science / philosophy

"Science repudiates philosophy." (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 16)

For Ernst Cassirer, the tensions which emerged in the late nineteenth century between philosophy and science were between philosophy's "special task" to "oppose the intellectual division of labor" and the increasing difficulty of that task as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the sciences. (see The Problem of Knowledge, Introduction)

Whitehead describes science as anti-rationalist (eg. medieval) and based on a naive faith in the relation between brute facts and general principles. Thus it has never cared to justify its faith or explain its meanings and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume. For Whitehead in 1925, the stable foundations of physics had broken up and it was time for science to become philosophical and examine its own foundations -- specifically "scientific materialism."

In Order Out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers see the origins of modern science in a "resonance" or convergence between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity. (p.46) leading to the "mechanized" nature of modern science, that debases nature and glorifies God and man. Subsequently, triumphant classical science could say of God's place in the world system "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse." (Laplace to Napoléon)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari characterize some of the differences between science and philosophy. For them, philosophy is "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts" (p.2), while the object of science is "not concepts but rather functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems". (p.117) "Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference." (p.118) (Is the latter the "plane of forms, substances, and subjects?" -1000 Plateaux p.262-- or do forms and substances lie on different planes?) Science is paradigmatic, while philosophy is syntagmatic."The concept is defined by its consistency, but it has no reference: It is self referential; it posits itself and its object as the same time as it is created." (p.22)

In this connection, it may be interesting to observe the intensity of the controversy around catastrophe theory, whose interpretation may have transgressed some of the boundaries between science and philosophy. It would thus seem rather philosophical (rather than scientific) of Robert Rosen, the biologist, when he pointed out that "If an individual scientist finds such concepts uncongenial, let him not use them. There is no reason why he should take their existence as a personal affront."

Science's plane of reference is constituted by "all the limits or borders through which it confronts chaos."(p.119)D+G define both science and philosophy in relation to chaos, which they characterize by the infinite speed with which determinations take shape and vanish (p.42). Thus Philosophy seeks "to give consistency without losing anything of the infinite", while science seeks to provide chaos with reference points, by renouncing infinite speeds. (see philosophy / chaos )

Science displays a peculiarly serial time, a time of chronos as apposed to a time of aeon.