(Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)
UPDATE: Matias Slavov, a visiting scholar in philosophy at UCLA, writes:
Thank you for providing the link to the Daily Telegraph, which features Hume’s impact on Einstein’s special relativity. As a regular reader of your blog, I got the news from you. But I wish to point out that the Telegraph article gives a fallacious picture of the Hume-Einstein connection. It is well-known and has been subject of scholarship for a long time. Victor F. Lenzen, for example, examined this relation already in his 1949 paper in the volume of Library of Living Philosophers that was dedicated to Einstein. More recently, John Stachel (2002) and John D. Norton (2010) have perused this relation: Stachel’s argument is that Einstein got a relationist ontology of space and time from Hume, whereas Norton argues that Einstein learned an empiricist theory of concepts which he then implemented in his argument for the relativity of simultaneity. When I (2016) wrote my article that essentially intertwines the relationist and empiricist arguments, I remember having difficulties of coming up with a novel interpretation because the Hume-Einstein connection had already been treated so many times.
The English translation of the correspondence with Schlick in which Einstein acknowledges his debt to Hume (and Mach) is in (1998) The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918. Ed. Robert Schulmann et. al. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Recent Comments