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In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy; in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive perspectives that should be helpful in developing a synergetic relationship between the two. I will review three lines of reasoning often employed in arguing that philosophy is useless for science: a) philosophy's death diagnosis ('philosophy is dead'); b) the historic-agnostic argument/challenge "show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don't know of any"; c) the division of property argument (or: philosophy and science have different subject matters, therefore philosophy is useless for science). These arguments will be countered with three contentions to the effect that the natural sciences need philosophy. I will: a) point to the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism (or: 'in order to deny the need for philosophy, one must do philosophy') and examine the role of paradigms and presuppositions (or: why science can't live without philosophy); b) point out why the historical argument fails (in an example from quantum mechanics, alive and kicking); c) briefly sketch som

We examine the sub-field of philosophy of science using a new method developed in information science, Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS). RPYS allows us to identify peak years in citations in a field, which promises to help scholars identify the key contributions to a field, and revolutionary discoveries in a field. We discovered that philosophy of science, a sub-field in the humanities, differs significantly from other fields examined with this method. Books play a more important role in philosophy of science than in the sciences. Further, Einstein's famous 1905 papers created a citation peak in the philosophy of science literature. But rather than being a contribution to the philosophy of science, their importance lies in the fact that they are revolutionary contributions to physics with important implications for philosophy of science.

When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by "Life" and "intelligence", i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word "definition" refers to two different situations. First, it means an arbitrary convention. On the other hand it also often designates an attempt to clarify the content of a pre-existing word for which we have some spontaneous preconceptions, whatever their grounds, and to catch an (illusory) "essence" of what is defined. It is then made use of pre-existing plain language words which carry an a priori pre-scientific content likely to introduce some confusion in the reader's mind. The complexity of the problem will be analyzed and we will show that some philosophical prejudice is unavoidable. There are two types of philosophy: "Natural Philosophy", seeking for some essence of things, and "Critical (or analytical) Philosophy", devoted to the analysis of the procedures by which we claim to construct a reality. An extension of Critical Philosophy, Epistemo-Analysis (i.e. the Psycho-Analysis of concepts) is presented and applied to the defintion of Life and to Astr

This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The main methods, which the author of this article uses, are speculative analysis and modeling. The symbolic meaning of the concept of time demonstrates preconditions for the organization of the bases of the natural sciences, and social and humanitarian knowledge as well. Judgments for the meaning of time reveal the essence of the problem in two aspects of discussion on the dissociation of the foundations in the modern philosophy of physics and the philosophical analysis of the humanities as well. 1) The formation of the image of human nature in contemporary philosophy reveals the special role of the concept of time in epistemology and philosophy of science. 2) This research reveals the perspective of understanding natural and cultural processes, which is based on the unification of branches of science. As a result, the research shows the basics of communication of the natural sciences with the social science, and humanitarian knowledge as well.

The paper defends the thesis that it's possible to maintain some conceptual preconditions of overcoming of relativistic intentions in modern philosophy of science ("there are no any general foundations in philosophy of science"). We found two general foundations in philosophy of science as a minimum. From the first side it's realistic to reveal on the base of special understanding of time the value of time not only in natural thought (especially in theory of gravity) but also in humanitarian knowledge. That's why philosophy of science has independent position in epistemology and ontology corresponding to interpretation of time as a general category of scientific thinking. The nature of time has internally inconsistent (paradoxical) character. Time is phenomenon which existing and not existing at the same time. This phenomenon is identified with imaginary movement and also ideal (formal) process of formation of the nature. The general understanding of time is connected with its "mathematical" meaning as calculable formal regulation of language practice and also the universal organization rules of quantitative parameters of intelligence of natural (physical) processes. From the secon

Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. I also suggest that recent important empirical results, such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect supersymmetry where many expected to find it, question the validity of certain philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method.

This paper argues that philosophers of science have before them an important new task that they urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science itself. The outcome of putting this new philosophy into scientific practice would be a new kind of science, both more intellectually rigorous and one that does better justice to the best interests of humanity.

I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science emerged with Galileo and Newton, and led to centuries of unparalleled success in explaining and often predicting new phenomena of nature. I argue here that the long standing obsession with the hierarchy problem as a guiding principle for the future of our field has had the tragic consequence of deviating high energy physics from its origins as natural philosophy, and turning it into a philosophy of naturalness.

I observe that, as the physics side of the OPERA-anomaly story is apparently unfolding, there can still be motivation for philosophy of science to analyze the six months of madness physicists spent chasing the dream of a new fundamental-physics revolution. I here mainly report data on studies of the OPERA anomaly that could be relevant for analyses from the perspective of phenomenology of philosophy of science. Most of what I report is an insider's perspective on the debate that evolved from the original announcement by the OPERA collaboration of evidence of superluminal neutrinos. I also sketch out, from a broader perspective, some of the objectives I view as achievable for the phenomenology of philosophy of science.

Starting from Greg Moore's description about Physical Mathematics, a framework is proposed in order to understand it, based on Gilles Châtelet's philosophy. It will be argued that Châtelet's ideas of inverting, splitting, augmenting and virtuality are crucial in the discussion about the nature of Physical Mathematics. Along this line, it will be proposed that mirror symmetry is a natural study case to test Châtelet's ideas in this context. This should be considered as a first step in a long term project aiming to study the relations among mathematics, physics and philosophy in the construction of a global understanding of the structure of the universe, as it was envisioned by Grothendieck in the late 80's of the last century and it was started to be developed independently by Châtelet in the beginning of the 90's. The main suggestion of the essay is that it is in the relations between mathematics, physics and philosophy that new knowledge arises.

