Not only can the roots of modern science be found in ancient philosophy, but science itself has proven time and again that it is frequently pregnant with new philosophies of its own. Never was it more obvious that the dialogue between science and philosophy is inevitable.
Galileo’s claim that the book of Nature “is written in the language of mathematics” is identical with the fundamental teaching of Pythagoras; Einstein’s claim that it is “the theory which explains the observations, not the observations which explain the theory” resembles Plato’s metaphysical and epistemological doctrines. Modern empiricism’s bias towards experimental data in the face of some metaphysical paradigm resembles Aristotle’s favouring of empirical data over the adoption of a priori principles.
Might it be that the quest for a definition of scientific method is fundamentally the same as the philosophical quest for the origin and nature of knowledge? At the very least, the search for knowledge of how to obtain knowledge is common to both scientific method and epistemology.
Coming Soon: Problems and Promises of Scientific Method
L.G. Sleiman 