•  8
    Appearance and reality: Einstein and the early debate on the reality of length contraction
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (4): 1-30. 2023.
    In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where len…Read more
  •  5
    The quest for a ‘unified field theory’, which aims to integrate gravitational and electromagnetic fields into a single field structure, spanned most of Einstein’s professional life from 1919 until his death in 1955. It is seldom noted that Hans Reichenbach was possibly the only philosopher who could navigate the technical intricacies of the various unification attempts. By analyzing published writings and private correspondences, this paper aims to provide an overview of the Einstein-Reichenbach…Read more
  •  19
    Relativity Theory as a Theory of Principles: A Reading of Cassirer’s Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2): 261-296. 2023.
    In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie, Ernst Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the “physics of principles” that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the “physics of models.” In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a role similar to the energy principle in previous physics. In this article, I argue that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interp…Read more
  •  15
    Cassirer and energetics: an investigation of Cassirer's early philosophy of physics
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (6): 1188-1211. 2023.
    At the turn of the twentieth century, Helm and Ostwald were the most prominent supporters of so-called ‘energetics’, which aimed to unify all physics by employing the sole concept of energy, without relying on mechanical models. This paper argues that Cassirer's interest in the history of the energy principle and the energetic controversy is entangled with the main themes of his philosophy of physics up to the 1920s: the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori and the substance-conc…Read more
  •  14
    This study reconstructs the 1928–1929 correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein about the latter’s latest distant parallelism-unified field theory, which attracted considerable public attention at the end of the 1920s. Reichenbach, who had recently become a Professor in Berlin, had the opportunity to discuss the theory with Einstein and therefore sent him a manuscript with some comments for feedback. The document has been preserved among Einstein’s papers. However, the subsequent correspon…Read more
  •  20
    In his 1916 review paper on general relativity, Einstein made the often-quoted oracular remark that all physical measurements amount to a determination of coincidences, like the coincidence of a pointer with a mark on a scale. This argument, which was meant to express the requirement of general covariance, immediately gained great resonance. Philosophers such as Schlick found that it expressed the novelty of general relativity, but the mathematician Kretschmann deemed it as trivial and valid in …Read more
  •  7
    In his 1920 monograph Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori the young Reichenbach distinguished between two meanings of the a priori: ‚apodictically valid, true for all time‘ and ‚constituting the concept of object‘. At the end of the 1990s Michael Friedman drew again the attention of philosophers of science to this forgotten distinction. In the spirit of Reichenbach’s early Kantianism Friedman attempted to construct a relativized or temporally variable a priori, which is nevertheless const…Read more
  •  31
    ‘Like thermodynamics before Boltzmann.’ On the emergence of Einstein's distinction between constructive and principle theories
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 71 (C): 118-157. 2020.
  •  1
    General Relativity 1916 - 2016 (edited book)
    Minkowski Institute Press. 2017.
  •  43
    Gerald Holton has famously described Einstein’s career as a philosophical “pilgrimage”. Starting on “the historic ground” of Machian positivism and phenomenalism, following the completion of general relativity in late 1915, Einstein’s philosophy endured (a) a speculative turn: physical theorizing appears as ultimately a “pure mathematical construction” guided by faith in the simplicity of nature and (b) a realistic turn: science is “nothing more than a refinement ”of the everyday belief in the e…Read more
  •  22
    In 1912, Ernst Cassirer contributed to the special issue of the Kant-Studien that honored Hermann Cohen's retirement—his mentor and teacher, and the recognized founding father of the so-called 'Marburg school' of Neo-Kantianism. In the context of an otherwise rather conventional presentation of Cohen's interpretation of Kant, Cassirer made a remark that is initially surprising. It is “anything but accurate,” he wrote, to regard Cohen's philosophy as focused “exclusively on the mathematical theor…Read more
  •  98
    Erich Kretschmann as a proto-logical-empiricist: Adventures and misadventures of the point-coincidence argument
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (2): 115-134. 2013.
    The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself real…Read more
  •  48
    Traditions in Collision: The Emergence of Logical Empiricism between the Riemannian and Helmholtzian Traditions
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (2): 328-380. 2017.
    This paper attempts to explain the emergence of the logical empiricist philosophy of space and time as a collision of mathematical traditions. The historical development of the ``Riemannian'' and ``Helmholtzian'' traditions in 19th century mathematics is investigated. Whereas Helmholtz's insistence on rigid bodies in geometry was developed group theoretically by Lie and philosophically by Poincaré, Riemann's Habilitationsvotrag triggered Christoffel's and Lipschitz's work on quadratic differenti…Read more
  •  19
    This paper offers a historical overview of Einstein׳s vacillating attitude towards ‘phenomenological’ and ‘dynamical’ treatments of rods and clocks in relativity theory. In Einstein׳s view, a realistic microscopic model of rods and clocks was needed to account for the very existence of measuring devices of identical construction that always measure the same unit of time and the same unit of length. It will be shown that the empirical meaningfulness of both relativity theories depends on what, fo…Read more
  •  41
    Urbild und Abbild. Leibniz, Kant und Hausdorff über das Raumproblem
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 41 (2): 283-313. 2010.
    The article attempts to reconsider the relationship between Leibniz’s and Kant’s philosophy of geometry on the one hand and the nineteenth century debate on the foundation of geometry on the other. The author argues that the examples used by Leibniz and Kant to explain the peculiarity of the geometrical way of thinking are actually special cases of what the Jewish-German mathematician Felix Hausdorff called “transformation principle”, the very same principle that thinkers such as Helmholtz or Po…Read more
  •  48
    Leibniz, Kant und der moderne Symmetriebegriff
    Kant Studien 102 (4): 422-454. 2011.
    The paper analyses the significance of the modern concept of „symmetry“ for the understanding of the concept of „intuition“ in Kant's philosophy of geometry. A symmetry transformation or automorphism is a structure preserving mapping of the space into itself that leaves all relevant structure intact so that the result is always like the original, in all relevant respects. Hermann Weyl was the first to show that this idea can be drawn on Leibniz's definition of similarity: two figures are similar…Read more
  •  95
    By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach into a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, this paper shows that not only did Einstein and Logical Empiricists come to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but also that in their lifelong interchange, they never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of hi…Read more
  •  14
    Kant, Helmholtz, Riemann und der Ursprung der geometrischen Axiome
    Philosophia Naturalis 45 (2): 236-269. 2008.
  •  26
    The discovery that Einstein's celebrated argument for general covariance, the 'point-coincidence argument ', was actually a response to the ' hole argument ' has generated an intense philosophical debate in the last thirty years. Even if the philosophical consequences of Einstein's argument turned out to be highly controversial, the protagonists of such a debate seem to agree on considering Einstein's argument as an expression of 'Leibniz equivalence', a modern version of Leibniz's celebrated in…Read more
  •  78
    Hermann Cohen's Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode: The history of an unsuccessful book
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 58 9-23. 2016.
    This paper offers an introduction to Hermann Cohen’s Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode, and recounts the history of its controversial reception by Cohen’s early sympathizers, who would become the so-called ‘Marburg school’ of Neo-Kantianism, as well as the reactions it provoked outside this group. By dissecting the ambiguous attitudes of the best-known representatives of the school, as well as those of several minor figures, this paper shows that Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode is a un…Read more
  •  29
    By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach in a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, the paper shows, that not only Einstein and Logical Empiricists came to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but they actually, in their life-long interchange, never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his “me…Read more