QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

and adapted it to both political and economic science and the scrutiny of natural research. 289
More universal attention in the Europe of the second half of the 1800s was awakened by
Classical Materialism, for example that which arose from the Mechanistic Materialism promoted
by Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899), according to which all knowledge concerning objective reality
could be derived from the mechanical laws of movement concerning material particles. It was
believed that correct knowledge could be obtained without engaging in philosophical speculation
by using strictly empirical methods of research based on the procedures employed in natural
science. 290
Certain researchers, such as Ernst von Haeckel (1834-1919), and Wilhelm Ostwald presented
this doctrine as a “natural-scientific world-view” deduced from scientific results, and their clarity
and authority attracted a wide audience. In the early years of his writings, Eino Kaila, a notable
representative of Finnish analytical philosophy and defender of science was fiercely critical of
the spiritual poverty of such teachings. He viewed the “natural-scientific world-view” as a
collection of narrow-minded and superficial science. Haeckel’s statement that “the whole of the
universe has developed out of indestructable energy-forms of an substance according to the
eternal laws of nature” was capable of being a clear and adequate view of primitive “common
sense”, but if, from the philosophical point of view, it was the final word, no serious critical
philosophy could then be undertaken. It was Kaila’s view that “This bottomless reality vibrating
with thousands of colours, light and sound could never be built from material elements in such a
simple way”. 291
Even though the idea that the whole of reality could be reduced to the mechanical interaction of
material elements appeared rather too simple, the new natural-scientific way of thinking signified
a clear response to the fundamental disagreement between Nominalists and Realists about
general concepts and the nature of being. The distinction might be defined as objective treatment
of the primary qualities and subjective treatment of the secondary qualities, i.e. the former are
considered as being objectively present, independent of a perceiving subject and observed in a
physical body, while the latter only exist in the consciousness of the perceiving person. It was,
however, imagined that a mental perception, such as the sensation that a body is warm, is caused
by the state of that body, which by means of the sense organs creates in us the sensation that we
denote by the word warm, and that this state had to be characterised by geometric-mechanical
289 Ketonen 1989, 129-130.
290 Niiniluoto 1980, 48, Ketonen 1989, 144-145.
291 Kaila 1990, 68-73. Poroporvari ja kamarifilosofi, Valitut teokset 1 ed. Ilkka Niiniluoto, Otava 1990.
110