The limits of rationality according to a contemporary physicist: the case of Arthur S. Eddington (1882-1944)

Florian LAGUENS, Associate professor, IPC, France

Arthur S. Eddington was probably the most influential astronomer of the interwar period. At Cambridge, where he worked as a teacher and director of the Observatory between 1914 and 1944, he was closely involved in the relativistic upheaval and made significant progress in astrophysics. At the same time, he invested in the epistemological field by publishing several philosophical works. This paper intends to show why and how Eddington insisted on the symbolic character of physics and on the limits of scientific rationality, while affirming in counterpoint the importance of a form of non-instrumentalized experience of the world that he called "mystical"