About Science and Philosophy
Hello everyone, Walter Veit here; scientist, philosopher, and the editor of Science and Philosophy — a publication about the world we live in — our planet, our society, our culture, and our environment. Science and Philosophy are not adversaries, but friends sitting in one boat. Both have the goal to make sense of the world, so it is most sensible to locate them at two ends of a continuum of abstractness. Whereas science often directly engages with the world, philosophy is often a detached armchair endeavour.
The perhaps best definition of philosophy has been offered by the philosopher Wilfried Sellars:
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”
Philosophy and theoretical science are thus in a close allyship — with philosophy being just a more theoretical — a highly theoretical science so to speak. Science, on the other hand, can be understood as natural philosophy, that is the empirical investigation of the natural world.
I can here only join Laplane et al. call to:
“see philosophy and science as located on a continuum. Philosophy and science share the tools of logic, conceptual analysis, and rigorous argumentation. Yet philosophers can operate these tools with degrees of thoroughness, freedom, and theoretical abstraction that practising researchers often cannot afford in their daily activities. Philosophers with the relevant scientific knowledge can then contribute significantly to the advancement of science at all levels of the scientific enterprise from theory to experiment as the above examples show.”
The goal of this publication is thus twofold:
- Clear up misconceptions of philosophy and how science works
- Show the strength of science AND philosophy to answer life’s persistent questions and bridge the supposed boundaries between the two
The upcoming articles by a diverse range of authors will hopefully manage to illustrate and convince the reader that science without philosophy and philosophy without science are stale. In a time when misinformation and fake news have gone rampant, there is a need for a voice of reason and compassion that relies on evidence to support its claim.
This publication offers you insight from the various sciences and the most theoretical science of all— philosophy. This publication is intended as a counterweight to the prevailing noise on the internet. We hope that you will find our voices of reason enjoyable and enriching.
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