SCIENCE vs. PHILOSOPHY

 

There is an increasingly widespread view that philosophy — that ancient pursuit of meaning, truth and understanding that has been with us for several thousand years at least — is dead in the modern world. Science, so goes the argument, has answered all the questions that philosophers once pondered: From a scientific perspective, there is no grand design, no cosmic plan that bestows meaning upon our lives. As scientists delve deeper into the mysteries of the cosmos, their discoveries reveal a universe that is vast, ancient, and seemingly indifferent to our presence.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of this position. Science has been extravagantly successful in explaining the natural world, and its discoveries have led directly to stunning technological achievements, from heart transplants to the moon landing. Philosophy, on the other hand, hasn’t achieved anything that could be considered a clear breakthrough in human understanding. 

Not so very long ago, science was once part of philosophy. Newton titled his revolutionary work "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica". It was only slowly - over the following three centuries - that the two drifted apart, eventually resolving themselves into distinct disciplines, with different concerns and methodologies.

Science grew in confidence and sophistication, while philosophy increasingly found itself reacting to scientific progress, rather than making independent headway. The separation was institutionalized in the nineteenth century, when universities created distinct departments. This ultimately grew unbridgeable in the twentieth century, as science became too technical for philosophers to participate in directly.

If philosophy once had pretensions to be the source of revelations about the workings of the natural world and the nature of reality, then that territory has long since been taken over. According to Stephen Hawking, philosophy is dead. Others are more generous and claim only that philosophy will be dead in the near future, or only partly dead.

Einstein, a formidable opponent to Hawking's viewpoint, stands as perhaps the most transformative scientific mind of the modern era. However, his contributions to the philosophical study of knowledge remain under-appreciated, outside specialist circles. He considered philosophical insight essential to genuine scientific progress, and credited his own philosophical explorations with inspiring his theories that revolutionized physics.

Both philosophy and science begin with wonder or, more precisely, they begin when we wonder about something. It is – like every intellectual discipline – a way of asking questions about the nature of things. In this way, philosophy is born of the very basic human disposition toward asking questions. [Isidore Isaac Rabi,  winner of a Nobel Prize for physics, when asked why he became a scientist, replied: “My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ But my mother used to say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’ That made the difference. Asking good questions made me into a scientist.”]

However, only philosophy asks new kinds of questions.  To name a few examples: the importance of values and individual freedom, where morality comes from, whether there is a God, whether there is a self, what constitutes our identity, and what beauty is.

What makes these questions important is not only that they help societies to function, but that they reflect something deeply fundamental about human beings: that we are physical creatures, but our consciousness is not restricted to physical matters. Today, determining whether life has meaning - is as relevant a question as ever.