Hermann Weyl (1949), Princeton University Press (1949; reissued 2009 with an introduction by Frank Wilczek) — DOI-10.1515/9781400833337
Key takeaways
- Philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics are intertwined, with advances in philosophy led by scientific discovery. Weyl’s two-part treatment (mathematics, then natural science), drawing on Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz and Newton, is a classic mathematician-physicist’s statement of that view.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Weyl, a mathematician, wrote this philosophy book despite “conflicts of conscience” about how the objectivity of science fits the uncertainty of philosophy. He argues that the two are already bound together, and that philosophical progress has followed scientific discovery. The book has two parts, one on mathematics and one on the physical sciences. It works through the ideas of Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz and Newton as a guide to understanding science philosophically.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 5 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — only glanced at (t=5s), and a long classic with no reachable text here. It matters as background rather than as a claim the record needs.
What a deeper reading should check:
- A classic source on symmetry, constructivism and the epistemology of physics, and a background text for the structural-realism and duality works in this batch (LIT-199, LIT-151). A deeper reading should find which appendices (added in 1949) bear on quantum theory and symmetry.
- For the record, the question is which date and edition to cite: 1927 German, 1949 English, or the 2009 reissue that the DOI names.
- Butterfield’s Physics Today review of the 2009 reissue is quoted on the Princeton page. It links this book to LIT-199’s co-author.
Access when seeded: The De Gruyter Brill page returned HTTP 202 with an empty body (a bot check), so it was not reached. The Princeton University Press product page for the 2009 paperback was reached. It gives the blurb, “Published: May 17, 2009”, 336 pp., and the introduction by Frank Wilczek. The 1927 German original and 1949 Helmer translation come from a web-search summary (SEP “Hermann Weyl” entry and a Physics Today review among the results) and were not read directly. The DOI is the De Gruyter record of the 2009 reissue (Crossref: Princeton University Press, 2009). No full text was reached. Keywords are my own. published: is the year of the English edition with no month or day; the German original (1927) and both years come from a search summary, not a primary page.