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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Philipp Frank
Philipp Frank wrote a thesis in physics under the supervision of Ludwig Boltzmann which was only completed after Boltzmann's death. Frank was a follower of Ernst Mach's positivism which became the logical positivism or empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Frank was an early member of the circle and much later, after his emigration to the United States, led meetings of an American version of the circle, promoting their vision of a Unity of Science movement for several years at Harvard University.

Albert Einstein recommended that Frank succeed him as professor of physics at Prague in 1912, where he lectured until emigrating in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

Frank wrote a comprehensive biography, Einstein, His Life and Times, which was important because Frank had known Einstein so well, working with him at different times in both Europe and America. His book began with a famous quote, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible," a loose translation of Einstein's claim that its comprehensibility is a miracle and an eternal mystery (from Physics and Reality, p.282).

Origin of the Quantum Theory
To Einstein it was always clear that his theory of relativity could not claim (and, indeed, it never did claim) to solve all the mysteries of the behavior of light. The properties of light investigated by Einstein concerned only a certain group of phenomena dealing with the relation between the propagation of light and moving bodies. For all these problems light could be conceived along the lines of traditional physics as undulatory electromagnetic processes which filled space as a continuum. By the theory of relativity it was assumed that some objects can emit light of this nature, and no attempt was made to analyze the exact process by which light is emitted or to investigate whether it sufficed for a derivation of all the laws for the interaction of light with matter.

The investigations on the nature of light and its interaction with matter, however, were to lead to the rise of the “quantum theory,” a revolution in physical thought even more radical than the theory of relativity. And in this field, too, Einstein’s genius had a profound influence on its early development. In order to make understandable the nature of Einstein’s contributions, I shall describe briefly the situation prior to his researches.

The simplest way of producing light is by heating a solid body. As the temperature rises, it begins to glow from a dull cherry red to a brighter orange, and then to blinding white light. The reason for this is that visible light consists of radiations of different frequencies ranging from red at the low end through the colors of the spectrum up to violet at the high end. The quality of light emitted by a solid body depends solely on its temperature; at low temperatures the low-frequency waves predominate and hence it looks red; at higher temperatures the shorter wave lengths appear and mingle with the red to give the white color.

Attempts to explain this change in quality of light with temperature on the basis of nineteenth-century physics had ended in failure, and this was one of the most important problems facing physicists at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time the emission of light was thought to be produced by the oscillations of charged particles (electrons), the frequency of light emitted being equal to the frequency of the vibration. According to Boltzmann’s statistical law, already mentioned, the average energy of oscillation of an electron should be exactly equal to the average kinetic energy of gas molecules, and hence simply proportional to the absolute temperature. But this led to the conclusion that the energy of vibrations is independent of the frequency of oscillation, and hence light of different frequencies will be emitted with the same energy. This conclusion obviously was contradicted by the observations on light emitted by heated bodies. In particular, we know that light of very short wave lengths is not emitted to any great extent by hot bodies. As the temperature increases, rays of increasingly higher frequencies appear, but yet at a given temperature there is no perceptible radiation above a certain definite frequency. Consequently it appeared that somehow it must be difficult to emit light of very high frequencies.

Since all arguments based on the mechanistic theory of matter and electricity led to results conflicting with experience, the German physicist Max Planck in the year 1900 introduced a new assumption into the theory of light emission. At first it appeared to be rather inconsequential, but in the course of time it has led to results of an increasingly revolutionary character. The turn in physics coincided exactly with the turn of the century. I shall sketch Planck’s idea in a somewhat simplified and perhaps superficial form.

According to Boltzmann’s statistical law, the average energy of oscillation of an electron in a body is equal to the average kinetic energy of the molecules. The actual energies of the individual atoms or molecules can, of course, have very different values; the statistical law only relates the average energy with the temperature. Boltzmann, however, had been able to derive a second result which determined the distribution of the energy of the particles around the average value. It stated that the number of particles with a certain energy depends on the percentage by which this energy differs from the average value. The greater a deviation, the less frequent will be its occurrence.

As Planck realized, the experimental results indicated that the oscillating electrons in a body cannot emit radiation with an arbitrary frequency. The lack of high-frequency radiation shows that the mechanism of radiation must be such that it is somehow difficult to emit light of high frequency. Since no explanation of such a mechanism existed at that time, Planck was led to make the new assumption that, for some reason as yet unknown, the energy of oscillation of the atoms cannot have just any value, but can only have values that are integral multiples of a certain minimum value. Thus, if this value is called ε, then the energy of the oscillations can only have the discrete values 0, ε, 2 ε ... or nε, whose n is zero or an integer. Consequently the radiation emitted or absorbed must take place in portions of amount ε. Smaller amounts cannot be radiated or absorbed since the oscillation cannot change its energy by less than this amount. Planck then showed that if one wants to account for the well-known fact that a shift to higher temperatures means a shift to higher frequencies, one has to take values for e that vary for different values of the frequencies of the oscillations, and in fact e has to be proportional to the frequency.

Thus he put ε = hν, where ν is the frequency and h is the constant of proportionality, which has since then been called Planck’s constant and has been found to be one of the most fundamental constants in nature. With this assumption Planck was immediately able to derive results in the theory of radiation that agreed with observations and thus removed the difficulties that had confronted the physicists in this field.

Planck thought he was only making a minor adjustment in the laws of physics in formulating his hypothesis, but Einstein realized that if this idea was developed consistently it would lead to a rupture of the framework of nineteenth-century physics so serious that a fundamental reconstruction would be necessary. For if the electron can oscillate only with certain discrete values of energy, it contradicts Newton’s laws of motion, laws which had been the bases for the whole structure of mechanistic physics.

Planck’s hypothesis dealt only with the mechanism of radiation and absorption of light and stated that these processes could take place only in definite amounts. He said nothing about the nature of light itself while it is propagated between the point of radiation and that of absorption. Einstein set out to investigate whether the energy transmitted by light retained this discrete character during its propagation or not.

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