Monday, September 20, 2010
Philosophy to Empirical Science
This will be really quick. I wanted to say that we as a society owe a huge debt to philosophy. Today I think that we really focus on scientist making the major break through and we really have laid aside philosophy. I am not trying to argue whether that is bad or good, I just want to say that most of the scientific fields today have their roots in discoveries of ancient philosophers. They made huge break through in medicine, politics, physics, and more areas than I have the time to enumerate on. Francis Bacon himself was a philosopher. Rene Descartes, who played a huge role in the transition to modern science, was a philosopher.
One of the greatest scientists that ever lived, Isaac Newton, sums up my thoughts very well when he said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." That is what philosophy has done for us now. Modern science was built on the giants of philosophy.
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3 comments:
Really interesting viewpoint. It is true that science was built upon philosophy. Without philosophy, we would not be where we are today. And, without philosophy, science would be a bunch of data that we would not know what to do with. Philosophy gives us reason in life to make sense of, and use, science.
I never really thought of philosophy in any other way than annoying. But it is really interesting to think about how much modern science is based upon philosophy.
I feel like philosophy gave people the "poetic license" to think freely about new ideas and thus challenge many of philosophical and scientific status quos. I think this ultimately paved the way for many scientific discoveries.
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