When was philosophy of science born? And why? This book aims to answer these questions. Simply put, philosophy of science was born in seventeenth-century Dutch universities, where the introduction of Cartesian ideas called for philosophical reflection upon the validity, method, and concepts of natural philosophy. The disciplines which fulfilled this role were metaphysics and logic. The process was neither short nor straightforward, nor – admittedly – easily grasped through such a generalisation.…
Read moreWhen was philosophy of science born? And why? This book aims to answer these questions. Simply put, philosophy of science was born in seventeenth-century Dutch universities, where the introduction of Cartesian ideas called for philosophical reflection upon the validity, method, and concepts of natural philosophy. The disciplines which fulfilled this role were metaphysics and logic. The process was neither short nor straightforward, nor – admittedly – easily grasped through such a generalisation. As a matter of fact, philosophy of science has existed since antiquity, or for as long as philosophers have provided reflections on such topics. On the other hand, the institutional fragmentation of philosophical and scientific disciplines in the modern era has made it increasingly easy to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’, and for philosophers to provide reflections on the natural sciences. This book stands at the crossroads: namely, it disentangles the ways in which metaphysics and logic became functional for such reflection, and, forthwith, they began to be detached from what was labelled ‘natural philosophy’. This is the reason why this book offers a study of Dutch Cartesianism. Dutch universities were the first where Descartes’s ideas became official matter of teaching and came to reshape the function of metaphysics and logic. So that one can meaningfully ascribe the role of ‘philosophy of science’ to them, and to see this role at work in lectures, disputations, treatises. Again, this is a simplification. Philosophy of science did not appear abruptly, nor was it related only to a transformation of metaphysics, logic, and natural philosophy: its emergence coincided with a rethinking of the foundations of all philosophical disciplines. Philosophy of science appeared, first, as a reflection on philosophy itself, carried out in different disciplines. More precisely, it emerged as a renewed foundation of all philosophical disciplines, serving to guarantee the reliability of their methodologies and concepts, namely, to grant their status as indubitable scientiae.