QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

starting point adopted by the early natural philosophers. In Greek, the question ‘What is nature
and how can it be understood?’ took the form “What are things and organisms made of?”, since
the term ‘nature’ originally meant that essence that belonged internally to something or which
caused it to be what it was. For example, the nature of oak was to be hard, and barking belonged
to a dog. When questioning the nature of nature, the Ionians were seeking its internal principle or
a characteristic that made creatures behave as they behaved. It was only later that the word
‘nature’ began to also mean all the objects belonging to nature, in a way that the term might be
used as a synonym for the word ‘world’. 35
The attempt by the Milesian school to understand the world as the differentiation of some
primary substance or element has been criticised in later philosophy for the problematic
presuppositions associated with the whole endeavour. Whenever there is an attempt to construct
cosmology on the basis of some homogenous primary substance, it is necessary to postulate this
substance as being the basis for all appearing things. The first result of this is the question of
how a clear conception of this non-visible primary substance can be formed simply by thought.
Secondly, it should be possible to present a credible explanation of why and in which way this
homogenous primary substance differentiates exactly into the world that we observe. 36 Although
Ionian speculations about the nature and development of the world are easy to prove noncredible
in the light of present knowledge, the question of examining the structure of reality from
the starting point of ontology has not enjoyed a clear solution. Western natural philosophy,
which is regarded as emphasising ontology, let alone physics, cannot ignore the question of
presuppositions. The fact that something about the structure of the world is already assumed
cannot be ignored. For example: the assumption that reality is completely determined by laws, or
that it ultimately consists precisely of certain kinds of stuff, objects or characteristics. Even if
such general ontological statements and presuppositions may seem to be well grounded from an
empirical point of view, they still cannot be tested directly.
By defining the primary substance as undifferentiable and unobservable, Anaximander was more
successful than either Thales and Anaximenes in avoiding the danger of squeezing reality into a
concrete entity of already-known components, a danger which is inherent in the ontological
approach. The abstract apeiron, the foundation of reality remained unknown and out of reach to
human beings. According to Werner Heisenberg, the question of whether the fundamental
35 Collingwood 1969, 43-44.
36 Collingwood 1969, 40-43.
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