Scientific nihilism : on the loss and recovery of physical explanation /

Athearn characterizes recent postpostivist epistemologies (e.g., antirealism) as "scientific nihilism," in that they abrogate "narrative causal explanations in fundamental physics." He briefly reconstructs his chief exemplar, the theory of light and the electromagnetic field, from the originally causally explicative ideas of Faraday and Maxwell to the "neo-Humean" acausalist arguments of photons and quantum theory. The suggested resolution of problems such as the wave-particle duality, quantum indeterminism, and, especially, non-locality of correlations argued through Bell's theorems is to recover Whitehead's process philosophy. This involves a "productionist" ("genetic") self-evolving account of degrees of materiality and localization of emergent events (and "time-systems") for such entities as photons. This approach arguably preserves the ontological features of Whitehead's alternative "relativity theory," and provides suggestive modes of philosophy of physics with some advantages over related approaches in phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and holism (Bohm). There are no mathematical discussions, but the very dense terminological complex will be opaque to undergraduates in philosophy. Ambitious and intriguing, but not quite fulfilling its edifying promises; a book for specialists in postmodern philosophy of science. P. D. Skiff; Bard College