Danielyan N.V. Ernst Mach and Philosophy of Science

Abstract: This article is devoted to the Austrian scientist Ernst Mach’s philosophical heritage. The reason for its writing is 100th anniversary of his death and the relevance of his works for the contemporary science. They had a great influence on understanding the nature of the cognition and forming non-classical space and time ideas. The main accent is made on the epistemological breakthrough based on his ideas: transference of cognition subject from transcendental to natural world; empirical knowledge as a sum of natural and mental processes («sets of feelings»); forming empiriocriticism as a direction that stimulated neopositivism appearance; relative nature of space and time that resulted in both Einstein’s theory of relativity and the relational concept of space and time developed in science nowadays. The author proves that Mach’s suggestion to consider the basic purpose of science as adapting an idea to experience gives a negative result due to the unilateral direction of the cognition process and the emergence of «model-dependent realism». As for the methodology of his works, they were written from the position of dialectics because of Mach’s argument with Newton and Kant’s metaphysical approach to a priori and absolute categories. The author makes a conclusion from the research that it was Mach who proposed the idea of the unity of subject and object in the form of their «principal coordination». This approach forms the foundation of understanding the cognition process in modern epistemology.

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