The part and the whole: Heisenberg’s platonism

Abstract

This work aims to demonstrate how Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum physics, had a deeply platonic view of the world’s scientific knowledge. Therefore, after analyzing with eminent Platonists of the early twentieth century the similarities between the Platonic worldview and the new paradigms exposed in quantum physics, we will analyze the skeptical view that Cassidy exposes in the biography of the scientist, and we will discover thanks to Chevalley, a prominent expert of the philosophical aspects of the quantum revolution, the need that Heisenberg had to philosophize. Next, we will collect clearly Platonic references in two of Heisenberg’s most philosophical writings: the 1942 manuscript and the autobiography The Part and the Whole. Finally, we will study what we can consider scientific Platonism in Plato’s Timaeus, as a reference for Heisenberg’s philosophical conception.