Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics
نویسنده
چکیده
Philosophy of science has a complicated – almost schizophrenic – relationship with metaphysics. Studying topics such as the nature of causation, laws of nature, and spacetime, it clearly engages in activities that deserve to be classified as metaphysics. Yet the academic discipline itself was born in opposition to the field. Carnap, Reichenbach, Feigl, Neurath, and Popper, for example, were united in a shared distrust of metaphysics. Their suspicion ran so deep as to motivate a search for a demarcation between science and non-science, and science and speculative metaphysics in particular. Philosophy of science appears caught in what Einstein (1933) calls the "eternal antithesis between the two inseparable components of our knowledge—the empirical and the rational" (271). It wants to employ metaphysical speculation, but impressed with the methods of the subject it studies, it fears over-reaching. Philosophy of science thus tries to walk a fine line between scientifically motivated or grounded metaphysics and its more speculative cousins.
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