Introduction to the Philosophy of Physical Science

Abstract

All attempts to write on the philosophy of science threaten to be wrecked on one or another now prominent hazards. A philosophy of science may meet its doom either on the arid desert of a recapitulation of the development of science or in the ethereal swift flood waters of the efforts to harmonize religion and science. Yet both of these threats to a philosophy of science contain certain passages that must be kept clear if any philosophy of science is to be achieved at all. The history of science, from the philosopher’s point of view, is important not because it gives credit where credit is due, which is the historian’s task, but because it offers examples and paradigms of what science is like and what it is about. Compare the great and valuable histories of science by Thorndike and Sarton, carefully documented and exact in all details, with that of the equally valuable one by Dampier and the insights of Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas. A philosophy of science can easily get lost in the chronology of science while all it needs is the history of the development of science. The basis of both the conflicts between and the attempts to harmonize religion and science lies in the fact that the two are world-views and no matter how one glosses over their divergences they do differ.

Unless otherwise indicated, when I speak of science I mean physical science.