Stöltzner coined the expression ‘Vienna indeterminism’ to describe a philosophical tradition centered on the Viennese physicist Exner, serving as the ‘historical link’ between Mach and Boltzmann, on the one hand, and von Mises and Frank, on the other. During the early 1930s debate on quantum mechanics, there was a ‘rapprochement’ between Vienna indeterminism and Schlick’s work on causality. However, it was Cassirer’s 1936 monograph Determinismus und Indeterminismus that showed a full ‘convergence’ with major tenets of Vienna indeterminism: the fundamentality of statistical laws, the frequency interpretation of probability, and the statistical interpretation of the uncertainty relations. Yet, Cassirer used these conceptual tools to pursue ‘in parallel’ different philosophical goals. While for the Viennese quantum mechanics represented a fatal blow to the already discredited notion of ‘causality,’ for Cassirer it challenged the classical notion of ‘substantiality,’ the ideas of ‘particles’ as individual substances endowed with properties. The paper concludes that this ‘parallel convergence’ is the most striking and overlooked aspect of Determinismus und Indeterminismus, serving as the keystone of its argumentative structure.

Stöltzner 创造了“维也纳不确定性”一词来描述以维也纳物理学家 Exner 为中心的哲学传统，它是马赫和玻尔兹曼与冯·米塞斯和弗兰克之间的“历史纽带”。在 1930 年代初期关于量子力学的辩论中，维也纳不确定性和 Schlick 关于因果关系的工作之间存在“和解”。然而，卡西尔 1936 年的专著《决定论与不确定性》表明了与维也纳不确定性的主要原则的完全“趋同”：统计定律的基本性、概率的频率解释和不确定性关系的统计解释。然而，卡西尔使用这些概念工具来追求“平行”不同的哲学目标。虽然对维也纳量子力学来说代表着对已经名誉扫地的“因果关系”概念的致命打击，但对卡西尔来说，它挑战了经典的“实质性”概念，即“粒子”作为被赋予属性的个体物质的概念。本文得出结论，这种“平行收敛”是决定论与不确定性最引人注目和被忽视的方面，是其论证结构的基石。