UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

We Need to Recreate Natural Philosophy

Maxwell, N; (2018) We Need to Recreate Natural Philosophy. Philosophies , 3 (4) , Article 28. 10.3390/philosophies3040028. Green open access

[thumbnail of Maxwell_philosophies-03-00028-v3.pdf]
Preview
Text
Maxwell_philosophies-03-00028-v3.pdf - Published Version

Download (653kB) | Preview

Abstract

Modern science began as natural philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. It was then killed off by Newton, as a result of his claim to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction. But this post-Newtonian conception of science, which holds that theories are accepted on the basis of evidence, is untenable, as the long-standing insolubility of the problem of induction indicates. Persistent acceptance of unified theories only in physics, when endless equally empirically successful disunified rivals are available, means that physics makes a persistent, problematic metaphysical assumption about the universe: that all disunified theories are false. This assumption, precisely because it is problematic, needs to be explicitly articulated within physics, so that it can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. The outcome is a new conception of science—aim-oriented empiricism—that puts science and philosophy together again, and amounts to a modern version of natural philosophy. Furthermore, aim-oriented empiricism leads to the solution to the problem of induction. Natural philosophy pursued within the methodological framework of aim-oriented empiricism is shown to meet standards of intellectual rigour that science without metaphysics cannot meet.

Type: Article
Title: We Need to Recreate Natural Philosophy
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/philosophies3040028
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies3040028
Language: English
Additional information: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: natural philosophy; metaphysics; physics; problem of induction; physicalism; theoretical unity; philosophy of science; scientific method; scientific progress; pessimistic induction
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057756
Downloads since deposit
85Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item