According to the traditional myth, mentioned in passing in the first entry of this series, contemporary philosophy of science would have started in the post-WWI Vienna, when a group of young philosophers and scientists, under the heading of Moritz Schlick, attempted to show how scientific knowledge could be unambiguously derived from observational data (or at […]
If you ask people to list the most intelligent animals, they’ll name a few usual suspects. Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are often mentioned, as are crows, dogs and occasionally pigs. Horses don’t usually get a look in. So it might come as a surprise that horses possess an unusual skill, widely considered an indicator of […]
One fascinating, as well as disconcerting fact about the evolution of Greek thought about science is that, almost immediately after the end of the ‘Classical’ period of philosophy, and particularly after Aristotle’s founding work on both philosophy and science, these two activities seemed to follow two radically separate courses. Actually, Greek science achieved its peak […]
Let me make a short interruption in our series about the prehistory of philosophy of science, to discuss a completely different point. I am writing this now, just because in the last days I think I have been able to clearly formulate a specific perplexity that for many years I had felt about what we […]
Besides being one of the main pioneers of scientific thought, Aristotle is the author of the work that can unquestionably be considered the first book explicitly and exclusively devoted to what we can call ‘philosophy of science’ . This small book is known by the rather insipid name of Posterior Analytics ( Ἀναλυτικὰ ὑστέρων ) […]
During the time Aristotle spent far from Athens after the death of Plato, he lived for a few years on the island of Lesbos and in some Asia Minor cities that surrounded it, an area where a kind of ‘franchise’ of the Academy had been founded a few years ago under the patronage of the […]
If Plato’s reflections on the nature of epistéme was the starting point of what we can take as an authentic ‘philosophy of science’, and even if his views were probably the most influential during the rest of the Ancient times (as we shall confirm in subsequent entries), the truth is that science as we know […]
We shall conclude with this entry our discussion of Plato’s view of science, the main conclusions of the two former ones being, in the first place, the idea that ‘scientific knowledge’ ( epistēmē ) consists in the knowledge of eternal, intelligible Forms, whereas material things are imperfect copies of the former, and only graspable with […]
In the past entry we introduced Plato’s model of the degrees of knowledge , ‘the simile of the line’, according to which the primordial difference between ‘science’ and ‘mere opinion’ is not so much about the ‘methods’ employed to reach one or the other (as will be assumed in modern times), but about the nature […]
If the preceding post of this series turned out being a little bit disappointing because of the clumsiness and sophistry of the anonymous author of the leaflet we know as On the (medical) science (the first preserved complete work which discusses the nature of a ‘science’, or, in this case, téchnē ), we reach today […]