Sympathy for the devil: Reconsidering Ernst Mach’s empiricism

Abstract

Aristotle claimed that the sign of an educated mind was the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. Yet, as we all know, sometimes we encounter a position so foreign to our own ways of thinking that even entertaining it is impossible. John Blackmore, over his long career of writing about the life, work and influence of Ernst Mach, has never been able to see anything of value in Mach’s philosophical writings, and what is more, his historical coverage of Mach’s career is often punctuated with tirades against what Blackmore calls Mach’s ‘‘phenomenalism,’’ the belief in the reality of human sense experience and literally nothing else. Blackmore reiterates that view in Ernst Mach’s Philosophy Pro and Con, his first book devoted exclusively to Mach’s philosophy, along with a recent offering about Ernst Mach’s Prague. In previous work, Blackmore has identified as an historian and claimed to avoid taking sides in philosophical disputes, but this has never been entirely true. It seems he cannot resist promulgating an erroneous, though widely shared, reading of Mach’s philosophy that has damaged Mach’s reputation for more than one hundred years, and one that I have tried to set straight in my (2003) and will again in this essay. Before getting to that, I will say that Blackmore’s work purely as an historian has been exemplary and does certainly demonstrate his ability to serve as a neutral judge. He has done a great deal to get all of the evidence out there and even publishes documents by Mach himself and writings by others, which do not square with Blackmore’s reading of Mach’s philosophy. Since his 1972 biography of Mach, Blackmore published a selection from Mach’s Correspondence in 1985 (with Klaus Hentschel), an excellent collection of essays called Ernst Mach—A Deeper Look in 1992, and Ernst Mach’s Vienna in 2001. A fifth volume, called Ernst