Niels Bohr's Complementarity : Its Structure, History, and Intersections with Hermeneutics and Deconstruction

This book explores the modern physicist Niels Bohr's philosophical thought, specifically his pivotal idea of complementarity, with a focus on the relation between the roles of what he metaphorically calls "e;spectators"e; and "e;actors."e; It seeks to spell out the structural and historical complexity of the idea of complementarity in terms of different modes of the 'spectator-actor' relation, showing, in particular, that the reorganization of Bohr's thought starting from his 1935 debate with Einstein and his collaborators is characterized by an extension of the dynamic conception of complementarity from non-physical contexts to the very field of quantum theory. Further, linked with this analysis, the book situates Bohr's complementarity in contemporary philosophical context by examining its intersections with post-Heideggerian hermeneutics as well as Derridean deconstruction. Specifically, it points to both the close affinities and the differences between Bohr's idea of the 'actor-spectator' relation and the hermeneutic notion of the relation between "e;belonging"e; and "e;distanciation."e;