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Philosophy and the Special Sciences

As the sciences divided, philosophers asked what was left to philosophy. The nineteenth-century answers, Comte’s new specialism of scientific generalities, Whewell’s “scientist” and Windelband’s principles, are on The nineteenth century.

The neo-Kantian schools of the later nineteenth century each wrote a philosophy of the sciences closest to them, physics at Marburg, history in the Southwest. They did not claim to direct the sciences. Rickert: philosophy “does not claim to direct science onto the paths it should take … it proposes only to follow science with a view to understanding it”; Cassirer: “critical philosophy … does not seek to direct the sciences but to understand them” (as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes them).

Russell stated what is left. “As soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work was called ‘the mathematical principles of natural philosophy’. Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology.” So “those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy”. He added: “This is, however, only a part of the truth” (The Problems of Philosophy, 1912, ch. XV). The psychology example can be followed in a journal’s name: The Journal of Philosophy was founded in 1904 as The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, and was incorporated under its present name in 1923. Wittgenstein: “Erkenntnistheorie ist die Philosophie der Psychologie”, the theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology (Tractatus 4.1121).

A general philosophy of science came first, with its own journals. In 1930 the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Society took over the Annalen der Philosophie and restarted it as Erkenntnis, with Carnap and Reichenbach as editors; the first issue of the American Philosophy of Science appeared in January 1934; the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science was founded in 1950. For the logical positivists physics was the model, and as late as 1969 Ernst Mayr complained that books with “philosophy of science” in the title should be re-titled “philosophy of physics”. Otto Neurath, who led the Unity of Science movement, wanted the sciences joined without a system over them: “An encyclopedia and not a system is the genuine model of science as a whole. An encyclopedic integration of scientific statements, with all the discrepancies and difficulties which appear, is the maximum of integration which we can achieve” (“Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration”, 1938).

Then the general field divided into the philosophies of particular sciences. David Hull’s Philosophy of Biological Science (1974) was the first sign of philosophy of biology becoming a mainstream part of philosophy of science, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, and by 1986 there were enough philosophers of biology to fill Michael Ruse’s new journal Biology and Philosophy. For F. A. Muller, “Philosophy of physics is a young branch of the tree of philosophy”, whose next generation, from the 1970s, were philosophers, some of them physicists turned philosophers. Peter Machamer traces the turn to the 1960s, when “as the result of the work of Thomas Kuhn – and concurrently Norwood Russell Hanson and Paul Feyerabend – the big philosophical question had become: Were there revolutions in science?”; afterwards philosophers of science “would have to work within science as actually practiced”, and “This emphasis on the details of science led various practitioners into doing the philosophy of the special sciences”. The genitive form itself is older than these fields: logic, physics and ethics as parts of philosophy go back to antiquity (see Philosophy in Greece and Rome).

Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle find the change in the older fields of the university, “philosophy, medicine, theology and law”: “These older fields were widely believed to hang together in a grand unity of knowledge — a unity directed toward the goal of the good life. But this unity shattered under the weight of increasing specialization by the turn of the 20th century”. Philip Kitcher proposed to “turn the contemporary conception inside out, attending to and developing further the valuable work being done on the supposed ‘periphery’ and attending to the ‘core areas’ only insofar as is necessary”.

Others set philosophy beside the sciences differently. Ortega y Gasset, lecturing in Madrid in 1929, defined philosophy as “conocimiento del Universo”, knowledge of the Universe, of “todo cuanto hay”, all there is, each thing seen as it stands “frente y junto a las demás”, facing and alongside the others (¿Qué es filosofía?; his account of philosophy’s retreat before physics is on The nineteenth century). Husserl, in the Crisis of European Sciences (Parts I–II, 1936), found the crisis not in the sciences’ results but in “what science in general had meant and can mean for human existence”: “Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people” (§2, in David Carr’s translation, as quoted). Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in What Is Philosophy? (1991), set philosophy, as the creation of concepts, beside science and art, “with no subordination among them”, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises them.