Philosophy and the Sciences

Abstract

The great tradition in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant, was that philosophy legislated the methodology and foundations of science. It can be claimed that, in spite of the many centuries separating Aristotle and Kant, it is still true that the three most important foundational works on science were Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, with many points amplified in the Physics and the Metaphysics, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and at the other end of the period the very specific working out of the foundations of physics in Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, with the more general lines of argument being given in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is not difficult to trace the enormous impact of Kant on physics in the nineteenth century, especially German physics, and also psychology, even though Kant was skeptical of providing the kind of foundations for psychology he gave for physics.