In this thought-provoking book, Richard Healey proposes a new interpretation of quantum theory inspired by pragmatist philosophy. Healey puts forward the interpretation as an alternative to realist quantum theories on the one hand such as Bohmian mechanics, spontaneous collapse theories, and many-worlds interpretations, which are different proposals for describing what the quantum world is like and what the basic laws of physics are, and non-realist interpretations on the other hand such as quantum Bayesianism, which proposes to understand quantum theory as describing agents' subjective epistemic states. The central idea of Healey's proposal is to understand quantum theory as providing not a description of the physical world but a set of authoritative and objectively correct prescriptions about how agents should act. The book provides a detailed development and defense of that idea, and it contains interesting discussions about a wide range of philosophical issues such as representation, probability, explanation, causation, objectivity, meaning, and fundamentality. Healey's project is at the intersection of physics and philosophy. The book is divided into two parts. Part I of the b

After a survey of the present state of cosmological theory and observations, this article discusses a series of major themes underlying the relation of philosophy to cosmology. These are: A: The uniqueness of the universe; B: The large scale of the universe in space and time; C: The unbound energies in the early universe; D: Explaining the universe -- the question of origins; E: The universe as the background for existence; F: The explicit philosophical basis; G: The Anthropic question: fine tuning for life; H: The possible existence of multiverses; I: The natures of existence. Each of these themes is explored and related to a series of Theses that set out the major issues confronting cosmology in relation to philosophy.

We seek to elucidate the philosophical context in which one of the most important conceptual transformations of modern mathematics took place, namely the so-called revolution in rigor in infinitesimal calculus and mathematical analysis. Some of the protagonists of the said revolution were Cauchy, Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass. The dominant current of philosophy in Germany at the time was neo-Kantianism. Among its various currents, the Marburg school (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer, and others) was the one most interested in matters scientific and mathematical. Our main thesis is that Marburg neo-Kantian philosophy formulated a sophisticated position towards the problems raised by the concepts of limits and infinitesimals. The Marburg school neither clung to the traditional approach of logically and metaphysically dubious infinitesimals, nor whiggishly subscribed to the new orthodoxy of the "great triumvirate" of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass that declared infinitesimals conceptus nongrati in mathematical discourse. Rather, following Cohen's lead, the Marburg philosophers sought to clarify Leibniz's principle of continuity, and to exploit it in making sense of infinitesimals and re

Here we review a kind of post-World-War-II "Nachtrag" to H. Weyl's philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s. In a talk given at Zürich in the late 1940s, Weyl discussed F.Gonseth's dialectical epistemology and considered it as being restricted too strictly to aspects of historical change. His own experiences with post-Kantian dialectical philosophy, in particular J.G. Fichte's derivation of the concept of space and matter, had been a stronger dialectical background for his own 1918 studies in purely infintitesimal geometry and the early geometrically unified field theory of matter (extending the Mie-Hilbert program). Although now Weyl distantiated himself from the speculative features of his youthful philosophizing and in particular from his earlier enthusiasm for Fichte, he again had deep doubts as to the cultural foundations of modern mathematical sciences and its role in material culture of high modernity. For Weyl, philosophical "reflection" was a cultural necessity; he now turned towards K. Jasper's and M. Heidegger's existentialism to find deeper grounds, similar to his turn towards Fichte's philosophy after World War

The philosophy of science is a discipline concerning the metaphysical aspect of science. Recently, I proposed measurement theory, which is characterized as the metaphysical and linguistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. I assert that this theory is one of the most fundamental languages in science, and thus, it is located at the central position in science. This assertion will be examined throughout this preprint, which is written as the draft of my future book (concerning the philosophy of science). Hence, I hope to hear various opinions about this draft.

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's theorem, and 1982, when Aspect published the results of his experiments. I argue that what was considered good physics after Aspect's experiments was once considered by many a philosophical matter instead of a scientific one, and that the path from philosophy to physics required a change in the physics community's attitude about the status of the foundations of quantum mechanics.

I argue that research in physics operates under an implicit community philosophy, and I offer a definition I think physicists would accept, by and large. I compare this definition to what philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science, with physicists, say we are doing.

The philosophy of the trajectory representation is contrasted with the Copenhagen and Bohmian philosophies.

We propose a test for abstract causal reasoning in AI, based on scholarship in the philosophy of causation, in particular on the neuron diagrams popularized by D. Lewis. We illustrate the test on advanced Large Language Models (ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini). Remarkably, these chatbots are already capable of correctly identifying causes in cases that are hotly debated in the literature. In order to assess the results of these LLMs and future dedicated AI, we propose a definition of cause in neuron diagrams with a wider validity than published hitherto, which challenges the widespread view that such a definition is elusive. We submit that these results are an illustration of how future philosophical research might evolve: as an interplay between human and artificial expertise.

Vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon as well as a property of physical objects. Fuzzy set theory is a mathematical model of vagueness that has been used to define vague models of computation. The prominent model of vague computation is the fuzzy Turing machine. This conceptual computing device gives an idea of what computing under vagueness means, nevertheless, it is not the most natural model. Based on the properties of this and other models of vague computing, it is aimed to formulate a basis for a philosophy of a theory of fuzzy computation.