Philosophy of Joseph Petzoldt

This volume is the first English resource to shed light on the philosophy of Joseph Petzoldt (1862-1929), the main pupil of Ernst Mach and founder of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, later the association of Berlin logical positivists. A central figure in the early debate on the theory of relativity, his work was praised by Einstein himself. Tracing the development of Petzoldt’s ideas, starting from his early acceptance of materialism and Kantian agnosticism, Chiara Russo Krauss presents a comprehensive reconstruction of his philosophy in the context of the German milieu. She examines his attempt to develop a new philosophy following Gustav Fechner and the empiriocriticism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. In the final chapter, she sets out how Petzoldt proposed relativistic positivism as the official interpretation of Einstein’s relativity. By illuminating key elements of Petzoldt’s work, this is a valuable case study for students and scholars of philosophy of science and late 19th-century and early 20th-century philosophy. It reveals the complex interplay of two different tendencies of the time: neo-Kantianism and its struggle to overcome the notion of thing-in-itself, as well as the need for an epistemological foundation for the new advances of science.

This book masterfully combines history of philosophy and history of ideas. It portrays Joseph Petzoldt (1862–1929) who creatively combined elements of thought of his teacher Richard Avenarius (1843–1896) and of the physicist-physiologist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Petzoldt developed a philosophy of “relativistic positivism” and became an influential interpreter of Einstein’s theory of relativity. In her richly contextualized account, Chiara Russo Krauss discusses strengths and weaknesses of Petzoldt’s thought., Russo Krauss offers a rich and fascinating picture of Petzholt’s positivism, including his accounts of the unity of science, the determinacy of law, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. She shows him to be a significant bridge from nineteenth-century German philosophy to early analytic philosophy of science., Chiara Russo Krauss's book on Petzoldt should be obligatory reading for anyone interested in German intellectual history from the 1890s to the 1920s. Russo Krauss situates Petzoldt in the philosophical debates of his time, illuminating not only Petzoldt's own wide-randing oeuvre, but also the work of those authors who influenced him, or who responded to him. The book is chock-a-block with intriguing historical and systematic insights. Russo Krauss' study sets a model of how best to discuss an allegedly 'minor' figure.

Chiara Russo Krauss is Professor of History of Philosophy at the Federico II University, Naples, Italy.