The Crisis of Anschaulichkeit and Cassirer’s Interpretation of Schrödinger’s Wave Mechanics

In this paper we discuss Cassirer’s interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave mechanics within the broader context of his account of the “crisis of intuition”. According to Cassirer, quantum mechanics chal-lenged the extent to which the conceptual apparatus of physics could still be grounded in, or made ad-equate to, the Kantian forms of human intuition. After having introduced his account of the structure of physical theories – based on the distinction between statements of measurement, statements of laws and statements of principles and causal statements – we explain why he regarded Schrödinger’s wave mechanics as an attempt to eliminate certain ad hoc assumptions of the theory and to derive the quantum rules from the formal structure of quantum mechanics.