The Reception of Relativity in American Philosophy

Abstract

Historians have shown that philosophical discussions about the implications of relativity significantly shaped the development of European philosophy of science in the 1920s. Yet little is known about American debates from this period. This paper maps the first responses to Einstein’s theory in three U.S. philosophy journals and situates these papers within the local intellectual landscape. We argue that these discussions (1) stimulated the development of a distinctly American branch of philosophy of science and (2) paved the way for the logical empiricists, who emigrated to the United States in the years before World War II.