CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

With the development of neokantism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the idea that the Kantian doctrine was the philosophical systematization of Newtonian natural science became almost unquestionable. However, it was also maintained that the fate of transcendental philosophy was not necessarily bound to the destiny of classical physics. Rather, according to Cassirer, in order to offer a philosophical foundation of the theory of relativity and of quantum physics we should not only not abandon the road traced by Kant but we have to follow it beyond the stadium that the philosopher of Königsberg reached. In this sense, diverse authors adopted a transcendental perspective when offering a philosophical interpretation of the questions raised by the development of modern physics. In this work we intend, in the first place, to expose the relevance and the utility of such a perspective in the case of quantum physics and, in the second place, to point out the essential task that a transcendental foundation of this theory should perform. We address the first point by comparing the present state of the philosophical interpretations of quantum physics with the view that Kant had of the state of the metaphysics of his time. We show that there is a remarkable resemblance between the way in which the philosophy of quantum physics tries to solve its problems and the way in which pre-critical metaphysics dealt with its questions. Our thesis is thus that the critical reduction of quantum objects to mere appearances in a Kantian sense may be very helpful for a satisfactory foundation of quantum physics, since it is precisely in this way that Kant overcame the problems of precritical metaphysics. However we will sustain that the character of appearance of a quantum object is stronger than the one that Kant maintained for a classical object.

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