Philosophy of science

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches science through the question of the conditions that make a discourse scientific: a proper object, universal and necessary laws, and experimental verification involving measurement. For this he draws on Max Planck, whose caution he stresses, and on Hume's critique of induction1. He rejects the empiricism that confuses matter with the sensible. Galileo seeks the mathematical law, Le Verrier deduces Neptune before seeing it, and Newton had written his equations before the apple23. Drawing on the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that reason grasps only what it produces a priori. He finds this bad empiricism in d'Alembert and in today's neopositivism, of which Popper is the figurehead3. He distinguishes science from scientism, an ideology that extends the determinism of Descartes's "long chains of reasoning" to the human world and abolishes the subject1. Finally, he links physics' overthrow of Aristotle's final causes to a teleology confined to the human world4. In his view, the order in which the sciences appeared leads toward man and history.

1. 1#9.17 The geopolitical metaphor: Planck, Descartes, Clouscard17 Mar 2021
2. 2#2.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017
3. 3From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!28 Aug 2026
4. 4#2 Lenin, or the wings of dreams18 Apr 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.