Hugo Dingler
Encyclopedia
Hugo Albert Emil Hermann Dingler (* July 7, 1881 Munich
, Germany
; June 29, 1954 Munich
, Germany
. Son of Hermann and Maria Dingler). Dingler was a German
scientist
and philosopher.
, philosophy
, and physics
with Felix Klein
, Hermann Minkowski
, David Hilbert
, Edmund Husserl
, Woldemar Voigt
, and Wilhem Roentgen at the universities of Göttingen
and Munich
. He graduated from the University of Munich with a thesis under Aurel Voss. He failed to get a Privatdozent
position in mathematics at Munich, but was given a position to teach "Methods, Teaching and History of Mathematics". Thus Dingler turned from mathematics to philosophy of science
.
In 1934 Dingler was dismissed from his teaching position. He told several interviewers that this was because of his favorable writings concerning Jews. In fact he was dismissed as part of a general retrenchment and not at this time for political reasons. Later his reinstatement was opposed for political reasons, but by 1940 he had joined the Nazi Party and was given a teaching position. Of Dingler's 1944 book Lehrbuch der Exakten Naturwissenschaften only thirty copies survived wartime bombing.
and others. Sometimes he is called a "radical conventionalist", as by the early Rudolf Carnap
. Dingler himself initially characterized it as "critical conventionalism", to contrast it with the "naïve conventionalism" of other philosophers such as Poincaré
, but he himself later ceased to call his position conventionalist. Dingler agrees with the conventionalists that the fundamental assumptions of geometry
and physics are not extracted empirically and cannot be given a transcendental
deduction
. However, Dingler disagrees with conventionalists such as Henri Poincaré in that he does not believe there is freedom to choose alternative assumptions. Dingler believes that one can give a foundation to mathematics and physics by means of operations as building stones. Dingler claims that this operational
analysis leads one to Euclidean geometry
and Newtonian mechanics, which are the only possible results.
Dingler opposed Einstein's relativity theory and was therefore opposed and snubbed by most of the leaders of the German
physics and mathematics community. This opposition, at least to the theory of general relativity
, remains in the work of his follower Paul Lorenzen
.
, Wilhelm Kamlah, and Peter Janich
, and more indirectly, Jürgen Mittelstraß
, is thus in large part pursuing a modernized version of Dingler's program which claims to incorporate relativity
, quantum theory
and quantum logic
.
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
; June 29, 1954 Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. Son of Hermann and Maria Dingler). Dingler was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
scientist
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
and philosopher.
Life
Hugo Dingler studied mathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, and physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
with Felix Klein
Felix Klein
Christian Felix Klein was a German mathematician, known for his work in group theory, function theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the connections between geometry and group theory...
, Hermann Minkowski
Hermann Minkowski
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, who created and developed the geometry of numbers and who used geometrical methods to solve difficult problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.- Life and work :Hermann Minkowski was born...
, David Hilbert
David Hilbert
David Hilbert was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of...
, Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Woldemar Voigt
Woldemar Voigt
Woldemar Voigt was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute...
, and Wilhem Roentgen at the universities of Göttingen
Göttingen
Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
and Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
. He graduated from the University of Munich with a thesis under Aurel Voss. He failed to get a Privatdozent
Privatdozent
Privatdozent or Private lecturer is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor...
position in mathematics at Munich, but was given a position to teach "Methods, Teaching and History of Mathematics". Thus Dingler turned from mathematics to philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
.
In 1934 Dingler was dismissed from his teaching position. He told several interviewers that this was because of his favorable writings concerning Jews. In fact he was dismissed as part of a general retrenchment and not at this time for political reasons. Later his reinstatement was opposed for political reasons, but by 1940 he had joined the Nazi Party and was given a teaching position. Of Dingler's 1944 book Lehrbuch der Exakten Naturwissenschaften only thirty copies survived wartime bombing.
Doctrines
Dingler's position is usually characterized as "conventionalist" by Karl PopperKarl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
and others. Sometimes he is called a "radical conventionalist", as by the early Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....
. Dingler himself initially characterized it as "critical conventionalism", to contrast it with the "naïve conventionalism" of other philosophers such as Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...
, but he himself later ceased to call his position conventionalist. Dingler agrees with the conventionalists that the fundamental assumptions of geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
and physics are not extracted empirically and cannot be given a transcendental
Transcendence (philosophy)
In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...
deduction
Deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypothesis...
. However, Dingler disagrees with conventionalists such as Henri Poincaré in that he does not believe there is freedom to choose alternative assumptions. Dingler believes that one can give a foundation to mathematics and physics by means of operations as building stones. Dingler claims that this operational
Operation (mathematics)
The general operation as explained on this page should not be confused with the more specific operators on vector spaces. For a notion in elementary mathematics, see arithmetic operation....
analysis leads one to Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the Elements. Euclid's method consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and deducing many other propositions from these...
and Newtonian mechanics, which are the only possible results.
Dingler opposed Einstein's relativity theory and was therefore opposed and snubbed by most of the leaders of the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
physics and mathematics community. This opposition, at least to the theory of general relativity
General relativity
General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...
, remains in the work of his follower Paul Lorenzen
Paul Lorenzen
Paul Lorenzen was a philosopher andmathematician.As a founder of the Erlangen School and the inventor of game semantics he was a famous German philosopher of the 20th century.-Biography:Lorenzen studied with David Hilbert as a schoolboy and he was one of Hasse's...
.
Influence
Paul Lorenzen, noted for his work on constructive foundations of mathematics was a follower of Dingler, at least with respect to the foundations of geometry and physics. The so-called Erlangen School of followers and allies of Lorenzen, including Kuno LorenzKuno Lorenz
Kuno Lorenz is a German philosopher. He developed a philosophy of dialogue, in connection with the pragmatic theory of action of the Erlangen constructivist school...
, Wilhelm Kamlah, and Peter Janich
Peter Janich
Peter Janich is a professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg. Janich studied physics, philosophy and psychology at the Universities of Erlangen and Hamburg. He attained a doctorate in philosophy in 1969 and during 1969/70 was a guest lecturer at the University of Texas in Austin...
, and more indirectly, Jürgen Mittelstraß
Jürgen Mittelstraß
Jürgen Mittelstraß is a German philosopher especially interested in the philosophy of science.He was born in Düsseldorf in 1936 and studied philosophy, history and protestant theology at Bonn, Erlangen, Hamburg and Oxford from 1956 till 1961.He received his Ph.D...
, is thus in large part pursuing a modernized version of Dingler's program which claims to incorporate relativity
Theory of relativity
The theory of relativity, or simply relativity, encompasses two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, the word relativity is sometimes used in reference to Galilean invariance....
, quantum theory
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...
and quantum logic
Quantum logic
In quantum mechanics, quantum logic is a set of rules for reasoning about propositions which takes the principles of quantum theory into account...
.
Works
- Beiträge zur Kenntnis der infinitesimalen Deformation einer Fläche (thesis directed by Aurel Voss), Amorbach, 1907.
- Grundlinien einer Kritik und exakten Theorie der Wissenschaften, 1907.
- Grenzen und Ziele der Wissenschaft, 1910.
- Die Grundlagen der angewandten Geometrie, Leipzig, 1911 / Die Grundlagen der Geometrie, Stuttgart, 1933.
- Kritische Bemerkungen zu den Grundlagen der Relativitätstheorie, Physikalische Zeitschrift, vol 21 (1920), 668-675. Reissued as pamphlet in Leipzig, 1921.
- Metaphysik als Wissenschaft und der Primat der Philosophie, Munich, 1926.
- Philosophie der Logik und Arithmetik, Munich, 1931.
- Geschichte der Naturphilosophie, Berlin, 1932.
- Das System, Munich, 1933.
- Das Handeln im Sinne des höchsten Zieles, Munich, 1935.
- Die Methode der Physik, Munich, 1938.
- Vom Tierseele zur Menschenseele, Leipzig, 1941.
- Lehrbuch der Exakten Naturwissenschaften, Berlin, 1944. Edited posthumously by Paul Lorenzen as Aufbau der Fundamentalwissenschaften, Munich, 1964.
- Grundriss der methodischen Philosophie, Fuessen, 1949
- Ergreifung des Wirklichen, Munich 1955. Reprinted (with intro. by Kuno Lorenz and Jürgen Mittelstrass), Frankfurt, 1969.
About Dingler
- Ceccato, Silvia, Silvio, "Contra-Dingler, pro Dingler" Methodos, Vol. 4 (1952) English transl. 266-290, and Dinger, reply, 297-299.
- Toretti, Roberto,"Hugo Dingler's Philosophy of Geometry," Dialogos, vol. 32, (1978), 85-118.
- Wolters, Gereon, "The First Man Who Almost Wholly Understands Me: Carnap, Dingler, and Conventionalism," in Nicholas RescherNicholas RescherNicholas Rescher is an American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of...
, ed., *The Heritage of Logical Positivism,Lantham MD: University Press of America, 1985, 93-107. - Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, "Geometrie und Physik," in C. P. Enz and Jagdish Mehra, eds., *Physical Reality and Mathematical Description, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974, esp. 60-63.