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XLII.—The Nature of Scientific Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2012

Extract

The title I have chosen for this lecture contains an implication which perhaps will not be generally accepted; there was a time when I would not have accepted it myself. The implication is that a particular kind of philosophy is possible which may be called scientific in contrast with other kinds which cannot be so called. I would go further and identify this scientific philosophy with what is generally called science, and this implies that the distinction that is often assumed to exist between science and philosophy is a false one. For this view I believe there is historical evidence. Science, as a separate, self-contained study, dates from the seventeenth century. Before that time, such consideration as was given to the subject-matter of present-day science was given it by philosophers and regarded as a part of their philosophising, and when in the seventeenth century a new kind of procedure was introduced, it was looked upon by its pioneers not as an attack on a new problem but as a new attack on an old problem. The science of that time was the “new philosophy”, faintly adumbrated by some mediæval philosophers, struggling for expression in Francis Bacon, and coming to full recognition in Galileo. Only later, when it had made such progress in certain limited fields of study that a new body of investigators was called into being who confined themselves to those fields, was the new philosophy transformed into a non-philosophy and called generally by the name “science”.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1949

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References

page 401 note * Synthetic Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Herbert Spencer Lecture for 1945), Blackwell, Basil, Oxford.Google Scholar

page 405 note * Proc. Aristot. Soc., XLVIII, 1948, 153Google Scholar; Phil. Mag., XXXV, 1944, 499Google Scholar.