Jan Faye

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Jan Faye is a Danish philosopher of science and metaphysics. He is currently associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. [1] Faye has contributed to a number of areas in philosophy including explanation, [2] interpretation, philosophy of the humanities and the natural sciences, evolutionary naturalism, philosophy of Niels Bohr, [3] and topics concerning time, causation, and backward causation (Retrocausality). [4]

Contents

Early life

He is educated in philosophy and physics at the University of Copenhagen, was a Research Fellow under the Carlsberg Foundation, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and held a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, England. He has taught philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark since 1995.

Research

Metaphysics

In the area of metaphysics Faye defends the possibility of backward causation in his book The reality of the future (1989). Faye argues that the direction of causation can in principle be reversed with respect to time and that if something like backward causation were physically possible, then it would involve causal processes carrying negative energy forward in time. Also within metaphysics, in his Experience and Beyond (2016), Faye strongly rejects realism about abstract objects by claiming that humans are not adapted by natural selection to grasp real abstract entities. In contrast, he holds that we need to invent abstract concepts in order to be able to talk, say, about identity over time.

Philosophy of science

In his book Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy (1991) and in several edited volumes dedicated to Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, Faye has contributed to the understanding of Bohr's philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics. Faye originally called Bohr an objective anti-realist because he sees Bohr’s interpretation as a case of anti-realism with respect to the theory of quantum mechanics, but not with respect to atomic entities. But where Bohr rejected representationalism with respect to the quantum formalism and regarded quantum theory as a tool for prediction, Faye has later advocated the view according to which the basic laws of nature properly understood are explicit language rules. However, parts of the pragmatism and naturalism that form the back-bone of Faye’s own philosophy may be traced back to his understanding of Bohr.

In Rethinking Science (2002), After Postmodernism (2012), and The Nature of Scientific Thinking (2014), Faye variously promotes the methodological unity among the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Faye defends this claim by developing a general pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation that attempts to cover all kinds of explanations in the sciences and the humanities.

Philosophy of mind

Within the philosophy of mind, Faye has explored how we can understand consciousness from the evolutionary-naturalistic program he also pursues in his work on metaphysics. His thesis is that the properties of consciousness must be understood as extrinsic properties that arise from the organism's neural system constantly interacting with its surroundings. This is in contrast to traditional materialistic explanations of consciousness that have sought to understand consciousness by referring to intrinsic properties of the brain.

Published books (In English)

Edited books (In English)

Related Research Articles

The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, principally attributed to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It is one of the oldest of numerous proposed interpretations of quantum mechanics, as features of it date to the development of quantum mechanics during 1925–1927, and it remains one of the most commonly taught.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Many-worlds interpretation</span> Interpretation of quantum mechanics that denies the collapse of the wavefunction

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some "world" or universe. In contrast to some other interpretations, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, the evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic and local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it many-worlds in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niels Bohr</span> Danish physicist (1885–1962)

Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum mechanics</span> Description of physics at the atomic scale

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Schrödinger's cat</span> Thought experiment in quantum mechanics

In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment that illustrates a paradox of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation. These views on interpretation differ on such fundamental questions as whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or stochastic, local or non-local, which elements of quantum mechanics can be considered real, and what the nature of measurement is, among other matters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of physics</span> Truths and principles of the study of matter, space, time and energy

In philosophy, philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in modern physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Philosophy of physics can be broadly divided into three areas:

Physics and Beyond is a book by Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who discovered the uncertainty principle. It tells, from his point of view, the history of exploring atomic science and quantum mechanics in the first half of the 20th century.

Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. The concept of holism informs the methodology for a broad array of scientific fields and lifestyle practices. When applications of holism are said to reveal properties of a whole system beyond those of its parts, these qualities are referred to as emergent properties of that system. Holism in all contexts is opposed to reductionism which is the notion that systems containing parts contain no unique properties beyond those parts. Scientific proponents of holism consider the search for these emergent properties within systems the primary reason to incorporate it into scientific assumptions or perspectives.

In physics, hidden-variable theories are proposals to provide explanations of quantum mechanical phenomena through the introduction of hypothetical entities. The existence of fundamental indeterminacy for some measurements is assumed as part of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics; moreover, bounds for indeterminacy can be expressed in a quantitative form by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Most hidden-variable theories are attempts to avoid quantum indeterminacy, but possibly at the expense of requiring the existence of nonlocal interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libertarianism (metaphysics)</span> Term in metaphysics

Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false and vice versa.

