Gregor Schiemann

Biological and neuroscientific phenomena are in the fore of works on new mechanism – a dominance that may have emerged for historical, contingent reasons. With this book, we want to broaden the scope of the discussion, going back to the roots of mechanistic explanations in physics. We divided the book into three parts. Part I is made up by three chapters that compare the traditional mechanical explanations of early modern science and philosophy to the current accounts of mechanistic explanations. The three chapters of Part II deal with general questions concerning the relations between mechanisms, causality, and the multi-level structure of complex systems in physics and beyond. Finally, Part III collects four studies that investigate the scope of mechanistic explanations in different sciences, making the bridge from physics to economics, complexity and computation theory.

Werner Heisenberg made an important – and as yet insufficiently researched – contribution to the transformation of the modern conception of science. This transformation involved a reassessment of the status of scientific knowledge from certain to merely hypothetical – an assessment that is widely recognized today. I examine Heisenberg’s contribution in particular by taking his conception of “closed theories” as an example according to which the established physical theories have no universal and exclusive, but only a restricted validity. Firstly, I characterize the historical process of hypothetization of claims to validity. Then, secondly, I reconstruct Heisenberg’s conception, as far as it can be derived from his popular writings, relating it to the process of hypothetization. Finally, I touch on the history of its reception and compare it with conceptions of science that emphasize the significance of the hypothetical for the modern theories of natural sciences. Compared to these conceptions, Heisenberg’s contribution turns out to be rather independent.