The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the highly ambivalent attitude of the Austrian-Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest toward contemporary developments in both science and society. On the one hand, he was in the vanguard of the quantum and relativity revolutions, supported industrialization and economic planning based on mathematical models, and, in general, cherished technocratic ideals. The essay highlights several influences that shaped his attitude in these respects, from his ties with the Philips Physics Laboratory and his sojourns in the United States to the (...) utopian visions of H. G. Wells. On the other hand, he was extremely worried about the harmful consequences of contemporary changes in science and society, such as specialization, the growing pace of city life, and the increasing dependence on modern technologies, be they material or mathematical. In this regard, he agreed with cultural critics such as Max Nordau, Henri Bergson, Ostwald Spengler, and Ludwig Klages. Rather than attempting to solve this paradox, the essay suggests that this kind of ambiguity characterized a great deal of innovative science in the period. (shrink)

Die Fin de Siècle‐These. Der Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen John Heilbrons Argumentation, die Physiker des ‘fin de siecle’ hätten Bild und Substanz ihrer Disziplin kulturellen Belangen angepasst, und Paul Formans Interpretation der Akausalität in der Weimarer Periode. Ergänzend zu ihrer Fokussierung auf Repräsentationen anstelle von Wahrheit, legten die von Heilbron benannten Anhänger “deskriptionistischer” Epistemologien den Schwerpunkt auf Methodik, statistische anstelle kausaler Erklärungen, historisches Verständnis von Epistemologie und unterstrichen die Beziehungen zwischen der Physik und anderen Disziplinen. Ihre Perspektive liefert einen (...) intellektuellen Kontext – innerhalb der Disziplin Physik – für zumindestens einen Teil dessen, was Forman als Kapitulation vor einer feindlichen sozialen Umgebung, wie sie sich in Oswald Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlandes ausdrückte, beschrieben hat.The Fin de Siècle Thesis. This paper examines the relations between John Heilbron's argument that fin de siècle physicists adjusted the image and substance of their discipline to cultural concerns, and Paul Forman's approach to acausality in the Weimar period. In addition to their focus on representation rather than truth, adherents of the “descriptionist” epistemologies that Heilbron identified also promoted an emphasis on method, statistical rather than causal explanations, historical understandings of epistemology, and stressed the relations between physics and other disciplines. Their views provide an intellectual context – within the physics discipline – for at least some part of what Forman had described as a capitulation to the hostile social environment expressed in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (shrink)