Abstract
Among the founders of Western culture, the Presocratic thinkers sought explanations of the natural world that required only one or very few fundamental principles or substances.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
Albert Camus.
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Notes
- 1.
With an even more audacious analogy, we can see the conflict between opposites essentially as the in fieri quantum wave/particle duality.
- 2.
This vision is not naive and is compatible with possible major changes occurring in nature on the scale of the age of the universe.
- 3.
Of course, it is meaningly to try to establish whether Leucippus or Democritus were “reductionists” in modern terms. Our historical references should be considered cum grano salis.
- 4.
It relates the classification of spectral rays of hydrogen following the frequency, afterwards generalised by Rydberg. It remains true in a given approximation.
- 5.
If this is strikingly so in modernity and in sciences, it is also true in earlier literary and philosophical studies: the highly symbolic, complex but, at the same time, very organised hierarchy proposed by Dante for heaven and hell; Aristotle’s metaphysical vision of sciences organised in three areas (theoretical, practical and productive) which were devoted to different purposes and formed part of a unified hierarchy with the theoretical at the top.
- 6.
In this sense, they were strongly influenced by the advances of mathematical logic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to Frege, Peano, Russell, Whitehead, and others.
- 7.
In Chap. 6, we will see how the philosophical ideas of the fathers of quantum mechanics are elaborate and not monolithic. On the other hand, a logical empiricist like Schlick developed a realistic approach.
- 8.
Other Nagelian-type models have been suggested and discussed subsequently (Hull 1974; Ruse and Wilson 1986). However, it is worth emphasising that these models all differ from Nagel’s original one, but not from a substantial and philosophical point of view. In particular, they all contain some kind of (not clearly specified) bridge principle.
- 9.
However, contrarily to a certain vulgata, logical positivists were well aware of these limits (Bouveresse 2011).
- 10.
In a different view, their causal powers.
- 11.
These limits are often called asymptotic since asymptotic analysis (Bender and Orszag 1978) is commonly used to describe the limit behaviour, which in our case is how a theory behaves when the appropriate order parameter approaches the limit value. The theory is trivial when the limit is regular but can be quite sophisticated and complex when it is singular (Primas 1981).
- 12.
For readers more interested in philosophy, it is worth noting that emergence and Nagelian reduction are distinct notions but, in our opinion, they are related and it seems reasonable to argue that the presence of emergent properties make inter-theoretic reduction in the Nagelian sense impossible to carry out. Even though deeper analysis is certainly required, the arguments discussed in the next chapter appear in favour of this thesis.
- 13.
- 14.
In the notion given by Kim (2000).
- 15.
Basically the claim that all microphysical events are determined, in so far as they are determined, by prior microphysical events and the laws of physics.
- 16.
Earlier we discussed emergence in the framework of natural sciences. Philosophers have discussed it much more in terms of logical relations and in the framework of causal efficacy. They differ on views and definitions, but most agree on the point that emergence has to be related to downward causation (that is to say that physics is not causally complete). In order for mental properties to be causally efficient, they have to cause changes in the physical world.
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Chibbaro, S., Rondoni, L., Vulpiani, A. (2014). A Random Journey from Monism to the (Dream of) Unity of Science . In: Reductionism, Emergence and Levels of Reality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06361-4_2
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