Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp (review)

404 BOOK REVIEWS Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers , Vol. VII. Edited by PAUL ARTHUR ScHILPP. Evanston, Illinois: Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949. Pp. 781, with index. $8.50. At the beginning of the present century, empiriological physics was faced with two paradoxes arising from a study of light. One was the problem of "black-body" radiation which inspired the quantum theory; the other was the Michelson-Morley e:Kperiment which led to the theory of relativity. Not only is relativity physics the work of Albert Einstein, but central notions in the quantum system are likewise owed to him. In fifty years, he has changed the course of physics even more than Galileo and Newton. Following the conventions of the " Library of Living Philosophers," the present volume opens with an intellectual autobiography of Einstein himself . Then follow twenty-five essays on Einstein's work by scientists and philosophers and scholars who are both. The book concludes with Einstein 's reaction to his critics, positive and negative, in the preceding section. Following the body of the book, there is a sixty-two page bibliography of Einstein's writings as compiled by Margaret C. Shields. There are twenty pages of index. As Schilpp writes in the preface, he has again assembled an imposing array of scholars for this latest addition to his valuable series. The essayists represent eleven countries. Six of them hold Nobel Prizes in science. As in the past volumes, Schilpp has failed to obtain an appropriate essay by a scholastic. He states in the preface that he had solicited a study from a Russian source but that the promised essay failed to arrive. Scholastics will be happy to learn from the dust-jacket of this book that the Library is preparing a volume on Maritain, but the fact remains that in the seven volumes of the Library so far published naturalists, logical empiricists, idealists, and even Marxians have been invited to contribute, without a single essay from the growing numbers of scholastics throughout the world. A Thomist, in reviewing the works of this Library, always feels tempted to sketch out what might have been the missing scholastic evaluation of the philosopher under consideration. According to the title of the present work, Einstein is both a philosopher and a scientist, but none of the contributors make it exactly clear if and where there is a dividing line between his two fields of work. Nor has any of the authors taken the patience to trace out the pre-suppositions of Einstein's work that would connect it up with the common experience of men in which knowledge begins. 'I,'homism has a great contribution to make in this pre-experimental and pre-empiriological area which cannot be dismissed as a common-sense illusion without making the illusion apply to all knowledge including that of the quantum and relativity specialist. Aristotle could still defend his three principles of motion in pre-experimental physics which goes logically and chronologically before the more BOOK REVIEWS 405 sophisticated and artificial techniques of experiment. Without matter or a subject and without privation (the term a quo) and form (the term ad quem), motion would be impossible. These three principles involve primarily the actualization of the potential, in so far as it is potential. They do not depend on quantity and measurement which are posterior in our knowledge, by comparison to matter-form-privation. The principles of motion not only escape measurement, but they likewise are below experiment since any effort to experiment them would presuppose their existence. Book I of Aristotle's Physics - not to mention the others - can stand in spite of empiriological physics, either in quantum or relativity form. It simply asks and answers questions at the general, pre-experimental level where Einstein's specialized method is powerless. The very success of quantum and relativity physics poses a problem which cannot be fully answered by simple epistemological distinctions like the one suggested in the foregoing paragraph. If not directly, at least in some indirect and oblique way, the quantum and relativity physicist does enter into a study of nature, and the practical achievements of his discipline could not be explained...