ABSTRACT
Philosophy may be informed by science, but it is not a part of science: it has problems and preoccupations of its own, including, as we saw in the last chapter, problems and preoccupations that keep alive the traditional theory of knowledge and the traditional philosophy of mind. There are other non-scientific subjects. Theology falls outside science because it tries to go beyond science. Either it is concerned with a metaphysically ultimate sort of explanation, which conditions scientific explanation itself, or else it tries to reach an accommodation between scientific explanations and ways of understanding made possible by faith. Another extra-scientific subject is aesthetics—not because there are no standards of taste, but because a body of criticism using these standards is not strongly comparable to a scientific theory making use of laws. In this chapter, however, I consider morals and social studies.
