Abstract.
By combining Ernst Mach's empiricism, Ludwig Boltzmann's atomism, and the relative frequency interpretation of probability, the Viennese physicist Franz Serafin Exner argued long before quantum mechanics that the basic laws of nature were of indeterministic nature and that the strict deterministic laws found on the macroscopic scale obtained in the limit of very many random events. The number of single events studied in humanistic disciplines was at best sufficient to ascertain weak regularities. But both science and the humanities were grounded in the law of large numbers, such that the world as a whole was governed by a global tendency towards the most probable state. Exner's unified outlook was not reductionist; rather it resembled the unification intended by Alexander von Humboldt's physical description of the world. Moreover, to Exner's lights, even culture was a natural product supervening on the various rising and declining peoples that exhibited a continuous ethical progress and the development of an objective scientific world view. By separating the individual microscopic and the ideal macroscopic levels, Exner's indeterminist theory simultaneously opposed the Spenglerian challenge against science and embraced his criticism of civilization and the death of the arts.
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ID="*"Michael Stöltzner is research fellow in the Special Research Program “Pluralism of Theories and Paradigms” at the University of Salzburg sponsored by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF) and a scientific member of the Institute Vienna Circle.
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Stöltzner, M. Franz Serafin Exner's Indeterminist Theory of Culture. Phys. perspect. 4, 267–319 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-002-8370-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-002-8370-8
- Key words. Indeterminism, physicalism, cultural history, Forman thesis, Franz Serafin Exner, Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Alexander von Humboldt, Oswald Spengler.