PATHFINDING THE “FIELD OF TRUTH”: GEDANKENEXPERIMENT, MACH'S PRINCIPLE AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD OF VARIATIONS

The article contributes to the development of an a priori methodology adequate to the legitimate claims of fundamental physics as a mathematical philosophy of nature. Husserl’s phenomenological method of variations - the most important part of this methodology - is seen as a means of bringing to clarity and achieving apodictic evidence, highly relevant in the current conditions of erosion of the empirical criterion of truth, when the invention of hypotheses for the needs of deductive theorization has become the norm of so-called fundamental research. As an example for express testing of the method, a problematic principle is taken that needs to be clarified: the “Mach principle” formulated in many ways since the time of A. Einstein. The result of a clarifying reflection of one of the transitions between versions of the principle is the conclusion that the conceptual development of the general theory of relativity on methodologically clarified grounds, one of which would be a correctly formulated Mach principle, should proceed from a relational understanding of space-time consistent with this principle. Mach’s principle, since it determines the structure of the equations of the theory themselves, the solutions of which are conceived in the modus of the possible, is in no way affected in its truth value by the fact of the existence of vacuum solutions of these equations. In conclusion, the article examines the question of the influence of the Mach theory of thought experiment on the genesis of the phenomenological method of variations.