ABSTRACT

Philosophy and science, as well as their respective histories, are not recognized as distinct genres until relatively late in Western philosophy. Even when they are thought to be distinct genres, neither can be written independently of the other, occasional protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Philosophy and science were seen as almost one and the same activity for most of Western intellectual history, and the description of the relations between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science not only forms a very large part of any account of philosophy and its history, but must include discussion of the history of science as well. Still, the terms “philosophy,” “history of philosophy,” “history of science,” and “philosophy of science” are not interchangeable because the networks of associated concepts and practices constituting each activity change over the long history of their relations. One could argue that Aristotle’s criticism of the pre-Socratics in Metaphysics is at one and the same time the first history of philosophy, the first history of science, and the first attempt at a philosophy of science. Aristotle does not distinguish philosophia from episteme, that is, scientific knowledge; indeed, these terms appear side by side in Metaphysics at 993b20: “It is right also that philosophy should be called knowledge of the truth.” This knowledge of the truth comes from studying sophia, or first philosophy, together with physics and mathematics, but not only from the study of these theoretical sciences. Philosophia includes also the pursuit of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as well as the knowledge of the “productive sciences” such as poetics and rhetoric. For Aristotle, episteme encompasses all of what now goes under the name “philosophy” but it is not the same as what contemporary philosophers of science would count as science. There is, however, at least one respect in which Aristotle’s Metaphysics indulges in a practice that seems to be characteristic of the history of philosophy as written by philosophers: Aristotle criticizes his predecessors

for not grasping the nature of philosophy and science, that is, episteme, but in doing so he fails to characterize their work accurately. The tradition of identifying science with episteme in its ancient sense, and episteme with philosophy, as encompassing all of what Aristotle would call the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences, persists well into the early modern period. René Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae progresses from Part I: The principles of human knowledge, and II: The principles of material things, to Part III: The visible world, and Iv: The earth. Descartes had envisaged a Part v, on living things, that is, on animals and plants, and vI, on man. Indeed, he extends this broad scope for philosophy even further when, in the Preface to the French translation of the work, he talks about philosophy being “like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches, which issue from this trunk, are all the other sciences. These reduce themselves to three principal ones, namely, medicine, mechanics, and morals.” In the same work, Descartes, who does not typically indulge in history, engages in some reconstructive history of philosophy in the service of his philosophy of science. In this instance, however, he both attenuates the contrast between his philosophy and that of Aristotle, and accentuates his differences with atomists such as Democritus, presumably in the hope of bringing his Aristotelian readers into his camp. The title to Principles Iv, article 200, announces that “there are no principles in this treatise that are not accepted by everyone, so that this philosophy is not new, but is the most ancient and most common of all.” As part of that argument, Descartes claims that he “made use of no principle which has not been approved by Aristotle and by all the other philosophers of every time.” Descartes asserts that he has considered only the figure, motion, and magnitude of each body, and what must follow from their collisions according to the laws of mechanics, as they are confirmed by certain and daily experience. He thus turns Aristotle into a fellow mechanist. Two articles later, he reinforces this revisionist history through a comparison of his principles and those of both Democritus and Aristotle: “That the philosophy of Democritus is not less different from ours than from the vulgar [or Aristotelian philosophy]” (Iv, art. 202). Democritus’s atomism is for Descartes very distant from his own philosophy, since he rejects both atoms and the void as absurd or impossible. He shares with Democritus only the endorsement of mechanism, what he calls “the consideration of figure, magnitude and motion.” Therefore, he concludes,

inasmuch as because the consideration of figure, magnitude and motion has been admitted by Aristotle and all others, as well as by Democritus, and as I reject all that the latter has supposed with this one exception, while I reject practically all that has been supposed by the others, it is clear that this method of philosophizing has no more affinity with that of Democritus than with any of the other particular sects.