Relativity in late Wilhelmian Germany: The appeal to a preestablished harmony between mathematics and physics

Abstract

Most students of intellectual life in Wilhelmian Germany have at one time or other attempted to gauge the magnitude of their task by reading in Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich's massive bibliography and synopsis of philosophical currents. More than any other source, his text provides a measure of the bewildering profusion of competing philosophical systems that appeared around 1900.1 There one sees theories of myriad shades and complexions, bright patches of color that fade one into the other's periphery. Never before, the impression arises, had there been such a large and apparently anarchic outpouring of concern about philosophical truth and how to achieve it. In flogging his own work, every obscure professor or social malcontent seemed eager to gather in his train, Friedrich Paulsen noted in 1907, a gaggle of disciples.2 Fame and fortune rewarded those, like Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, and Rudolf von Eucken, who gave the public what they wanted. From our privileged vantage point we see the superficiality of philosophical texts published at that time. Leaving aside major developments in mathematical logic, one is especially struck by the extent to which philosophers failed to arrive at formulations commensurate with achievements in other fields. Creative thinkers early in the twentieth century would have agreed: philosophy only lightly scarred the enduring accomplishments of the period. If one finds little echo of the special world systems of a Windelband, a Nietzsche, a Tonnies, or a Weber in literary fiction or scientific theories, there