cover "Philosophie der Physik"

This volume offers a systematic and generally understandable introduction to philosophical questions in physics and its historical development. It begins with a presentation of important stages in the history of physics in antiquity, the early modern period and the past two centuries, and uses them to illustrate central epistemological features of physics. It discusses typical explanatory strategies, the role of experiments and predictions, the procedure for forming concepts and theories and the importance of mathematics.


2nd edn. München: Beck.

ISBN: 978-3-406-66794-7

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idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel