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Einstein's Philosophy of Science (2014)
- jimhefferon 9y ago> Robert Thornton, a young African-American philosopher of science How is his ethnic background possibly relevant?
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThe entire bit about Robert Thornton seems unnecessary, they can't even keep his name consistent. Though a German citizen writing a letter to an African-American in 1944 probably does say a fair amount about his philosophy of science, if you include the letter at all it seems worth mentioning.
- gpawl 9y agoIt's strange to call Albert Einstein a "German citizen" in _1944_, since by 1943 all German Jews had been murdered or exiled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein > In 1901, after being stateless for more than five years, Einstein acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life. > He settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940
- boomboomsubban 9y agoYes, that was the point. And being an American citizen tells you more about his philosophy, as most American physicists would not have been allowed to write such a letter in 1944.
- bbctol 9y agoI thought they might want to avoid confusion with Robert Thornton, the nuclear physicist of the same era, but for some reason didn't want to include a parenthetical "not the famous one" and so provided some extra detail. Even if it's that it's extremely clumsy, though.
- woodandsteel 9y agoThis is a very interesting article. It turns out that Einstein was a very serious philosopher of science, in dialogue with leading philosophers of science of his day such as Schlitz and Reichenbach. It seems to me that his overall philosophy of science is a version of pragmatism.