Elise Crull, Guido Baccagaluppi (Eds.): Grete Hermann : Between Physics and Philosophy . (Studies in the History and Phi
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Elise Crull, Guido Baccagaluppi (Eds.): Grete Hermann: Between Physics and Philosophy. (Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science). Springer: Dordrecht 2016, 281 pp., 106,99€ (hardcover), ISBN 9789402409703 Michael Drieschner1
© The Author(s) 2020
Grete Hermann must have been a fascinating woman: After studies in mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen she obtained a doctorate degree in mathematics under the supervision of Emmy Noether, who would later became famous for her work on the relation between conserved quantities and symmetries. Already in Göttingen she met Leonard Nelson, a Neo-Kantian philosopher, and became his collaborator and “disciple”—though a critical one. In the 1930s she participated in the debate about the then new quantum mechanics. In order to get firsthand information she went for some time to work in Heisenberg’s institute at the University of Leipzig. Besides those academic activities, she was strongly engaged politically and pedagogically as a socialist. With her political friends, she tried to organize a common front of the socialist and communist parties in order to prevent the Nazis from ruling Germany—an attempt that, as we know, failed. It was Leonard Nelson who encouraged all his followers to realize their philosophical insights in practical life. So Grete Hermann worked, besides her socialist political commitment, in pedagogical initiatives. She worked with others in founding and running a boarding school (“Walkemühle”) for education of adults as well as children in a peaceful atmosphere. After the Nazis assumed power, eventually she had to flee with parts of the boarding school, first to Denmark and later to England. After the war she went back to Germany and continued her pedagogical and political work, then mainly connected with the labour union and the Social Democratic Party. There she was one of those who put up the new party program for post-war Germany. Finally, she had a permanent position for pedagogy at the University of Bremen. The edition ‘Grete Hermann—Between Physics and Philosophy’ by Elise Crull and Guido Baccagaluppi reviewed here deals mainly with Hermann’s work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics. In its part IV it presents three key texts translated into English: A letter from Gustav Heckmann, a friend of hers, of December 1933 dealing with a long discussion he had with Heisenberg about her work, and two papers by Hermann herself on quantum mechanics: ‘Determinism and Quantum Mechanics’ (1933) and * Michael Drieschner [email protected] 1
Institut für Philosophie I, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany
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‘Natural-Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics’ (1935), all translated into English by the editors. The first of her own texts is an unpublished draft she had sent to Dirac and Heisenberg, among others; the second is her main publication on philosophical questions of quantum mechanics. Those texts comprise the final about 50 pages of the volume. Part I of the v
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