The History of Philosophy

It is one of the quirks of the history of philosophy that philosophical reflection has tended to get dragged along behind the sciences. Somehow, philosophy (or rather, philosophers) has been so entranced by the development of a particular science that they have believed that their own thinking or perhaps, the thinking of humanity in general, should proceed along similar lines.

The phenomenon is not new of course. Descartes was a mathematician as well as a philosopher and thought that philosophy should proceed mathematically. Famously (or perhaps infamously) Spinoza thought that ethics could be done geometrically. He was not, of course, daft enough to suppose that you could draw ethical diagrams and work out angles, but axioms and inferences are to be found in his work. Locke understood what he was doing as clearing away the undergrowth for natural philosophy – Newtonian science in his case – to prevail. Hume thought that he could reduce morals to a science, and so on down the line. The reputation of science for being a paradigm of human thought and clarity has a long history.

Other subjects have followed suit, of course. We have historical sciences, economic sciences, social sciences and so on, all trying possibly to accrue some of the impacts that the sciences, usually understood as the physical sciences, have on the world. People have said to me of their social science projects when I have shown them how to obtain a full set of data “That is more scientific”. I am still trying to work out what that means, but then I am not a social scientist.

Theology, of course, is not immune to this movement. Recently there has been a spate of concepts flying around to use some of the approaches of science to a method in theology – a scientific theology. This stuff is interesting, but it is a little difficult to see exactly how it helps. Theology, thinking about God, is not science, where science is thinking about things in the world.

It is possible that there is a link between the doing of science and the doing of other subjects. The people who consider that science is a paradigm of human thought have something of a point but not, perhaps, in quite the way they might have expected. The link is, of course, the human mind and brain. I do not want to get into the debate as to the difference or identity of the human brain and the human mind, but just to say that whatever it is, the same thing does the thinking behind science, history, theology and everything else. If (and it might be a sizeable if) the physical sciences give a paradigm of how we think, then we might be able to think a bit more clearly about other subjects.

To be fair to the philosophers I have mentioned above, and to everyone else who has trodden his path, I doubt if anyone was naïve enough to believe that the problems of philosophy could be solved by applying particular scientific or mathematical methods. It was the regularity, the testing, the clarity of thought and derivation that they were all after. We cannot clear away the undergrowth of thought without clarifying our understandings, our concepts and our knowledge of how we came to be here, in our current intellectual climate. Physical science, it is thought, does away with the fuzziness.

Unfortunately, my experience of doing physics is that in a research context at least, fuzziness is the norm. True, we attempt to work our way through things, to chop up the bits we do not understand into bits that we do and then reassemble them, but if things were easy or clear, there would be a lot less research around. Isaac Asimov once said the most powerful words in science are not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny’, and he has a point. Scientists at least should be confident to say ‘I don’t know’, but that is often not how science and its progress are viewed.

The acclaim which scientific advances have accrued over the centuries have affected the self-confidence of other subjects. True, by comparison with mathematics and physics, the social sciences are new kids on the block, but, on the whole, most subjects are either cowed by scientific method or claim to use it for themselves. Interestingly, as a physicist, I do not remember ever having a lecture on ‘The Scientific Method’. The nearest I recall was a principle investigator calling a slightly naïve research student a clot for changing two variables in an experiment at a time and thus not being able to say which had caused the difference in the result. In other subjects it seems, research methods are widely taught.

The upshot of this accumulation of glamour to the physical sciences is that other subjects either retreat into themselves, arguing more and more over finer and finer points of nuance, or they subjugate themselves entirely to (mis-)understandings of science and what it can achieve. This is true of some trends in theology, where misreadings of relativity and (more often) quantum mechanics can lead to some very strange views about spirituality and truth claims. Fortunately, the mainstream of the subject has largely recovered from such weirdness, but they still happen (and, even more oddly, get published).

The physical sciences, however, are not quite as arrogant or all-conquering as views of them (or views put forward by some scientists) would have us believe. They may well be paradigms of how humans can think, intentionally, about a particular subject or problem. By this I mean that a lot of the things we do in science relate to problem-solving, from the simple (‘Where is the leak in my vacuum system?') to the more complex (‘How do I integrate this equation?’) and beyond; the most famous in modern physics would be Einstein’s wondering what it would be like to sit on a photon. But, as I have tried to suggest, this is not the whole arena of human thinking. We do not spend our entire time problem solving, even as working scientists. There is a lot more to life than science.