Between Philosophy and Science ebook

The relationship between philosophy and science is intricately complex and notoriously difficult to describe. This is why the zone of interaction between them is so fascinating, both for philosophers interested in science and scientists with philosophically open minds. This “in between zone” can by no means be reduced to a narrow band separating these two fields; it rather infiltrates deeply the strata of scientific research and invades many areas of philosophical analysis. It is not only that science – as a certain phenomenon – may be an object of study for philosophers. By following some especially vital strands of thought, leading through the most fundamental scientific theories or models, one reaches domains on which one cannot avoid asking the kind of questions which are traditionally reserved for philosophy, questions such as those pertaining to existence, truth or rationality. However, less ambitious but equally important problems inhabit the “interface zone”, for instance in problems related to space, time, causality and various epistemological questions. This zone is far from static; it is full of motion and truly dynamic. It is very instructive to investigate the migration of concepts between scientific and philosophical discourses and to see how these concepts change their meaning depending on their actual environment.

The volume we now offer to the Reader can be regarded as an excursion, or rather an exploratory expedition, into this “in between zone” and this constitutes a brief presentation of your companions in this risky enterprise.

The volume opens with a paper by Robert Audi, Naturalism as a Philosophical and Scientific Framework: A Critical Perspective, which tackles the problem of naturalism. After introducing some of the classical doctrines of naturalism, the author undertakes a critical analysis of scientific (methodological) naturalism, and attempts to substantiate the thesis that it does not necessarily exclude ontological pluralism. He argues further that the so-called scientific worldview does not require the assumption of the causal closure of the universe. Roman Murawski’s On Proof in Mathematics isdevoted to the elucidation of the concept of proof. The author claims that one should distinguish between two different ways of understanding ‘proof’ in mathematics: the ‘informal’ one, used in the every-day practice of mathematicians, and the ‘formal’ one, developed by logicians and those working on the foundations of mathematics. The following chapter, Logical Form and Ontological Commitments by Krzysztof Wójtowicz, poses the question of what is the relation between ontology and ‘ideology’ vis a vis the problem of the ontological commitments of scientific theories. The problem is discussed against the background of various interpretations of quantifiers: it turns out that one’s chosen understanding of quantifiers influences one’s ontological commitments. Bartosz Brożek, in Neuroscience and Mathematics. From Inborn Skills to Cantor’s Paradise,provides an overview of the results obtained in the neuroscience and psychology of mathematics, and attempts to reconstruct the phylogenetic and ontogenetic history of mathematical cognition. He claims that mathematics is an ‘embrained’, embodied and embedded phenomenon. Against this background, he analyzes two classical problems connected to mathematics – mathematical Platonism and the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.

Michael Heller’s chapter, The Ontology of the Planck Scale, is devoted to the question of how the physical theories which aim at describing phenomena at the Planck scale may be used in ontological speculation. The author’s claim is that since the Planck scale is currently the most fundamental level known to science, it should also teach us something about the fundamental ontological problems. In particular, at the Planck scale such notions as object, time, causality or change seem to be essentially different than the corresponding concepts in the classical ontologies of Aristotle, Kant or Whitehead. Wojciech Grygiel, in Spacetime in the Perspective of the Theory of Quantum Gravity: Should It Stay or Should It Go?, argues – against the background of an analysis of such research programs as the loop quantum gravity, superstring theory, twistor theory, topos theory or noncommutative geometry – that the categories of space and time, as we understand them, may play no role at the Planck scale, and hence it is most likely that those intuitive categories will disappear from the explanations of the fundamental phenomena. Helge Kragh, in The Criteria of Science, Cosmology, and the Lessons of History, considers what are the criteria which enable the distinction between science and pseudo-science. His analysis is carried out against the background of two examples: the steady state cosmology and the anthropic multiverse conceptions. He underscores the role of philosophical assumptions in the construction of both theories. The chapter culminates in the presentation of several examples of the uses and abuses of the history of science in arguing for or against particular scientific theories. The following chapter, Bogdan Dembiński’s Structuralism in Platonic Philosophy of Science,aims at substantiating the thesis that, in the eyes of a philosopher of science, Plato may be seen as a structuralist. The author begins by identifying the key aspect of Plato’s thinking, i.e. his account of the relationship between One and Many, as depicted in the dialogue Parmenides. Dembiński claims that for Plato each and every relationship between One and Many constitutes a whole, which in the contemporary terms may be called a structure. He then concludes with the description of the major features of Plato’s structuralism.

