Stemeroff, Noah (2024) The Notorious Man-in-the-Street: Hermann Weyl and the Problem of Knowledge. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Hermann Weyl's philosophical reflections remain a topic of considerable interest in the history and philosophy of science. In particular, Weyl’s commitment to a form of idealism, as it pertains to his reading of Husserl and Fichte, has garnered much discussion. However, much less attention has been given to Weyl's later, and at that only partial, turn towards a form of empiricism (i.e. from the late 1920s onward). This lack of focus on Weyl’s later philosophy has tended to obscure some of the most significant lessons that Weyl sought to draw from his decades of research in the foundations of mathematics and physics. In this paper, I develop some aspects of what I will term as Weyl's 'modest' empiricism. I will argue that Weyl's turn toward empiricism can be read in the context of a development of Helmholtz's epistemological program and his unique form of 'Kantianism'. The hope is that this reading will not only provide a better understanding of Weyl's later thought, especially his (1954) criticism of Cassirer, but that it may also provide the basis for a novel 'Weylian' account of the mathematization of nature underwriting the group-theoretic methodology of parts of modern physics.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Stemeroff, Noah nstemero@uni-bonn.de 0000-0003-1667-0677
Keywords:	Hermann Weyl; Hermann von Helmholtz; Ernst Cassirer; Empiricism; Kantian and neo-Kantian Philosophy of Science
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics
Depositing User:	Dr. Noah Stemeroff
Date Deposited:	21 Feb 2024 17:02
Last Modified:	21 Feb 2024 17:02
Item ID:	23118
Subjects:	General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies Specific Sciences > Physics
Date:	2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23118

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