PURPOSE AND PLAN 13question is no less a matter of taste than of fact. I would say that at his best he
was not, but I would not argue strenuously against the opposite view. It is as
certain that Einstein's interest in philosophy was genuine as it is that he did not
consider himself a philosopher.
He studied philosophical writings throughout his life, beginning in his high
school days, when he first read Kant (3). In 1943 Einstein, Godel, Bertrand Rus-
sell, and Pauli gathered at Einstein's home to discuss philosophy of science about
half a dozen times [Rl]. 'Science without epistemology is—in so far as it is think-
able at all—primitive and muddled,' he wrote in his later years, warning at the
same time of the dangers to the scientist of adhering too strongly to any one epis-
temological system. 'He [the scientist] must appear to the systematic epistemologist
as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist in so far as he seeks
to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; an idealist in so far as
he looks upon the concepts and theories as the free inventions of the human spirit
(not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist in so far as
he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they
furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may
even appear as a Platonist or Pythagorean in so far as he considers the viewpoint
of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research' [E6].
Elements of all these 'isms' are clearly discernible in Einstein's thinking. In the
last thirty years of his life, he ceased to be an 'unscrupulous opportunist', however,
when, much to his detriment, he became a philosopher by freezing himself into
realism or, as he preferred to call it, objective reality. That part of his evolution
will be described in detail in (25). There can be as little doubt that philosophy
stretched his personality as that his philosophical knowledge played no direct role
in his major creative efforts. Further remarks by Einstein on philosophical issues
will be deferred until (16e), except for his comments on Newton.
The men whom Einstein at one time or another acknowledged as his precursors
were Newton, Maxwell, Mach, Planck, and Lorentz. As he told me more than
once, without Lorentz he would never have been able to make the discovery of
special relativity. Of his veneration for Planck, I shall write in (18a); of the influ-
ence of Mach* in (15e); and of his views of Maxwell in (16e). I now turn to
Newton but first digress briefly.
Einstein's deep emotional urge not to let anything interfere with his thinking
dates back to his childhood and lends an unusual quality of detachment to his
personal life. It was not that he was aloof or a loner, incapable of personal attach-
ments. He was also capable of deep anger, as his attitude toward Germany during
*I should note that I do not quite share Isaiah Berlin's opinion [B2] that Mach was one of Einstein's
philosophical mentors and that Einstein first accepted, then rejected Mach's phenomenalism. Ein-
stein's great admiration for Mach came entirely from the reading of the latter's book on mechanics,
in which the relativity of all motion is a guiding principle. On the other hand, Einstein considered
Mach to be 'un deplorable philosophe' [E7], if only because to Mach the reality of atoms remained
forever anathema.