With the release of his first book directly taking on philosophy, On the Equality of All Things, physicist Carlo Rovelli takes aim at analytic philosophy's return to realism. He argues that much of the philosophy of the twentieth century either hasn’t taken up the new sciences of Einstein and Bohr, or is too trapped focusing on how mind, spirit, or consciousness is special. In this interview with the IAI's Ozbir Kip, Rovelli argues that electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgments and galaxies, are not fundamentally different in nature from one another. He goes onto argue, neither science nor philosophy, will ever be able to get at ultimate reality.

Kip: You're a theoretical physicist who is also a philosopher, which is a rare attribute to see in a lot of physicists. What first got you into philosophy?

Rovelli: I have been interested in philosophy since I was young. Maybe today it is not too common to see scientists interested in philosophy, but certainly it was not so in the past. Think about the greatest, like Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, or Newton, or - to get out of physics - Darwin: they were all deeply interested in philosophy. There have always been some scientists totally uninterested in philosophy, or even coming out with strongly disparaging comments on philosophy, like Stephen Hawking, who said philosophy is dead because now we have science. But I think that’s plain nonsense.

The reason so many scientists are interested in philosophy is that there is an actual dialogue between science and philosophy which is a constitutive part of both science and philosophy. From the science side, philosophy becomes relevant when the rules of the game and the conceptual scheme in which you’re working are not clear. Science is also finding new ways for thinking about reality on the basis of the information we have, new data, measurements, new ideas, whatever—and that’s also philosophical work. So the scientists that say philosophy has nothing to do with their science—actually they are just in a certain philosophical position. They’ve learned a certain philosophy, and they’re stuck there. Kant is almost the prototypical philosopher, right? What was Kant doing? To a large extent, Kant was trying to make sense of Newton. There is this fabulous thing that is Newtonian mechanics—it seems to be explaining the world. How can it make sense? What is the space that Newton is talking about? I work in this interface as a scientist. Quantum gravity, which is my own science, is particularly close to philosophical questions.

An important question in the philosophy of science is the question of realism versus anti-realism. So you have people like Bas van Fraassen claiming that things like electrons aren't real, whereas you have people like Stathis Psillos who think they are, and you have structural realists somewhere in the middle. How would you characterise your philosophical position on this debate?

I think it’s a badly posed question whether an electron is real or not, because it takes for granted a clear understanding of what is to be real, which is not an a priori given. It’s part of the discussion itself. Some of the arguments of the anti-realists are very good, and I see that some of the arguments of the realists are very good, and when I read them carefully, I ask: where are they actually disagreeing? They disagree about a question that, in my opinion, has no meaning; it is only terminology