x x x i v I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 7
there during May 1921, the first two were popular talks for a large audience; a type-
script of these talks is presented as Appendix C. The other three talks were given
to a much smaller audience of interested scientists. In the published version, writ-
ten some months later, Einstein, who had made his theory accessible to a general
audience with his popular book of 1917 (Einstein 1917a [Vol. 6, Doc. 42]), now
presents it to a scientific audience.
Einstein had long been concerned with methodological and epistemological
questions, which constituted an important motivation for his scientific work. His
interest in the foundations of science had already taken hold during the days of the
“Olympia Academy,” the philosophical reading group he formed with his friends
Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine. With the maturation of his work on general
relativity, he began not only to explain the foundations of the theory but to charac-
terize its epistemological status vis-à-vis other physical theories. Thus, in his inau-
gural lecture at the Berlin Academy, Einstein 1914k (Vol. 6, Doc. 3), he contrasted
the deductive character of relativity with other physical theories that seek to find
foundational principles inductively. But it is only in the years covered by this
volume that Einstein began to write extensively on the methodology and epistemol-
ogy of science. He published a series of papers (Einstein 1918j [Doc. 7], Einstein
1919f [Doc. 26], Einstein 1919g [Doc. 28], and Einstein 1921c [Doc. 52]) that
address the question of methodology from different angles but give a rather coher-
ent picture of his views, one that would not change considerably in the coming
years (Einstein 1933, Einstein 1944). These documents are not philosophy papers
in an academic sense and stay quite close in style to his popular expositions, but
they reflect Einstein’s serious and independent thinking about the methodological
foundations of his work.
Einstein’s methodological papers share with his popular lectures and articles the
desire to make his work understandable to a lay audience. Furthermore, they have
the more specific purpose of defending his program against methodological criti-
cism. Einstein’s unique way of asking foundational questions about physics had
met with a mixed response in the physics community: many physicists did not
consider his requirements of theoretical simplicity and coherence as a sufficient
substitute for the scant empirical confirmation that general relativity could offer.
They came to the conclusion that the theory was as speculative as it was formally
impressive (see Eisenstaedt 1989 and, for the specific example of Joseph Larmor,
Sánchez-Ron 1999). Hence, it is not surprising that Einstein saw a need to articulate
his conviction that a search for theoretical unification through very general princi-
ples was an integral part of physics, quite independent of its direct empirical
import. Einstein’s major interlocutor on philosophical questions during these years
was Moritz Schlick, whose works Einstein read with enthusiasm. Many of the
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