ABSTRACT
A cursory examination of the responses of philosophy (or, more precisely, of what passes itself off for philosophy) to quantum physics suffices to validate fully Althusser’s thesis on the co-dependence of positivism and obscurantism: the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of quantum physics consists of a bricolage of positivist confinement to what is measurable/observable and of spiritualist obscurantism (‘there is no reality outside the observer’, ‘reality exists only in our mind’). Stephen Hawking undoubtedly had in mind such obscurantist talk on ‘consciousness which begets reality’, such associations of quantum physics with ESP phenomena, with curving a spoon at a distance, by means of the sole ‘power of mind’, and so on, when he risked the provocative paraphrase of Josef Goebbels: ‘When I hear of Schroedinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.’1
