The Philosophy of Science course has three new scholarly essays, each exploring the deep connections between philosophy and the foundations of physics. These aren't summaries — they're extended treatments with primary-source quotations, historical context, and critical analysis.
Bertrand Russell: From Paradox to Structural Realism
Bertrand Russell's influence on the philosophy of science is enormous, yet many physics students know him only for Russell's paradox in set theory. Our new essay traces the full arc of his philosophical contributions to the sciences.
We begin with Russell's paradox itself — the discovery that the set of all sets that do not contain themselves leads to a contradiction — and show how it shattered naive set theory and forced the development of type theory, Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms, and ultimately the rigorous foundations on which modern mathematics rests.
The essay then turns to Russell's philosophy of physics. His structural realism — the thesis that science captures the structure of the world but not its intrinsic nature — anticipated debates that remain central to philosophy of science today. We examine how structural realism responds to the pessimistic meta-induction (the argument that since past theories were false, current ones probably are too) by noting that mathematical structure is often preserved across theory change.
We also cover Russell's analysis of causation (his 1913 argument that the word “cause” should be expelled from philosophy), his neutral monism (the view that mind and matter are different arrangements of the same neutral stuff), and his influence on the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.
Schrödinger's Cat as Philosophical Reductio
Pop culture treats Schrödinger's cat as a whimsical illustration of quantum superposition. The reality is more interesting: Erwin Schrödinger introduced the thought experiment in 1935 as a reductio ad absurdum — an argument that the Copenhagen interpretation, taken literally, leads to conclusions so absurd that the interpretation itself must be flawed.
Our essay reconstructs Schrödinger's original argument from his 1935 paper (“Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik”), placing it in the context of his correspondence with Einstein. We show that the cat thought experiment was part of a broader critique: Schrödinger was deeply uncomfortable with the notion that quantum states are “complete” descriptions of reality, and the cat scenario was designed to make that discomfort visceral.
The essay then surveys how different interpretations of quantum mechanics handle the measurement problem that the cat highlights: the Copenhagen interpretation (with its observer-triggered collapse), Everett's many-worlds interpretation (where both branches are real), Bohmian mechanics (where particles always have definite positions), and decoherence theory (which explains the appearance of collapse without invoking it). We argue that Schrödinger's thought experiment remains philosophically potent because no interpretation has fully dissolved the puzzle.
Phenomenology and Quantum Mechanics: From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty
The third essay explores an unexpected intersection: the continental philosophical tradition of phenomenology and the interpretive puzzles of quantum mechanics. While analytic philosophy of physics gets most of the attention in English-language departments, the phenomenological tradition offers distinctive insights into the role of the observer, the nature of measurement, and the meaning of objectivity.
We begin with Edmund Husserl's foundational project: the systematic investigation of the structures of conscious experience. Husserl's concepts of intentionality (consciousness is always consciousness of something), the life-world (Lebenswelt), and the phenomenological reduction (bracketing natural assumptions to examine experience itself) turn out to be surprisingly relevant to quantum foundations — particularly to the question of what role the observer plays in measurement.
The essay then examines Martin Heidegger's critique of scientific objectification, Edith Stein's work on empathy and intersubjectivity (relevant to the Wigner's friend scenario), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty's insistence that perception is always perspectival and bodily situated resonates with relational interpretations of quantum mechanics, where quantum states are defined relative to an observer rather than absolutely.
We close by surveying recent work that explicitly connects phenomenology to quantum theory, including Michel Bitbol's neo-Kantian phenomenological approach and QBism's emphasis on the agent's perspective. The essay argues that phenomenology, far from being irrelevant to physics, offers conceptual tools for thinking about the participatory nature of quantum measurement that analytic philosophy has been slow to develop.
The Philosophy of Science Course
These three essays join an already extensive collection covering the Vienna Circle, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Grothendieck, the realism/anti-realism debate, causation, the ethics of science, and more. The course is designed for anyone — scientists or philosophers — who wants to think more carefully about the foundations of scientific knowledge.