Ways of the Scientific World-Conception

Abstract

For the most part it is not a good sign if scholars are too eagerly occupied with the foundation and history of their discipline instead of producing new statements concerning the subjects treated by them. Physicists can afford occasional considerations of this kind as they are surely above any suspicion of slowing down their own work by sterile debate about method or by historicizing reflections, or of papering over defects. As representatives of disciplines with very tidy concepts they approach their objects directly; in doing so they also use traditional intellectual means without, however, specially stressing their genealogy. Einstein does not call himself a neo-Cartesian, though in a certain sense he would be justified in doing so; philosophers, on the other hand, like to speak about themselves as neo-Hegelians, neo-Kantians, neo-Thomists. The advocates of a scientific world-conception, which absorbs everything that can be experienced, behave like physicists. They are active and close to the present time even if they move in abstract spheres. They care less for the history of their trains of thought than for new insights, which they try to formulate in clear statements. They do not rest satisfied with the results achieved, but advance and improve formulations year by year.