Using History of Philosophy in Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Philosophy, Science, and History is an anthology, consisting mostly of excerpts from important texts in philosophy of science. Some of these texts were written in the tradition of philosophy of science as a discipline. However, most of them come from older times when there was not much of a separation between science and philosophy and reflecting about science was a way of doing science—the tradition known as natural philosophy. The book contains a total of 29 chapters, the first of which is a general introduction, and the remaining 28 are grouped in two parts, each with a brief summary presenting the themes discussed. The first part, ‘‘Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science’’, aims at presenting classical twentieth-century approaches to philosophy of science. It contains an introduction by the editor and texts by George Santayana, Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Martin Rudwick, and Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. It focuses on philosophical reflections about science in the debate between the logical and methodological, and the historical and sociological approaches. The second part draws attention to earlier periods of philosophy and history of science; it is divided into three sections (A, B, and C), each devoted to a different debate, and each containing an introduction by the editor. Section A is entitled ‘‘Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery’’, bringing texts by John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Norwood Russell Hanson; its theme is the relation between scientific hypotheses and inductive reasoning, in such a way that Hanson’s text appears as the peak of the tradition of investigation on the processes that lead to the formulation of scientific theories. Section B discusses ‘‘Force in Natural Philosophy’’, presenting texts by Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Emilie du Châtelet, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Those texts raise numerous discussions, but the Editor’s Introduction to this section directs the reader through the matters of force and causality in classical physics. And in section C one finds some important features of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism in geology and its