Michael Heidelberger – författare

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a German physicist, psychologist, and philosopher, best known to historians of science as the founder of psychophysics, the experimental study of the relation between mental and physical processes. Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner's place in the history and philosophy of science.

Lectures in Immunochemistry is a compilation of lectures that would probably never have been put together but for an unusual combination of circumstances. The book includes six lectures given at the behest of Professor Tornio Ogata, Professor of Serology in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tokyo. The six lectures were conducted before the Faculty during the period from September 26 to October 6, 1955. No attempt was made to give a course in immunochemistry, since much of the subject was being covered in Professor Ogata''s own course in serology. It seemed more profitable, both for the lecturer and his listeners, to select a limited number of topics and to discuss their historical development under the impact of the introduction of quantitative micromethods conforming to the rigorous criteria of analytical chemistry. At the suggestion of Professor Takeo Tamiya, material was included to show how and why certain topics and substances were chosen for the research to be described and discussed. Although the resulting six lectures present an incomplete coverage of the field, they at least bring together a number of scattered fragments into a whole, unified by an experimental approach to the various problems, and by the solution of those problems through the application of quantitative analytical micromethods.

Das Buch besteht aus drei Teilen. Der erste Teil befasst sich mit der allgemeinen Struktur empirischer Theorie. Der zweite Teil beschäftigt sich mit den Problemen der Anwendung von Theorien und im dritten Teil werden Beispiele vorgestellt.

How was the hypothetical character of theories of experience thought about throughout the history of science? The essays cover periods from the middle ages to the 19th and 20th centuries. It is fascinating to see how natural scientists and philosophers were increasingly forced to realize that a natural science without hypotheses is not possible.

Naturwissenschaftler und Philosophen haben im Lauf der Wissenschaftsgeschichte unterschiedliche Auffassungen vom Hypothesencharakter empirischer Theorien entwickelt. Der Band widmet sich drei verschiedenen Epochen, in denen der Erkenntnisoptimismus erfolgreicher Wissenschaftspraxis auf ein wachsendes Bewusstsein der Grenzen naturwissenschaftlicher Einsicht trifft: der Frühen Neuzeit (Kopernikus, Kepler, Bacon, Galilei, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Locke, mit einem Rückblick auf die mittelalterlichen Autoren Maimonides und Gersonides), dem mechanistischen Weltbild des 19. Jahrhunderts (Herschel, Whewell, Mill, C. G. J. Jacobi, Carl Neumann, Boutroux, Ch. S. Peirce, mit einem Rückblick auf Lagrange und d’Alembert) und dem 20. Jahrhundert mit dem Aufkommen der modernen Physik (Hertz, Poincaré, Vaihinger, Duhem, Heisenberg, Popper). Abgerundet wird der Band durch Studien zur Gegenwartsdiskussion des wissenschaftlichen Realismus und den Chancen einer hypothetischen Metaphysik der Natur.