Results and Conclusions

This chapter presents the results and conclusions of the research in three parts. The first part contains the hermeneutical results. It shows that the Neo-Kantian, logical-empiricist, and scientific-realist interpretations of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics, considered with respect to the transversal principles of causality and stationary action, satisfy the criteria by which Mauricio Beuchot identifies hermeneutical interpretations. It then classifies them: Neo-Kantianism as predominantly univocal, logical empiricism as predominantly equivocal, and scientific realism as univocal in its ontology, although it belongs to the realist family. Classical realism, reached through the BBMT bridge of Chapter 7, appears as the only analogical interpretation, because only it grounds its ontology in the third degree of formal abstraction. The second part derives a secondary thesis concerning the existential states that tend to accompany each hermeneutical mode: anguish in the case of univocity, hopelessness in the case of equivocity, and hope in the case of analogy. It is presented as a philosophical interpretation in dialogue with psychological research, not as an empirical finding. The third part draws three corollaries: a cosmological corollary, which reinterprets the problem of time in the Wheeler–DeWitt equation through the act–potency structure; a physical corollary, which examines the “absolute” that physics can reach within its own formal object; and an ontological corollary, which shows that the first three ways of Thomas Aquinas are valid within the analogical hermeneutic.