A Quote by Sam Harris
I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
There is a continuum between science and philosophy. As Fichte said (but did not practice), philosophy should be the science of sciences.
My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.
Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.
Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.
Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory's empirical import) had beenmisconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality, I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line.
Oddly, since by now I've written quite a lot on early modern philosophers, I didn't care for the history of philosophy, which I thought dull and obscure, until I got a minor job writing articles for a children's encyclopedia in the history of science and began to make connections between science and philosophy.
Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence.
Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.
Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.
The word philosophy, as distinguished from science, is misleading, for it implies that what philosophy contains is impossible to be a systematic body of knowledge and what science contains is certain or proved.
But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards.
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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