A Scientist Responds to His Skeptical Crisis: Laplace’s Philosophy of Science

Abstract

There is a significant conjuncture that has not been sufficiently explored between the evolution of philosophy and of science in the late eighteenth century. The trajectory of philosophic thought was irrevocably altered by Hume’s skeptical crisis, Kant’s response, and the development of German Idealism. Contemporaneous with these changes was the emergence of scientific disciplines from natural philosophy, the ascendance of mathematics in the physical sciences, and the gradual establishment of the philosophy of positivism. Even though these co-temporal transformations were not independent, their degree of interaction has not been examined with any care.