The day has arrived I have dreaded… with my arrival at “modern” philosophy and
Descartes, I must now tackle that most problematic of issues… Science…
What is Science? What is its relationship with philosophy?
how is Science different and how is science similar to philosophy?
what is an scientific issue and what is an philosophical issue?
There are many who believe that science has driven philosophy for the
last 500 years and so without any knowledge of science, the study of philosophy
becomes impossible…
I am not as concerned with such specific issues as evolution or how does gravity work,
as much as how does science itself interact and change philosophy and how much does
philosophy itself interact and change science…
at one time, what we call science was called natural philosophy and was considered
a part of philosophy… science wasn’t a separate field of study as it is today,
to study science was to study philosophy and to study philosophy was to study
science…they were one and the same…
the question of science was/is a study in method… the scientific method…
what is that and how do we use the scientific method to discover the world around
us… how does the scientific method create knowledge of our world…
many, many philosophers have tried to make philosophy into science…
Spinoza and Hegel and Marx for example have tried to turn philosophy
into a science…their failure is quite evident but is their failure because
you can’t turn philosophy into science or is their failure because of the
method/technique used by them caused their failure? if they had a better
method, would they have succeeded in turning philosophy into science?
I don’t know that…
Science can tell us how breathing works or how the solar system
works, but can philosophy give us the why? science cannot give
us any why’s…it can only tell us how something works for example,
the solar system stays in place because of gravity and science lays
out some scientific “laws” that tell us how the solar system stays in place…
but science cannot tell us “WHY”… why does the solar system stay in place…
does that fact tell us anything about the meaning or purpose of the universe?
Religion would say that “god” put the solar system in place and that is in part,
part of our existence… science says, ahhhh no, god didn’t put the solar system in
place… philosophy exists somewhere between science and religion…
religion can give us a why the solar system exists and science cannot tell
us why, but philosophy can/maybe tell us why… philosophy can give us a
why…
I have studied evolution and I have studied physics but that doesn’t mean I have
studied science…so how does the small study of individual branches of science
give us information about the entire tree of science… and how does that relate
to philosophy and the why? the why of existence is really philosophy’s reason for
existence… we want to know the “why” we have existence and what is existence for, without
recourse to religion or god…the problem is really that religion and science and philosophy,
all have many, many different moving parts and keeping those separate parts in mind
is quite difficult…finding relationships between all those moving parts can drive
a person crazy…but it is not impossible, just very difficult…
is there a method I can use to finding those relationships between science and religion
and philosophy? a method like one used for science? but many believe that
science doesn’t actually have a method, like Popper and Feyerabend, for
example… if science doesn’t actually have a method, then trying to create
a method for philosophy sounds impossible…science is concerned with
measurements… how big, how fast, how small, how heavy, how slow, how, how, how…
there are no measurements for philosophy… you cannot measure why…
just as you cannot measure god…so how do we create method when you don’t
have measurements?
all very difficult questions… but that is the point… there is no point on
attacking very easy questions… it is only in attacking big, indeed impossible
questions that has value…and we approach one aspect in this question of
science and philosophy and religion in the question of “value vs facts”…
science deals with facts and philosophy and religion deals with values…
that is just one question we face during this pursuit…
so what aspect of these questions draws your interest and why?
Kropotkin