"Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
Charles:Mach , following his philosophical line , thought atoms were just aids to thought, ideas.
Justin:Mach officially thought that theoretical entities were "elements," neither mental nor physical.
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CB: Sort of like heuristic devices.
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That said, the structure of his epistemology is pretty Humean. See The Analysis of Sensation.
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CB: Lenin categorizes Mach as idealist and dualist , a la Kant (i.e. "shamedface materialists", agnostics in Engels categories) . I know he discusses Humean elements and Berkeley , as the type idealist philosopher, in the whole trend of empirio-criticism, as he defines it.
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What Einstein took from Mach was Mach's attack on thea sboluteness of soace and time from The Science of Mechanics.
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CB: Yes, Kant made an important scientific discovery too, that the solar system has a history.
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CB:See _Einstein : His Life and Times_ , where the author describes this philosophical break with Mach, upon a meeting with the latter late in Mach's life. Einstein breaks with Mach on the issue of atoms as an objective reality, the objection that Lenin had to Machism.
Justin: Einstein also thought that spacetime was real, which Mach did not.
^^^^ CB: This is the generalized point of the existence of objective reality. Lenin claims that Mach doesn't believe in objective reality. Just sense data, as you say , like Hume. The " We really only have direct experience of sense data" rap. So, Mach is a positivist , too, as everything relies on immediate sense data. Einstein is anti-positivist too, as I think you mentioned his stubborn comment concerning an experiment not confirming relativity.
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>(Einstein also independently arrived at a position of defeatism for one's
>own country in WWI, pretty much the same as Lenin's on that war. Einstein
>was very brave in this in that almost all the other physicists were working
>for the government in support of the war)
>
In WWII, Einstein wrote a letter for Szilard and Bohr that helped get Roosevelt's attentiona nd got the Manhattan Project going.
jks