Let us start with the objections to the first thesis above, that the sciences need philosophy. Understanding this relationship is a first key step toward developing a synergetic relationship between the two fields. Reaching clarity about the fact that philosophy is useful for science is by itself an important and urgent task. Here I will concentrate on basic aspects of the relation between the two, and reduce the applications to education to a few final considerations. Hence my topic of the ‘love–hate relationship’. But on the other hand, philosophy is often regarded as useless, so that a philosophical outlook is irrelevant for science at best, and harmful at worst-as evinced by long pages of armchair philosophy that is blissfully uninformed by science. On the one hand, some great scientists have been great philosophers-not necessarily in the professional sense, but in the sense of deep thinking: science and philosophy often went together in the work of great figures such as Newton and Leibniz, so that it is sometimes hard-and perhaps unnecessary, and certainly anachronistic-to say where science ends and where philosophy begins. The relation between science and philosophy is an intricate and somewhat problematic subject, Footnote 1 as I will review in the next Section. This, at least, would seem to be a widely held view, and partly for good reasons. Experimental results, and not the scholastic distinctions of the philosophers, are the final judges in the court of Science. Natural scientists, not philosophers, have earned the trust of the public opinion in matters of truth, learning, and understanding. The scientific worldview has freed us from prejudice, ignorance, and the ironclad rule of authority. And science has given us machines, abundant energy, technology, and a healthy attitude of scepticism. For it has a method for declaring theories wrong: in other words, for falsifying its results. Science, not philosophy, is widely regarded as the more secure source of knowledge. Why should I be defending the use of philosophy? After all, the thesis that philosophy is useful for science is not likely to be agreed upon by all practicing scientists. Once this distinction is made, the harm of treating all of the sciences en bloc, on the model of physics, can be minimized. As I will argue, the most important distinction to be made is not between one natural science and another, but between fundamental and applied science. This being part of my professional bias, I claim that the arguments that apply to physics apply to biology, earth science, and other natural sciences as well. Most of my examples will be from physics. In doing so, I will have to define the sense in which I mean that science ‘needs’ philosophy and make a distinction between different ways in which different aspects or branches of science need philosophy. I will also address some possible consequences of these theses for the Liberal Arts and Sciences. In this paper I will argue that: (i) The natural sciences need philosophy and (ii) That scient ists need philosophy. I will conclude with some implications of this synergetic relationship between science and philosophy for the liberal arts and sciences. I will: (a) point to the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism (or: ‘in order to deny the need for philosophy, one must do philosophy’) and examine the role of paradigms and presuppositions (or: why science can’t live without philosophy) (b) point out why the historical argument fails (in an example from quantum mechanics, alive and kicking) (c) briefly sketch some domains of intersection of science and philosophy and how the two can have mutual synergy. These arguments will be countered with three contentions to the effect that the natural sciences need philosophy. I will review three lines of reasoning often employed in arguing that philosophy is useless for science: (a) philosophy’s death diagnosis (‘philosophy is dead’) (b) the historic-agnostic argument/challenge “show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don’t know of any” (c) the division of property argument (or: philosophy and science have different subject matters, therefore philosophy is useless for science). In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive perspectives that should be helpful in developing a synergetic relationship between the two.
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