Moritz Schlick Gesamtausgabe I/5 Rostock, Kiel, Wien

Volume I/5 of the Moritz Schlick Edition comprises mostly writings on the philosophy of nature. The volume contains philosophical as well as popular/didactic articles about relativity theory, Schlick`s works on Hermann von Helmholtz, and general epistemological articles. It also contains two yet unknown publications of Schlick (one a review of Einstein`s famous speech "Geometry and Experience"), which were only rediscovered in the course of the Moritz Schlick Edition research project and now are presented to the scientific community (philosophers and historians) for the first time. There are several philosophical positions Schlick formulates in the texts printed here: psychophysical parallelism, antivitalism, epistemological realism, psychologism, naturalism, antiphenomenalism, and empiricism. Schlick follows a particularly original line of argument in the debates on the philosophy of space and time, which is clearly distinct from positivism and Kantianism. Helmholtz is interpreted as empiricist and thus contrasted with the Kantian tradition - an interpretation which Schlick inherited from the philosopher Benno Erdmann, and which is interwoven (for both Schlick and Erdmann) with the relationship between geometry and experience. As regards this relationship, contemporary results from experimental psychology have been taken into account by Schlick. The final part of the volume is Schlick`s textbook-like Philosophy of nature, which assumed a key role, historically, in that the relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences is treated in explicit demarcation from the overcome speculative tradition of "Naturphilosophie". What`s more, relativity theory and quantum physics are taken to be parts of a scientific world conception and are thus understood as being philosophically fruitful. Among other things, this implies taking back the coincidence argument, which promised a directly observable empirical basis of knowledge. This means a break away from Schlick`s original conception of the sameness of physical and psychological elements. Far from an exclusively philosophical treatment of the physical theories which became influential in the 20th century, political-cultural connections play a crucial role in the present volume. In the course of increasingly antisemitically connotated polemics against Albert Einstein and flawed presentations of relativity theory by the media and critics alike, the popular-scientific articles of Schlick printed here gained a pivotal weight. The political and historical background of this are captured in the editorial reports and in the introduction to the volume. Also, the volume comes with an exegetic apparatus, which should make it possible to retrace the textual genesis.