Niels Bohr's Complementarity

This book explores the modern physicist Niels Bohrs philosophical thought, specifically his pivotal idea of complementarity, with a focus on the relation between the roles of what he metaphorically calls spectators and actors. 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 Bohrs 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 Bohrs 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 Bohrs idea of the actor-spectator relation and the hermeneutic notion of the relation between belonging and distanciation.