Ulrich Majer - Böcker

The present publication forms part of a projected book that F. P. Ramsey drafted but never completed. It survived among his papers and ultimately came into the possession of the University of Pittsburgh in the circumstances detailed in the Editor's Introduction. Our hope in issuing this work at this stage - some sixty years after Ramsey's premature death at the age of 26 - is both to provide yet another token of his amazing philosophical creativity, and also to make available an important datum for the still to be written history of the development of philosophical analysis. This is a book whose appearance will, we hope and expect, be appreciated both by those interested in linguistic philosophy itself and by those concerned for its historical development in the present century. EDITORS'INTRODUCTION 1. THE RAMSEY COLLECTION Frank Plump ton Ramsey (22 February 1903 -19 January 1930) was an extra­ ordinary scholarly phenomenon. Son of a distinguished mathematician and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge and brother of Arthur Michael, eventual Archbishop of Canterbury, Ramsey was closely connected with Cambridge throughout his life, ultimately becoming lecturer in Mathematics in the University. Notwithstanding his great mathematical talent, it was primarily logic and philosophy that engaged his interests, and he wrote original and important contributions to logic, semantics, epistomology, probability theory, philosophy of science, and economics, in addition to seminal work in the foundations of mathematics.

This study presents a collection of research papers, written by physicists, philosophers and historians of science who had participated in the Zentrum fuer interdisziplinare Forschung (ZiF) during the academic year 1992/93 in order to discuss the nature and structure of spacetime as it is used in general relativity. All contributions focus on unsolved questions, such as the possibility of time machines, referential indeterminacy, the hole problem, and the conventional versus empirical character of spacetime. These papers deal with Einstein's view of general covariance and with the epistemological status of space(time) in the works of Carnap, Weyl and Hilbert, all of whom relate their position to Husserl's phenomenology, yet in fundamentally different ways.

This volume contains a selection of material exhibiting many of Hilberts philosophical and foundational views on particular theories and the exact sciences in general, drawn from his private notebooks and from lectures for more general audiences held in the 1920s.

This volume focuses on notes for lectures on the foundations of the mathematical sciences held by Hilbert in the period 1894-1917. They document Hilbert's first engagement with 'impossibility' proofs; his early attempts to formulate and address the problem of consistency, first dealt with in his work on geometry in the 1890s; his engagement with foundational problems raised by the work of Cantor and Dedekind; his early investigations into the relationship between arithmetic, set theory, and logic; his advocation of the use of the axiomatic method generally; his first engagement with the logical and semantical paradoxes; and the first formal attempts to develop a logical calculus. The Volume also contains Hilbert's address from 1895 which formed the preliminary version of his famous Zahlbericht (1897).

This Volume has three sections, General Relativity, Epistemological Issues, and Quantum Mechanics. The core of the first section is Hilberts two semester lecture course on ?The Foundations of Physics? (1916/17). This is framed by Hilberts published ?First and Second Communications? on the ?Grundlagen der Physik? (1915, 1917). The section closes with a lecture on the new concepts of space and time held in Bucharest in 1918. The epistemological issues concern the principle of causality in physics (1916), the intricate relation between nature and mathematical knowledge (1921), and the subtle question whether what Hilbert calls the ?world equations? are physically complete (1923). The last section deals with quantum theory in its early, advanced and mature stages. Hilbert held lecture courses on the mathematical foundations of quantum theory twice, before and after the breakthrough in 1926. These documents bear witness to one of the most dramatic changes in the foundations of science.

The first part of volume 4 documents Hilbert’s efforts in the period 1898-1910 to base all known physics (including thermodynamics, hydrodynamics and electrodynamics) on classical mechanics. This period closes with a lecture course ‘Mechanik der Kontinua’ (1911), in which Hilbert considers the consequences of the new principle of special relativity for our understanding of physics. The second part starts with the lecture course ‘Kinetische Gastheorie’ (1911/12), which introduces a new approach to problems of statistical physics. The lecture course ‘Molekulartheorie der Materie’ (1913) deals with a topic that was of great importance to Hilbert, returning to it repeatedly. The last lecture course contained in this volume, ‘Statistische Mechanik’ (1922) presents a very perceptive comparison of the different approaches of Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs etc. to the foundational problems of statistical physics. It is a paradigm of logical analysis and conceptual clarity.

This volume contains six sets of notes for lectures on the foundations of geometry held by Hilbert in the period 1891-1902. It also reprints the first edition of Hilberts celebrated Grundlagen der Geometrie of 1899, together with the important additions which appeared first in the French translation of 1900. The lectures document the emergence of a new approach to foundational study (the axiomatic method), which concentrates on assessing the logical weight of central propositions by exploiting to the full the method of independence proofs by modelling. This culminates in the lectures of 1898/1899 (the immediate precursor of the 1899 monograph) and 1902. The lectures contain many reflections and investigations which never found their way into print.

This book presents a collection of research papers, written by physicists, philosophers and historians of science who had participated in the Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung (ZiF) during the academic year 1992/93 in order to discuss the nature and structure of spacetime as it is used in general relativity. All contributions focus on unsolved questions, such as the possibility of time machines, referential indeterminacy, the hole problem, and the conventional vs. empirical character of spacetime. These papers having a more historical colour deal with Einstein's view of general covariance and with the epistemological status of space(time) in the works of Carnap, Weyl and Hilbert, all of whom relate their position to Husserl's phenomenology, yet in fundamentally different ways.