überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were fully amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical psychology (...) and cognitive science. (shrink)

Der Verzicht auf absolut gültige Erkenntnis, heute in den Naturwissenschaften beinahe schon selbstverständlich, ist erst jüngeren Datums. Noch im vergangenen Jahrhundert zweifelte die experimentelle Forschung kaum an der vollkommenen Begreifbarkeit der Welt. Diesen Wandel zu erkunden und aufzuzeigen ist Thema der vorliegenden Studie. Der erste Teil präsentiert verschiedene Typen neuzeitlicher und moderner Wissenschaftsauffassungen von Galilei über Newton bis hin zu Kant. Im zweiten Teil werden Entwicklung und Wandel der Wissenschafts- und Naturauffassung bei Helmholtz (1821-1895) erstmals mittels detaillierter Textanalysen einer umfassenden (...) Rekonstruktion unterzogen. Die Relativierung des Wahrheitsanspruchs erlaubt es Helmholtz, seine Naturauffassung trotz der antimechanistischen Kritik innerhalb der Physik, die im letzten Viertel des vergangenen Jahrhunderts laut wurde, als Hypothese aufrechtzuerhalten. Auch gewährt die Studie eine neue Sichtweise des Verhältnisses zwischen Helmholtz und Kant, das in der Vergangenheit kontroverse Beurteilungen erfuhr. (shrink)

David Cahan has assembled an outstanding group of European and North American historians of science and philosophy for this intellectual biography of Helmholtz, ...

The dissertation analyzes the theory of "logical space" developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I show how this idea represents a development of arguments first put forward by Hermann von Helmholtz, the physicist and physiologist. Helmholtz--instead of honouring Kant's distinction between on the one hand time and space, and, on the other, empirical qualia --stretched the Kantian spatial manifold to cover the other qualia as well: the qualia are also organized in manifolds; and this new, extended manifold is (...) the "space" of all possible human experience. He explained this a priori mesh as being a consequence of the physiological constitution of our bodies, and the physical constitution of the world in which they are situated. The subject is enclosed in an inner world whose structure is the network of possible sensation; outside of her is a world of unknown complexity; and separating the two is what Heinrich Hertz called the "no-man's-land" of sense-physiology, a border zone regulating all traffic between the two realms, common to both, yet proper to neither. ;Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, adapted the picture-theories of Helmholtz and Hertz to his analysis of logic. He too was confronted with the problem of defining a field of possible experience, of possible facts: his analysis of Russell's and Frege's logical theories had led him to the conclusion that the fundamental properties of logic could not be accounted for without assuming such an a priori space. Thus he assimilated Russell's types to the dimensions of a manifold, the elements of which were his Sachverhalte, or elementary facts. The truth-functions of our logic are defined on top of this space: it is the basis on which all symbolic systems, including those of the natural sciences, are erected. (shrink)