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I believe I should start with a kind of opening statement which will make the purpose of this paper clear and its presentation easier to follow. In the first place, it is not going to be a paper on philosophy or methodology of science — at least not in its usual, orthodox sense — but rather a philosophical comment on one particularly significant trend in twentieth-century physics. You may call it an essay in "philosophy of nature", if we understand the term properly. I am fully aware of how unpopular and discredited this term has become; it is now rare to find institutions which still offer courses in "philosophy of nature". It really takes courage to do so and I commend my colleague Robert Cohen for having introduced courses of this kind in the Boston University curriculum. It is not difficult to trace the causes of this unpopularity and I have analyzed them in some of my previous writings. In the first place, the term itself is a translation of the German Naturphilosophie coined by the German idealists in the post-Kantian period, and a lingering disappointment with their speculative and arbitrary constructions comes immediately to mind as soon as the word is mentioned. In truth, we could hardly find another period in which the contrast between sterile and a priori speculations such as those of Schelling and Hegel and the genuine progress in the empirical sciences were more striking; we have only to consider the development of geology, biology, chemistry and of the physics of electricity and magnetism during the same period. Second, even if we understand "philosophy of nature" in a more acceptable and less pretentious way as an attempt to synthesize various scientific fields, that is, as "completely unified knowledge" in the sense that Herbert Spencer in the second half of the last century defined philosophy in general, some grave doubts remain. When, after all, would scientific knowledge be fully unified? Spencer's name itself reminds us of how premature and ambitious his attempt at a "complete integration of knowledge" was; all he achieved was a codification and integration of nineteenth-century scientific knowledge and only in a rough and approximate sense. Isn't the same thing likely to happen to anybody who would try to synthesize the scientific knowledge so enormously increased and diversified, would not such an attempt be even more unrealistic and more pretentious now?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-7178-3_1

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