To many contemporary scholars, Émile Meyerson is a footnote in an obscure history: early twentieth-century French philosophy of science. While the traditions of épistémologie are beginning to enjoy the scrutiny they deserve, Meyerson’s role remains overlooked. This article provides an overview of Meyerson’s philosophical project to help sow the seeds for a more systematic recuperation of its legacy. By orienting his work historically, I elucidate the nature of Meyerson’s critique of positivism, his distinctive method, and the implications these have for (...) the relation between science and philosophy. In particular, I show that for Meyerson positivisme refers not only to the doctrine of Auguste Comte but to a general philosophical tendency. Inseparable from Meyerson’s critique of this tendency is his implementation of a new methodology—épistémologie—according to which reason must be understood through the historical development of science. Épistémologie reveals that positivism not only is an incomplete account of science but is detrimental to its progress. Accordingly, Meyerson hopes to secure science’s right to function according to its own immanent principles, thereby providing prolegomena to all future metaphysics through a historical determination of the nature and limits of human reason. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to folklore, Einstein never really cared for geometrizing the gravitational or the electromagnetic field; indeed, he thought that the very statement that General Relativity geometrizes gravity "is not saying anything at all". Instead, I shall show that Einstein saw the "unification" of inertia and gravity as one of the major achievements of General Relativity. Interestingly, Einstein did not locate this unification in the field equations but in his interpretation of the geodesic equation, the law of motion (...) of test particles. (shrink)

Gerald Holton has famously described Einstein’s career as a philosophical “pilgrimage”. Starting on “the historic ground” of Machian positivism and phenomenalism, following the completion of general relativity in late 1915, Einstein’s philosophy endured (a) a speculative turn: physical theorizing appears as ultimately a “pure mathematical construction” guided by faith in the simplicity of nature and (b) a realistic turn: science is “nothing more than a refinement ”of the everyday belief in the existence of mind-independent physical reality. Nevertheless, Einstein’s mathematical constructivism (...) that supports his unified field theory program appears to be, at first sight, hardly compatible with the common sense realism with which he countered quantum theory. Thus, literature on Einstein’s philosophy of science has often struggled in finding the thread between ostensibly conflicting philosophical pronouncements. This paper supports the claim that Einstein’s dialog with Émile Meyerson from the mid 1920s till the early 1930s might be a neglected source to solve this riddle. According to Einstein, Meyerson shared (a) his belief in the independent existence of an external world and (b) his conviction that the latter can be grasped only by speculative means. Einstein could present his search for a unified field theory as a metaphysical-realistic program opposed to the positivistic-operationalist spirit of quantum mechanics. (shrink)