Serpent » December 18th, 2016, 8:18 am wrote:vivian maxine » December 18th, 2016, 9:35 am wrote:I have been pondering this for a long while. I would love to hear some thoughts on it. What is the relationship between philosophy and science in these modern times? How do they connect? I can't put a finger on anything. Can someone help? Thank you.
Once, they were a single entity. Then Science split off, taking all the quantitative thinkers off in hot pursuit of ergs, germs, and quarks, thence to develop technology. The more introspective and fanciful of the bright boys became known as Philosophers and took on the long, slow, thankless task of perfecting mankind.
Where they diverged and should not have is in the field of ethics.
Lately, they have met - colluded and collided - in some unlikely arenas: cosmology, neuro-science, ethnology and memetics.
But the only business they really need to tackle as a team is the ethics of applied technology.
This oversimplifies things, which may not be a fair criticism because your first paragraph was obviously glib, but the implication still remains that scientists are doing something real and philosophers are wholly concerned with things other than science. Which brings me to what I'd like to argue for in this thread:
Science is philosophy. A scientist is a kind of philosopher. Why might I say that?
A) Science depends on philosophy for it's epistemological grounds. A scientist would not even know what to ask and how they might answer their questions without the philosophical underpinning of science.
B) Philosophy was, from the start, a holistic venture into everything conceivably academic. The word was synonymous with the whole academic culture, and remained so for quite some time until things became more stratified recently. As has been noted already here, various scientific pursuits were originally identified as 'natural philosophy' and this was happening up until almost the 20th century.
C) Science needs philosophical discussion. It has always blossomed historically in an atmosphere where philosophy of science discussions are keen, pervasive, and substantive. While the modern primary epistemological paradigms of science were beginning to settle in the late 19th, work was done that had much to do with the thought of individuals like Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Dirac, and Bell. The same can be said of many other influential periods in science, e.g. the move away from Ptolemaic astronomy.
D) Science may have a distinct universe of discourse, but it still has a dependent universe of discourse. Modern academia has a regrettable trend towards stratifying and stagnating, instead of demarcating, universes of discourse. Everyone is saying "well I don't do what they do", oftentimes not producing much of a substantive answer as to what they think the other really does, and fields naturally suffer from less of a stress by the whole towards holism.
That is what philosophy used to do. The same Aristotle that wrote Posterior Analytics and Nichomachean Ethics wrote Metaphysics and Zoology. Bacon didn't content himself with the Novum Organum, he also gave us Historia Naturalis and Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secunda, The New Atlantis and The Wisdom of the Ancients. Shouldn't everyone at least assume holism, and think something is wrong with either their universe of discourse or that of another if the two are irreconcilable?