Why Science Needs Philosophy

[pood]

I have seen a number of posts in various threads suggesting that philosophy is useless to science, or just useless period. And it’s true that many scientists say they have no use for philosophy. On Page One of one of his books, Steven Hawking famously declared “philosophy is dead,” and then went on to write a book — of philosophy. Apparently he didn’t get his own memo.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed science journal that publishes work across a wide range of disciplines, does not agree. I commend to your attention Why Science Needs Philosophy, which focuses on the major contributions of philosophy to biology, including stem-cell research, the discontinuity theory of immunity, cognitive science (especially the contributions of the philosopher Jerry Fodor), evolutionary altruism, debates over units of selection, and how to define genes, on which, perhaps surprisingly, there is still disagreement. It also alludes to the contribution of philosophy to physics on the definition of time, especially the work of Huw Price and David Lewis, both of whom I have read, and Lewis’s paper The Paradoxes of Time Travel is a classic contribution to analytic philosophy.

In the quote that opens this article, Einstein takes direct aim at the “shut up and calculate” school of science, likening them to “artisans” as distinct from “real seekers after truth.”

 

[bilby]

The scientific method is considered a reliable way to discern information about reality, and that is itself a philosophical position, as are all epistemologies.

 

[steve_bank]

As to science being a branch of natural philosophy.

Natural philosophy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe while ignoring any supernatural influence. It was dominant before the development of modern science.

From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common term for the study of physics (nature), a broad term that included botany, zoology, anthropology, and chemistry as well as what we now call physics. It was in the 19th century that the concept of science received its modern shape, with different subjects within science emerging, such as astronomy, biology, and physics. Institutions and communities devoted to science were founded.[1] Isaac Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century. Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) persisted into the 18th and 19th centuries as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit, after rejecting the scholastic tradition and replacing Aristotelian metaphysics, along with those of the dogmatic churchmen, with Kantian rationalism. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. Naturphilosophie was associated with Romanticism and a view that regarded the natural world as a kind of giant organism, as opposed to the philosophical approach of figures such as John Locke and others espousing a more mechanical philosophy of the world, regarding it as being like a machine.[citation needed]