The goal of Wojciech Załuski’s chapter, On the Relevance of Evolutionary Anthropology for Practical Philosophy, is to assess the importance of evolutionary anthropology in the context of practical philosophy. The author argues that evolutionary anthropology – understood as a view of human nature implied by the findings of evolutionary psychology – is more suited to constitute an important aspect of legal philosophy rather than of moral philosophy. The main argument backing this claim is that the primary object of moral evaluation are motives, while legal evaluation pertains to actions. Łukasz Kurek in Emotions from a Neurophilosophical Perspective addresses the question of whether emotions constitute a coherent category, both from philosophical and scientific perspectives. He begins by identifying various levels of the explanation of the concepts used in folk psychology (such as emotions), and indicates that the concept of emotion is both of philosophical and neuroscientific interest. Philosophy and science provide us with two popular theories of emotions, the cognitive and the noncognitive. The author claims that they both account for some phenomena usually categorized as emotions, which leads to the conclusion that emotions do not constitute a natural kind. Teresa Obolevitch, in her chapter The Issue of Knowledge and Faith in the Russian Academic Milieu from the 19th to the 21st Century, analyses the relationship between science and religion in the Russian ecclesiastical tradition. She underscores the peculiarities of the Russian academic philosophy, and describes the development of ‘natural apologetic’ in the 19th century, as well as the 20th century conceptions of the relationship between faith and reason.

The papers collected in this volume have been written within the research project The Limits of Scientific Explanation, carried out at the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Kraków and sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. It is our hope that these contributions – even if they take on different problems and make recourse to different philosophical methods – together constitute a coherent illustration of how complex and intriguing the relationship between philosophy and science may be.

Michael Heller

Bartosz Brożek

Łukasz Kurek

[1] The publication of this paper was made possible through the support of a grant “The Limits of Scientific Explanation” from the John Templeton Foundation.

[2]Epistemology Naturalized appeared in Quine’s collection, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press, New York 1969). For discussion of this and other versions of naturalism in philosophy, see Philosophical Naturalism, “Midwest Studies in Philosophy” 1994, vol. XIX, where we find Autonomy Naturalized by Marina A. L. Oshana, among other defenses of one or another naturalization project. The papers by Laurence BonJour, Richard Foley, Richard Fumerton, Richard Grandy, and Peter Hylton all have special relevance to appraising Quine’s naturalism. See also David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism,Blackwell, Oxford 1993. Recent treatments are found in M. De Caro, D. Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question,Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2004; S. Goetz, C. Taliaferro, Naturalism,William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 2008; and D. Bradden-Mitchell, R. Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism,MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2009.

[3] Spinoza is more difficult to locate in relation to naturalism than Descartes and Leibniz and might be argued to have, or at any rate make room for, a substantial naturalistic element.

[4] One should, however, note Comte and other French figures important in the history of positivism.

[5] Quoted by Hilary Kornblith in Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological, „Midwest Studies in Philosophy”, vol. XIX, no. 4, p. 50. Sellars was of course overlooking G. E. Moore and other non-naturalists in early analytic philosophy. Cf. Barry Stroud’s comment, “‘Naturalism’ seems to me . . . rather like ‘World Peace’. Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out. . . And, like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it involves . . . it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive ‘naturalism’.” See The Charm of Naturalism, [in:] M. De Caro, D. Macarthur, op.cit., p. 22.

[6] W. Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, [in:] idem, Science, Perception and Reality, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1963, p. 173 (originally published in “Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science” 1956, vol. 1).

[7] J.J.C. Smart, Sensations and Brian Processes, “Philosophical Review”, 1959, vol. LXVIII. The “frankly” here suggests a high level of conviction and also that he realized he was not able to provide a conclusive case for the mental-physical identify thesis.

[8] For a detailed examination of Moore’s metaphysics of value see P. Butchvarov, Skepticism in Ethics