Interview: Paul Hoyningen-Huene

Abstract

Paul Hoyningen-Huene was born in Pfronten/Allgäu, West Germany, in 1946. He studied Physics and Philosophy in Munich (1966-1971), Mathematical Physics in London (1971-72) and Theoretical Physics in Zurich (1975). The theoretical physicist and philosopher taught in Switzerland (1976-1998) and was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Thomas S. Kuhn (1984-85). Afterward, he published Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (1993), an original neo-Kantian interpretation of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas. His numerous articles focus on Logic, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Physical Sciences and the General Philosophy of Science. Throughout his career, Hoyningen-Huene also wrote about Paul Feyerabend’s thesis concerning the rationality of scientific development and theory comparison, Scientific Realism, Reductionism, Ethics of Science and Historiography of Science. The German thinker founded the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany) and intended to summarize his main ideas on the nature of scientific knowledge in the book Systematicity: The Nature of Science (2013).