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Aristotle laid the foundation of a philosophy supported by observation and experience. We need only glance through the list of his works to see that astronomy, mineralogy, physics and chemistry, biology, zoology, furnished him with examples and bases for his theories on the constitution, of the heavenly and terrestrial bodies, the nature of the vital principle, etc. Besides, the whole Aristotelean classification of the branches of philosophy is inspired by the same idea of making philosophy -- general science -- rest upon the particular sciences.
The early Middle Ages, with a rudimentary scientific culture, regarded all its learning, built up on the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), as preparation for philosophy.
In the thirteenth century, when Scholasticism came under Aristotelean influences, it incorporated the sciences in the programme of philosophy itself. This may be seen in regulation issued by the Faculty of Arts of Paris 19 March, 1255, "De libris qui legendi essent" This order prescribes the study of commentaries or various scientific treatises of Aristotle, notably those on the first book of the "Meteorologica", on the treatises on Heaven and Earth, Generation, the Senses and Sensations, Sleeping and Waking, Memory, Plants, and Animals. Here are amply sufficient means for the magistri to familiarize the "artists" with astronomy, botany, physiology, and zoology to say nothing of Aristotle's "Physics", which was also prescribed as a classical text, and which afforded opportunities for numerous observations in chemistry and physics as then understood. Grammar and rhetoric served as preliminary studies to logic, Bible history, social science, and politics were introductory to moral philosophy. Such men as Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon expressed their views on the necessity of linking the sciences with philosophy and preached it by example. So that both antiquity and the Middle Ages knew and appreciated scientific philosophy.
In the seventeenth century the question of the relation between the two enters upon a new phase: from this period modern science takes shape and begins that triumphal march which it is destined to continue through the twentieth century, and of which the human mind is justly proud. Modern scientific knowledge differs from that of antiquity and the Middle Ages in three important respects: the multiplication of sciences; their independent value; the divergence between common knowledge and scientific knowledge.
In the Middle Ages astronomy was closely akin to astrology, chemistry to alchemy, physics to divination; modern science has severely excluded all these fantastic connections. Considered now from one side and again from another, the physical world has revealed continually new aspects, and each specific point of view has become the focus of a new study. On the other hand, by defining their respective limits, the sciences have acquired autonomy; useful in the Middle Ages only as a preparation for rational physics and for metaphysics, they are nowadays of value for themselves, and no longer play the part of handmaids to philosophy. Indeed, the progress achieved within itself by each particular science brings one more revolution in knowledge. So long as instruments of observation were imperfect, and inductive methods restricted, it was practically impossible to rise above an elementary knowledge. People knew, in the Middle Ages, that Wine, when left exposed to the air, became vinegar; but what do facts like this amount to in comparison with the complex formulae of modern chemistry? Hence it was that an Albertus Magnus or a Roger Bacon could flatter himself, in those days, with having acquired all the science of his time, a claim which would now only provoke a smile. In every department progress has drawn the line sharply between popular and scientific knowledge; the former is ordinarily the starting-point of the latter, but the conclusions and teachings involved in the sciences are unintelligible to those who lack the requisite preparation.
Do not, then, these profound modifications in the condition of the sciences entail modifications in the relations which, until the seventeenth century, had been accepted as existing between the sciences and philosophy? Must not the separation of philosophy and science widen out to a complete divorce? Many have thought so, both scientists and philosophers, and it was for this that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so many savants and philosophers turned their backs on one another. For the former, philosophy has become useless; the particular sciences, they say, multiplying and becoming perfect, must exhaust the whole field of the knowable, and a time will come when philosophy shall be no more. For the philosophers, philosophy has no need of the immeasurable mass of scientific notions which have been acquired, many of which possess only a precarious and provisional value. Wolff, who pronounced the divorce of science from philosophy, did most to accredit this view, and he has been followed by certain Catholic philosophers who held that scientific study may be excluded from philosophic culture.
