Abstract
In concluding this work we want to devote some consideration to the relations between science and metaphysics, an issue that has been constantly present in the history of Western philosophy and is far from having lost its intrinsic interest in our time as well, despite the fact that it is often considered with suspicion in the ‘official’ philosophy of science. Whereas in ancient and medieval philosophy these two notions were strictly related (indeed metaphysics was considered the best example of science) in modern times a process of separation has developed, which began as a distinction in the seventeenth century and terminated as an opposition in the twentieth century, when the view of science proposed by positivism became dominant even in the mind of general public. This was a consequence of a change occurred in the meaning of science itself, determined by the emergence of a new paradigm of knowledge, that is, of modern natural science.
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Notes
- 1.
What we have just said must be taken only as a sketchy presentation of what we could call a ‘prevailing atmosphere’ in Western culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a matter of fact, several important scholars have defended there being a more or less explicit and significant interconnection between science and metaphysics (though not always using this terminology), from Whewell to Duhem, Meyerson, Einstein, Campbell, Enriques, Northrop, Harré and many others. In Dilworth (2007), a work thematically devoted to the illustration and defense of such a position, abundant references and quotations are offered attesting to this trend in the philosophy of science. An author who has done important work along this trend is A. Chakrawartty. See especially Chakrawartty (2007).
- 2.
Sometimes metaphysics understood as an inquiry on the universal features of reality is called a transcendental inquiry, while when it is understood as an investigation into the supersensible dimensions of reality is called a doctrine of the transcendent. As we shall soon see, Kant admitted metaphysics in the first sense, but not in the second. These terms, however, have often been used with different meanings in modern philosophy, and we shall therefore avoid using them in the sequel.
- 3.
What we have said corresponds especially to the discourse developed by Kant in his Prolegomena (1783), but we cannot deny that Kant may even have engaged himself in proposing a genuine ‘metaphysics of science.’ This he did in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), that is, in the period of his ‘critical’ thought, including the time during which he wrote the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Prolegomena (1783), and the second edition of the Critique (1787). In this work he explores natural science (practically, Newtonian physics) based on the norms established in the Critique, realising in such a way a project that he had had in mind already in his ‘pre-critical’ period (as is explicitly attested in a letter to Lambert of 1765). The need to afford a natural philosophy that was ‘exact’, free of speculative adventures, and solidly anchored to mathematics, had been present to his mind as the need for a ‘metaphysical foundation’, but could be satisfied only after the deep reform of the notion of metaphysics he had attained in the Critique. Indeed, in this work of 1786 he shows the passage from the “pure” concepts and principles of the understanding presented in the “Analytics” of the Critique of Pure Reason to genuine natural science, that is, to the study of the motion of material points (i.e. mechanics). One must note, however, that the Metaphysical Foundations did not attract much attention when it was published (in a 1795 letter to Kant by Kiesewetter this fact is deplored). But the work was often discussed later by the idealists, and influenced their often arbitrary metaphysical interpretations of natural science, so that the final outcome was a discredited mixture of metaphysics and science that favoured the positivist hostility to metaphysics in general.
- 4.
These unifications occur within the commonsense apprehension of reality, and constitute, essentially, that which Sellars has called the “manifest image” of the world, an image that, in such a way, is the indispensable precondition and permanent framework for the construction of the “scientific image.” This is why (as we have already explained) we cannot share Sellar’s thesis that the manifest image is intrinsically wrong and must be superseded (at least as a regulative ideal) by the scientific image, which is right.
- 5.
It is this kind of aprioristic dependence of science on metaphysics maintained by several even famous philosophers (from Descartes to Hegel) that produced the anti-metaphysical reaction of the neo-positivists, as can be seen, for instance, in this declaration of Hans Reichenbach: “[Modern scientists] refuse to recognize the authority of the philosopher who claims to know the truth from intuition, from insight into a world of ideas or into the nature of reason or the principles of being, or from whatever super-empirical source. There is no separate entrance to truth for philosophers. The path of the philosopher is indicated by that of the scientist.” (Reichenbach 1949, p. 310).
- 6.
We would add too much to the already respectable size of this work if we should embark on the illustration of how metaphysical considerations constitute the prerequisite framework of science. Let us simply say that certain metaphysical principles belonging to general ontology (e.g., the principle of the permanence of substance, or the principle of causality) receive a ‘specialization’ when they are ‘applied’ to the specific ontology of a certain science, that is, as we have explained in preceding chapters, when the interest of the inquiry focuses on certain restricted ‘attributes’ of reality. So, for example, in Newtonian mechanics mass, motion, space and time play the role of substances, while force plays the role of cause (the cause of the change of motion that must be compatible with the ‘conservation’ of the quantity of motion). An additional metaphysical principle that does not belong to general ontology, but only to the special ontology of Nature is that of the “uniformity of nature.” This last principle is the rational prerequisite for looking for natural laws, as well as for planning experiments and making predictions. The general causality principle is the rational prerequisite for constructing theories that should show why certain empirical laws are so, as a consequence of the basic specific properties and laws of the substances involved. Therefore, the general metaphysical principles are specialized in principles, laws and theories of a particular science. In Dilworth (2007) a detailed and convincing presentation is offered of this process and particular stress is laid upon the role of principles in science, an aspect that we did not explicitly treat in this book considering that it is included in the idea of a “hermeneutic framework” we have presented. This topic certainly deserves the deeper analysis provided by Dilworth.
- 7.
For an excellent discussion of this point see Mittelstaedt (2011).
- 8.
This feedback from scientific knowledge to metaphysics can have even more significant impacts, in the sense of implying, for example, the rejection of general metaphysical models of physical reality. For instance, Massimo Pauri maintains that “The ontological breakthrough implied by the discovery of the atomization of action is so radical that quantum theory represents the death certificate of atomism in a very deep sense. In this sense, I believe, it historically represents the most conspicuous empirical disproof of a general philosophical thesis about the world” (Pauri 1997, p. 175). Developing his approach, the same author maintains later that “Planck’s discovery of the atomization of action leads to the fundamental recognition of an ontology of non-spatial abstract entities (Quine) for the quantum level of reality (QT) as distinguished from the necessarily spatio-temporal experimental revelations (measurements)” (Pauri 2011, p. 1677).
- 9.
See especially Agazzi 1977, 1981c, 1988d.
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Agazzi, E. (2014). Science and Metaphysics. In: Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04660-0_10
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