Longing for Synthesis: Philipp Frank on the Cultural Threat of Disunified Science

Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.

Date: 16/03/2023

Time: 15h00

This talk is going to be a hybrid event, in-person at NIG (SR 2i) and can be followed via online Plattform.

Online Plattform:

Access:

univienna.zoom.us/j/63035484129

Passcode: 226427

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Abstract:

Unified science is a well-attested programmatic aim of logical empiricism, appearing in connection with various projects and methods over multiple decades. I am interested in recovering a larger-scale significance of unified science within logical empiricism by attending to the joint philosophical and cultural problem it was invoked to solve. As an occasional spokesman and intellectual historian of the movement, Philipp Frank is particularly explicit about the problem of disunity. In several places, he connects it with the crisis of mechanistic physics around the turn of the century and the attendant rise of organicism as a scientific framework with political implications. He writes that whereas the nineteenth century mechanistic-materialist framework was linked to liberal and socialist political theory, the organicism emerging from its decline was thought to lend scientific support to fascist theories of state and society. I will provide some historical background for this narrative, and argue that unified science in logical empiricism fulfills a “longing for synthesis” otherwise answered through philosophical, scientific, and political channels Frank and his colleagues deemed suspect. I hope thereby to situate unified science and its philosophical precedents (especially Ernst Mach) in their historical and cultural context, and contribute to a recent literature interested in characterizing the political aspirations of logical empiricism.