Science and Philosophy

As can be seen in an earlier posting on my blog (tonyfahey.com), and in my paper, ‘Philosophy, Science, Consciousness’ in the Pathways E-Journal, Issue 152, my position on this issue, particularly in relation to neuroscience and philosophy has been well nailed to the mast. However, to deal with the issue of the relationship between science and philosophy on a broader level, we should look much further back in time. As far back that is to the Milesians and to a time when Thales chose to challenge tradition and look for answers to the ‘Big Questions’ in the natural world, philosophy and science have been inextricably intertwined.

As A Spirkin says in his paper ‘Philosophy and Science’, science and philosophy have always learned from each other. Philosophy tirelessly draws from scientific discoveries fresh strength, material for broad generalisations, while to the sciences it imparts the world-view and methodological impulses of its universal principles. Many general guiding ideas that lie at the foundation of modern science were first enunciated by the perceptive force of philosophical thought. (see Marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin).

Following Thales, the first person to posit the view that the earth was not flat was the philosopher Anaximander who, circa 560 B.C., held that the earth was cylindrical, and as early as 435 B.C. Anaxagoras proposed that the sun was not a ‘small glowing circle of light’, but a ‘glowing rock larger than Pelopennesus’. The fact that his calculation may have been somewhat inaccurate should not detract from the fact that his ‘scientific’ theory dared to challenge the wisdom of his time. Mind you, for daring to suggest such a thing, he was exiled from Athens.

In an earlier version of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Coperniicus drew on the Greek thinker Aristarchus’s thesis that the motions of the Earth could be understood if it was assumed that the planets revolved around the Sun, and the stars were infinitely further away because they seemed to be motionless. Not wishing to compromise his originality, Copernicus later withdrew his debt to Aristarchus.

23 centuries before the Scottish geologist, James Hutton, proposed that mountains on which seashells were found were once covered by the sea, the same theory had been advanced by the Greek philosopher Xenophanes, and ridiculed as lunacy.

Aristotle’s credentials as a scientist are so well documented that I feel there is no need to list them here.

Borrowing again from Sprikin, we are reminded that the idea of the atomic structure of things voiced by Democritus. Certain conjectures about natural selection were made in ancient times by the philosopher Lucretius and later by the French thinker Diderot. Hypothetically he anticipated what would become a scientific fact two centuries later. We may also recall the Cartesian reflex and the philosopher's proposition on the conservation of motion in the universe.

On the general philosophical plane Spinoza gave grounds for the universal principle of determinism. The idea of the existence of molecules as complex particles consisting of atoms was developed in the works of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi and also Russia's Mikhail Lomonosov. Philosophy nurtured the hypothesis of the cellular structure of animal and vegetable organisms and formulated the idea of the development and universal connection of phenomena and the principle of the material unity of the world. Lenin formulated one of the fundamental ideas of contemporary natural science—the principle of the inexhaustibility of matter—upon which scientists rely as a firm methodological foundation. (see ibid)

So overwhelming is the evidence that these two disciplines are, and have been, inextricably interlinked over the centuries that I feel any further evidence would be superfluous. As long as philosophers remain faithful to that which attracted them to philosophy in the first instance – a love of wisdom, and a search for truth – science will always have a part to play in the philosophers desire to test and extend the boundaries of their understanding.