Boris Kožnjak

The aim of this article is to fill a gap in the history and philosophy of the mind-body problem, which regularly discuss the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz, while the contribution of Roger Boscovich, a distinguished polymath and Jesuit priest—best known for his Theory of Natural Philosophy (1758)—has remained almost entirely unknown. Boscovich was a passionate advocate of free will and of Cartesian mind-body interactionist dualism, a position which since the time of Descartes has faced significant criticism. Critics have argued that it may violate immutable physical laws, particularly the principle of the conservation of momentum—a problem most notably highlighted by Leibniz. I analyse how Boscovich addressed what he regarded as Leibniz’s justified yet incomplete criticism of Descartes’s outdated solution to the problem of conserving the “quantity of motion” in “free motions produced by our mind,” and present a detailed analysis of Boscovich’s philosophy of mind by placing it within a broader historical context.

The aim of this article is to fill a gap in the history and philosophy of the mind-body problem, which regularly discuss the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz, while the contribution of Roger Boscovich, a distinguished polymath and Jesuit priest—best known for his Theory of Natural Philosophy (1758)—has remained almost entirely unknown. Boscovich was a passionate advocate of free will and of Cartesian mind-body interactionist dualism, a position which since the time of Descartes has faced significant criticism. Critics have argued that it may violate immutable physical laws, particularly the principle of the conservation of momentum—a problem most notably highlighted by Leibniz. I analyse how Boscovich addressed what he regarded as Leibniz’s justified yet incomplete criticism of Descartes’s outdated solution to the problem of conserving the “quantity of motion” in “free motions produced by our mind,” and present a detailed analysis of Boscovich’s philosophy of mind by placing it within a broader historical context.

The author tackles the problem of debates about free will from the socio-historical perspective that is still largely missing from the literature on free will. In particular, he tests the hypothesis that the belief in free will correlates with one’s religiosity and specific political or worldview concerns by the case studies of the earliest missionaries of “quantum free will,” as he dubs Arthur Eddington in Britain and Arthur Compton in the United States. They were not only the earliest, but also the most distinguished physicists in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s arguing for the “liberation of free will” with the help of Heisenberg’s famous indeterminacy principle. By a detailed analysis of their own writings, but also of the public reception and perception of their work on free will in the English speaking world of the time, especially in light of the struggle between “regressive” and “progressive” political and ideological forces, the author argues for the existence not only of the strong intrinsic religious motivation and specific conservative worldview concerns behind their own work on free will, but also of the similar factors, only of the opposite sign, behind the fierce reaction on their libertarian solution to the problem of free will, which, as he sees it, has never in the history of human thought been a purely scholarly and rational, but in fact always also a heatedly debated ideological and political matter.

The article demonstrates the historically and philosophically overlooked common phenomenological roots of Goethe’s Farbenlehre and Plato’s theory of color mixture in the Timaeus, as well as the shared epistemological background to Goethe’s and Plato’s abhorrence of the experimental study of natural phenomena, including light and colors, as the ‘torture of nature’, which is the basis of their equally shared ‘Orphic attitude’ toward nature and natural sciences. In addition to its historical context, the article also discusses Plato’s and Goethe’s shared ‘Orphic epistemology’ of experiment within the framework of modern philosophy of scientific experimentation.

In this paper, I analyse the hitherto largely ignored social and psychological roots of the philosophy of wholeness in David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was Bohm’s strongest philosophical influence throughout his mature intellectual life, however, as demonstrated in the paper, Bohm’s abhorrence of fragmentation and his affection for wholeness, which is prominently reflected in both his physics and his philosophy of science, was actually the realisation of specific social propensities and psychological determinants of his early emotional and intellectual development for which Hegel’s philosophy was a crucial rational catalyst later in his life. These social propensities and psychological determinants of Bohm’s early development are further demonstrated to be strikingly similar to those that also led the young Hegel to engage with the concept of wholeness throughout his life. The article also brings the biographical evidence of Bohm’s lifelong interest in Hegel and analyses the state of scholarship regarding his Hegelianism, the nature of Hegel’s philosophy as reflected in Bohm’s work, and the reasons for the somehow unexpected disciplinary neglect of the crucial influence of Hegel’s philosophy on Bohm.

Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics.

In this paper a possible interpretative value of Aristotle’s fundamental ontological doctrine of potentiality and actuality is considered in the context of operationally undoubtedly the most successful but interpretatively still controversial theory of modern physics – quantum mechanics – especially regarding understanding the nature of the world, the phenomena of which it describes and predicts so successfully. In particular, beings of the atomic world are interpreted as real potential beings actualized by the measurement process in appropriate experimental arrangement, and the problem of actual beings of the atomic world is considered in the context of Aristotle’s threefold requirement for the priority of actuality over potentiality – in time, definition or knowledge, and substantiality.Dieser Artikel setzt sich mit der interpretativen Relevanz der ontologischen Theorie Aristoteles’ über die Möglichkeit und die Wirklichkeit für die Quantenmechanik auseinander, also für die auf der empirischen Ebene erfolgreichste Theorie innerhalb der modernen Physik, die jedoch noch immer kontrovers interpretiert wird. Dies gilt insbesondere im Hinblick auf das Verständnis der Natur der Atomwelt, deren Phänomene sie erfolgreich beschreibt. Die W esen der Atomwelt werden als reale Möglichkeitswesen begriffen, die in der experimentellen Situation aktualisiert werden, während das Problem der W irklichkeitswesen der Atomwelt im Kontext des von Aristoteles dreifach begründeten Vorrangs der W irklichkeit vor der Möglichkeit betrachtet wird – nämlich auf der Ebene der Zeit, auf der Ebene desBegriffs und auf der Ebene des Seins.U članku se promišlja možebitna interpretativna vrijednost Aristotelova temeljnog ontološkog nauka o možnosti i zbiljnosti  u kontekstu izračunski nesumnjivo najuspješnije, ali interpretativno još uvijek dvojbene teorije suvremene fizike – kvantne mehanike, posebno kada je riječ o razumijevanju naravi samoga atomnoga svijeta čije pojavnosti tako uspješno opisuje i predviđa. Poglavito, bića atomnoga svijeta poimaju se kao realna možna bića koja bivaju ozbiljena prema prigotku eksperimentalne situacije, a problem zbiljskih bića atomnoga svijeta promišljen je u kontekstu Aristotelova trojnog zahtjeva o prvotnosti zbiljnosti nad možnošću – prema vremenu, prema pojmu i prema bivstvu.

In this paper, I compare Pierre-Simon Laplace's celebrated formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1814 Essai philosophique sur les probabilités with the formulation of the same principle offered by Roger Joseph Boscovich in his Theoria philosophiae naturalis, published 56 years earlier. This comparison discloses a striking general similarity between the two formulations of determinism as well as certain important differences. Regarding their similarities, both Boscovich's and Laplace's conceptions of determinism involve two mutually interdependent components—ontological and epistemic—and they are both intimately linked with the principles of causality and continuity. Regarding their differences, however, Boscovich's formulation of the principle of determinism turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine. A detailed analysis of these similarities and differences, so far missing in the literature on the history and philosophy of the concept of determinism, is the main goal of the present paper.

In this brief note, a concept of the ‘scientific worldview’ is examined. In particular, contrary to some of the most often misconceptions regarding the concept, it will be argued (1) that there cannot be a ‘scientific worldview’ in the traditional sense of a Weltanschauung if science is taken in its strictest sense, (2) that the remaining ontological and epistemic skeleton cannot be a single unified picture of the world (Weltbild), and (3) that the supposed ‘truth’ of these remaining pictures cannot be unambiguously grounded either in the methodology of science, although the methodology itself can be explanatory and predictively adequate and successful, or in the technological success that is associated with science.

In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction and a critical analysis of Abraham Maslow’s neglected psychological reading of Thomas Kuhn’s famous dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, which Maslow briefly expounded four years after the first edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in his small book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, and which relies heavily on his extensive earlier general writing in the motivational and personality psychology. Maslow’s Kuhnian ideas, put forward as part of a larger program for the psychology of science, outlined already in his 1954 magnum opus Motivation and Personality, are analyzed not only in the context of Kuhn’s original ‘psychologizing’ attitude toward understanding the nature and development of science, but also in a broader historical, intellectual and social context.