What shall we say on this question? That the reasons which formerly existed for keeping touch with science are a thousand times more imperative in our day. If the profound synthetic view of things which justifies the existence of philosophy presupposes analytical researches, the multiplication and perfection of those researches is certainly reason for neglecting them. The horizon of detailed knowledge widens incessantly; research of every kind is busy exploring the departments of the universe which it has mapped out. And philosophy, whose mission is to explain the order of the universe by general and ultimate reasons applicable, not only to a group of facts, but to the whole body of known phenomena, cannot be indifferent to the matter which it has to explain. Philosophy is like a tower whence we obtain the panorama of a great city -- its plan, its monuments, its great arteries, with the form and location of each -- things which a visitor cannot discern while he goes through the streets and lanes, or visits libraries, churches, palaces, and museums, one after another. If the city grows and develops, there is all the more reason, if we would know it as a whole, why we should hesitate to ascend the tower and study from that height the plan upon which its new quarters have been laid out.
It is, happily, evident that contemporary philosophy is inclined to be first and foremost a scientific philosophy; it has found its way back from its wanderings of yore. This is noticeable in philosophers of the most opposite tendencies. There would be no end to the list if we had to enumerate every case where this orientation of ideas has been adopted. "This union", says Boutroux, speaking of the sciences and philosophy, "is in truth the classic tradition of philosophy. But there had been established a psychology and a metaphysics which aspired to set themselves up beyond the sciences, by mere reflection of the mind upon itself. Nowadays all philosophers are agreed to make scientific data their starting-point" (Address at the International Congress of Philosophy in 1900; Revue de Métaph. et de Morale, 1900, p. 697). Boutroux and many others spoke similarly at the International Congress of Bologna (April, 1911). Wundt introduces this union into the very definition of philosophy, which, he says, is "the general science whose function it is to unite a system free of all contradictions the knowledge acquired through the particular sciences, and to reduce to their principles the general methods of science and the conditions of knowledge supposed by them" ("Einleitung in die Philosophie", Leipzig, 1901, p. 19).
And R. Eucken says:
"The farther back the limits of the observable world recede, the more conscious are we of the lack of an adequately comprehensive explanation" -- " Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Philos. u. Lebensanschanung" (Leipzig, 1903), p. 157].
This same thought inspired Leo XIII when he placed the parallel and harmonious teaching of philosophy and of the sciences on the programme of the Institute of Philosophy created by him in the University of Louvain.
On their side, the scientists have been coming to the same conclusions ever since they rose to a synthetic view of that matter which is the object of their study. So it was with Pasteur, so with Newton. Ostwald, professor of chemistry at Leipzig, has undertaken to publish the "Annalen der Naturphilosophie", a review devoted to the cultivation of the territory which is common to philosophy and the sciences A great many men of science, too, are engaged in philosophy without knowing it: in their constant discussions of "Mechanism", "Evolutionism", "Transformism", they are using terms which imply a philosophical theory of matter.
If philosophy is the explanation as a whole of that world which the particular sciences investigate in detail, it follows that the latter find their culmination in the former, and that as the sciences are so will philosophy be. It is true that objections are put forward against this way of uniting philosophy and the sciences. Common observation, it is said, is enough support for philosophy. This is a mistake: philosophy cannot ignore whole departments of knowledge which are inaccessible to ordinary experience. Biology, for example, has shed a new light on the philosophic study of man. Others again adduce the extent and the growth of the sciences to show that scientific philosophy must ever remain an unattainable ideal; the practical solution of this difficulty concerns the teaching of philosophy.
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(Ernst Mach)'A piece of knowledge is never false or true - but only more or less biologically and evolutionary useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow.'
(Albert Einstein) 'I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.' (Albert Einstein to Robert A. Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61-574)
(Thomas Kuhn, 1962) '..the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.'
(Karl Popper, 1975) 'All we can do is to search for the falsity content of our best theory. We do so by trying to refute our theory; that is, by trying to test it severely in the light of all our objective knowledge and all our ingenuity. It is, of course, always possible that the theory may be false even if it passes all these tests; that is allowed for by our search for verisimilitude. But if it passes all these tests then we may have good reason to conjecture that our theory, which (we know) has a greater truth content than its predecessor, may have no greater falsity content. And if we fail to refute the new theory, especially in fields in which its predecessor has been refuted, then we can claim this as one of the objective reasons for the conjecture that the new theory is a better approximation to truth than the old theory.'