In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the problem of how, or whether, wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer.

In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr regarded as an essential feature of the theory. The complementarity principle holds that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. An example of such a pair is position and momentum. Bohr considered one of the foundational truths of quantum mechanics to be the fact that setting up an experiment to measure one quantity of a pair, for instance the position of an electron, excludes the possibility of measuring the other, yet understanding both experiments is necessary to characterize the object under study. In Bohr's view, the behavior of atomic and subatomic objects cannot be separated from the measuring instruments that create the context in which the measured objects behave. Consequently, there is no "single picture" that unifies the results obtained in these different experimental contexts, and only the "totality of the phenomena" together can provide a completely informative description.

Quantum mechanics is the study of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles. By contrast, classical physics explains matter and energy only on a scale familiar to human experience, including the behavior of astronomical bodies such as the moon. Classical physics is still used in much of modern science and technology. However, towards the end of the 19th century, scientists discovered phenomena in both the large (macro) and the small (micro) worlds that classical physics could not explain. The desire to resolve inconsistencies between observed phenomena and classical theory led to two major revolutions in physics that created a shift in the original scientific paradigm: the theory of relativity and the development of quantum mechanics.

The ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics considers the quantum state description to apply only to an ensemble of similarly prepared systems, rather than supposing that it exhaustively represents an individual physical system.

The Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory was perhaps the final attempt at understanding the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation on the basis of the so-called old quantum theory, in which quantum phenomena are treated by imposing quantum restrictions on classically describable behaviour. It was advanced in 1924, and sticks to a classical wave description of the electromagnetic field. It was perhaps more a research program than a full physical theory, the ideas that are developed not being worked out in a quantitative way. The purpose of BKS Theory was to disprove Einstein's hypothesis of the light quantum.

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a central role for an observer of a quantum phenomenon. The quantum mechanical observer is tied to the issue of observer effect, where a measurement necessarily requires interacting with the physical object being measured, affecting its properties through the interaction. The term "observable" has gained a technical meaning, denoting a Hermitian operator that represents a measurement.

David Favrholdt was a Danish philosopher, educated with M.A.s in psychology and philosophy and later Dr. Phil. from Copenhagen University. He is one of few Danes to be included in the International Who's Who.

This is a glossary for the terminology applied in the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum metaphysics, collectively called quantum philosophy, a subfield of philosophy of physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ravi Gomatam</span>

Ravi Veeraraghavan Gomatam is the director of Bhaktivedanta Institute and the newly formed Institute of Semantic Information Sciences and Technology. He teaches graduate-level courses at these institutes. He was an adjunct professor at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, Rajasthan, India (1993–2015).

References

  1. "Jan Faye". Staff - University of Copenhagen. 2005-03-30.
  2. Tschaepe, Mark Dietrich (2006). "Pragmatics and Pragmatic Considerations in Explanation". Contemporary Pragmatism. 6 (2): 25–44. doi:10.1163/18758185-90000115.
  3. Faye, Jan (2014). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2014.
  4. Faye, Jan (2017). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Backward Causation". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2017.
  5. Urchs, Max (1993). "Review of The Reality of the Future: An Essay on Time, Causation and Backward Causation". Erkenntnis (1975-). Springer. 38 (2): 273–279. doi:10.1007/BF01128985. JSTOR   20012473.
  6. Cushing, James T. (March 1994). "Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy. Jan Faye". Philosophy of Science. 61: 149–150. doi:10.1086/289789.
  7. "Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy: An Anti-Realist View of Quantum Mechanics. Jan Faye". Isis. 84: 169. March 1993. doi:10.1086/356425.
  8. Klaus Hentschel in Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences 44 (1994): 429-431.
  9. Regt, Henk W. de (12 November 2014). "Review of The Nature of Scientific Thinking: On Interpretation, Explanation, and Understanding". Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
  10. Tschaepe, Mark (28 February 2015). "Jan Faye , The Nature of Scientific Thinking: On Interpretation, Explanation, and Understanding". Philosophy in Review. 35 (1): 14–16.