Philosophy and Contemporary Science :: Philosophical Essays

Philosophy and Contemporary ScienceABSTRACT This paper is concerned with some of the differences between doctrine and modern science, and with the significance of these differences for the question of the nature of school of thought. Differences of particular post here are ones that tend to be concealed and ignored through the influence of the professionalist attitudes of contemporary science, an influence that manifests itself in the prevailing normative attitude to the vocabularies and linguistic practices of professional philosophy. It is argued that this normative attitude is questionable in the light of a feature that we chance upon to be essential to philosophy always being open to the question of its own nature and task. A traditional, and still common, view of the difference between philosophy and the special sciences is based upon the dichotomies universal/particular or general/special. It is state that philosophy deals with the general issues concerning some subject m atter while the special sciences take divvy up of the more specific issues. Chemistry concerns itself with properties of various chemical compounds and physics with forces and the motion of bodies, while philosophy deals with the general nature of matter, general questions of causality, determinism, etc. Linguistics deals with special, a posteriori questions about the nature of language, while philosophy is supposed to discover the general principles that govern all language.The ontological question about what there is in the world, is, in Quines words, a shared concern of philosophy and most other non-fiction genres. (1) It is the use of more general or broader categories, such as, for instance, physical objects or classes, that distinguishes the ontological philosophers interest in what there is from the scientists. This synoptic view of philosophy, as Moritz Schlick called it, usually also involves the view of philosophy as a science. (2) As physics studies the specific structu re of matter, so philosophy studies its general nature. Quine dictates, for instance, that Philosophy ... as an effort to get clearer on things, is not to be distinguished in essential points of purpose and method from good or bad science. (3) Like the special sciences, philosophy is also a science, only one of a more general character. But Quines philosophy represents only one, naturalistic, meter reading of this synoptic view of the nature of philosophy. There are others, both within and outside the analytic tradition. And there is a great deal to be said about the difference between these philosophies, for instance, that the ones in the Kantian tradition are more oriented towards discovering the general conditions of human knowledge and experience, and have less to say about the general nature of reality.