ArgumentIn this paper I present an interpretation of du Bois-Reymond’s thesis on the impossibility of a scientific explanation of consciousness and of its present importance. I reconsider du Bois-Reymond’s speech “On the limits of natural science” (1872) in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy and neurophysiology, pointing out connections and analogies with contemporary arguments on the “hard problem of consciousness.” Du Bois-Reymond’s position turns out to be grounded on an epistemological argument and characterized by a metaphysical skepticism, motivated by the (...) unfruitful speculative tendency of contemporary German philosophy and natural science. In the final sections, I show how contemporary research can benefit from a reconsideration of this position and its context of emergence, which is a good vantage point to trace open problems in consciousness studies back to their historical development. (shrink)

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However, it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are too strongly qualified, then it is no longer SR. A way to overcome this difficulty is to talk (...) about modal, or nomological relations instead of purely extensional relations. I argue that this is insufficient, for then, SR collapses into modal empiricism. I suggest, however, that ME could be the best position in the debate on scientific realism. 1Introduction2Objections to Structural Realism3How to Escape Newman’s Objection4Which Modal Relations Are Retained in Theory Change?5Are Modal Relations Real?6Relativity and Fundamentality7Is Modal Empiricism Really Empiricism?8Could Modal Empiricism Be the Best of Both Worlds? (shrink)

In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie, Ernst Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the “physics of principles” that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the “physics of models.” In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a role similar to the energy principle in previous physics. In this article, I argue that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Cassirer pointed out that before and after (...) Kant, the history of physics presents significant instances in which the search for formal conditions that the laws of nature must satisfy preceded and made possible the direct search for such laws. In his earlier years, Cassirer seems to have regarded principles like the energy principle, the relativity principle, and the principle of least action as a constitutive but provisional form of a priori, imposing specific limitations on the form of the allowable laws of nature. Only in his later years, by attributing an autonomous status to these statements of principle, did Cassirer attribute a definitive but merely regulative meaning to the a priori. This does not impose specific requirements on natural laws but only a motivation to search for them. (shrink)

Quantum indeterminism seems incompatible with Kant’s defense of causality in his Second Analogy. The Copenhagen interpretation also takes quantum theory as evidence for anti-realism. This first article of a two-part series argues that the law of causality, as transcendental, applies only to the world as observable, not to hypothetical objects such as quarks, detectable only by high energy accelerators. Taking Planck’s constant and the speed of light as the lower and upper bounds of observability provides a way of interpreting the (...) observables of quantum mechanics as empirically real even though they are transcendentally ideal. (shrink)