Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract

Since the Niels Bohr centenary of 1985 there has been an astonishing international surge of scholarly analyses of Bohr's philosophy. Now for the first time in Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy Jan Faye and Henry Folse have brought together sixteen of today's leading authors who have helped mould this new round of discussions on Bohr's philosophy. In fifteen entirely new, previously unpublished essays we discover a surprising variety of the different facets of Bohr as the natural philosopher whose `framework of complementarity' shaped the final phase of the quantum revolution and influenced two generations of the century's leading physicists. There is much on which the authors included here agree; but there are also polar disagreements, which assure us that the philosophical questions revolving around Bohr's `new viewpoint' will continue to be a subject of scholarly interest and discussion for years to come. This collection will interest all serious students of history and philosophy of science, and foundations of physics. Bohr's Response to EPR -- Niels Bohr's Words and the Atlantis of Kantianism -- A Bohmian Response to Bohr's Complementarity -- Niels Bohr and Realism -- Non-Locality or Non-Separability? A Defense of Bohr's Anti-Realist Approach to Quantum Mechanics -- Bohr's Framework of Complementarity and the Realism Debate -- Description and Deconstruction: Niels Bohr and Modern Philosophy -- Bohr and the Crisis of Empirical Intelligibility: An Essay on the Depth of Bohr's Thought and Our Philosophical Ignorance -- What Makes a Classical Concept Classical? Toward a Reconstruction of Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Physics -- Niels Bohr's Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology to Physics -- Niels Bohr's Conceptual Legacy in Contemporary Particle Physics -- A Critique of Bohr's Local Realism -- Bohr and the Realism Debates -- The Bohr-Einstein Dispute -- Hidden Historicity: The Challenge of Bohr's Philosophical Thought -- Quantum Theory and the Place of Mind in Nature -- References -- Name Index.