• Anh
    1
    I think science majors are for researching the laws of the world, so I think philosophy should be the science of general laws, but to understand the general law, we can't just thinking about it purely but we should understand and learning other majors as a specific knowledge for understanding the world as the whole big picture.
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    I agree. I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, administrators constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administrators supposedly knows better and had better be listened to.

    But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work. Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty.

    I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there. The sciences are then to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done.
  • Mww
    4.5k


    So how many scientific laws should we need in order to understand the philosophically pure general law “all objects are extended in space”?

    Science: researching the laws of the world......yes;
    Philosophy: the science of general laws......yes;

    You can’t get to a general from a manifold of particulars, but you can get from a general to certain particulars relative to it. So it would seem the general comes first, and if so, it is without scientific law, which implies the general must be pure thought. Then, the science laws of the world consequently either support or refute it.

    So the OP is backwards: pure general laws come first, and understanding the world piece by piece by means of the science laws found in it, follows from the pure general law which grounds them.

    No science is ever done that isn’t first thought, accidental causality being the singular exception.
  • Kenosha Kid
    3.2k
    I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate.Pfhorrest

    I... I'm gonna fight you. :P

    Have an excellent Christmas, my friend!
  • Gnomon
    3.5k
    I think science majors are for researching the laws of the world, so I think philosophy should be the science of general laws, but to understand the general law, we can't just thinking about it purely but we should understand and learning other majors as a specific knowledge for understanding the world asthe whole big picture.Anh
    Yes, The focus of exploratory Science is on the reductive details . . . piece by piece; pixel by pixel. Since the modern analytical materialist sciences have the bits & pieces covered, what's left for philosophers to understand is a holistic synthetic overview of the "big picture", in order to learn, or relearn, the general or universal principles that hold the parts together. :smile:
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