Record Details
Exploring the structural dynamics of human understanding : an historico-philosophical analysis of the problem of meaning in Heidegger and Bohr
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Exploring the structural dynamics of human understanding : an historico-philosophical analysis of the problem of meaning in Heidegger and Bohr |
| Names |
Tattersall, Mason
(creator) Luft, David (advisor) |
| Date Issued | 2015-03-17 (iso8601) |
| Note | Graduation date: 2015 |
| Abstract | This dissertation explores the structural dynamics of human understanding and particularly the concept of meaning and its connections to concepts of ultimate ground, necessity and contingency, language, and perception. It focuses on the history of the concept of meaning in early twentieth-century European physics and philosophy, through an analysis of the work of Martin Heidegger and Niels Bohr. Using the work of these two immensely important thinkers as case studies, the dissertation attempts to approach the problem of meaning, which lies at the root of the problem of understanding, from an empirical standpoint, observing two vital confrontations with the problem of meaning and its attendant connections to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of science, in two radically different fields, in a synchronous moment in the tumultuous world of early twentieth-century European thought. The dissertation thus presents two historical case studies: the young Heidegger's confrontation with the problem of meaning from his early graduate work to the 1927 publication of Being and Time and Bohr's confrontation with the problem of meaning from his proposal of the quantized atom in 1913 to his 1927 formulation of the principle of complementarity, which underlies the so-called "Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics." Through careful analysis of these two historical instances the dissertation attempts to discover general properties of meaning as it functions within systems of understanding. At the same time the dissertation offers itself up as a methodological example in an implied argument for the fruitful use of historiological research as an observational empirical science in its own right, with its own proper domain of research and its own appropriate methods and logic. |
| Genre | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Topic | history |
| Identifier | http://hdl.handle.net/1957/55575 |
