What is philosophy of science?
I just finished Plato’s Timaeus, which is often regarded as the first major philosophy of science. It used to be considered a much more important book—maybe even Plato’s most important—but at a certain point it fell out of favor; probably because of the rise of modern science, which made Plato’s philosophy of science seem somewhat quaint. In Raphael’s (the painter not the Ninja Turtle) famous painting The School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle are front and center, among all the other sages of ancient Greece; and Plato is holding a book. What book? The Timaeus. That’s the importance the book used to be held in.
The Timaeus was seen by many as the most important of Plato’s books—the one with the most explanatory power, and written in his final period of literary activity—and so it was translated into Latin very early; due to that, it was the only one of Plato’s works available in the Latin-speaking world until the 12th century. The Timaeus was synonymous with Plato for centuries—in a way that the Republic has been for our time. When people think of Plato today, they likely think of his book the Republic (or maybe the Apology of Socrates). The Timaeus used to be that book.
Why did this change? Because the Timaeus is Plato’s philosophy of science—and over the last few centuries, with the rise of modern science, science was no longer thought of as something that needed a philosophy. Science became so sophisticated, so intricate, so refined, that having anything outside of its purview—something like philosophy (or even morality)—came to be viewed as absurd. Science was no longer ceonceived of as something that needed to have a philosophy—and what does it mean when this happens? It means that it no longer has to be understood, or have any meaning. That it is too big and too important to be understood—that stooping down to have a philosophy, to be susceptible to a philosophy, would be crude, gauche, unbecoming such a regal and dignified, all-powerful thing as science.
Science is now viewed as too big to have a meaning. Is the absurdity of this clear? Isn’t this exactly the opposite of how it should be? The bigger something is, the more meaning we must demand of it. If something gets too big to have any meaning, that is not a good thing—it is a failure of philosophy. Indeed, this is perhaps the main function of philosophy—to ensure that nothing gets too big to understand; because something big that has no meaning, and that cannot be understood, will not lead to anything useful for humanity. We need to have a future that makes sense—and a future dominated by a science without any philosophy, is a future that by definition will not make any sense. Is it any wonder that so many people today, especially young people, don’t really want any part of such a future?
Science is no longer thought of as something that needs to have a philosophy—meaning it’s no longer thought of as something that needs to make any sense. In fact, the less sense it makes, the more meaning it is seen as having. The more incomprehensible science gets—at the furthest reaches of quantum physics, where the scientists themselves even admit that they don’t really know what they’re getting at—the more explanatory power it is viewed as having.
Plato’s Timaeus is a philosophy of science in the sense that it tries to imbue all the discoveries that human intelligence had made in Plato’s time—and there were a lot of them!—with as much meaning as possible. More than that, it was an attempt to imbue the natural world, and the human body, down to its internal organs, with meaning. What is the meaning of the liver? Plato tells you in the Timaeus. Why is blood red? Why do we have hair? Why is there a lot of flesh on some parts of the body, and not on others? Why do we have necks? Why are the intestines so long and winding?
To answer a few of these: we have hair because the brain eeds more protection than just the skull and scalp—but not so much flesh as to dull it, since it needs to be as free to exercise its intelligence as possible. So the hair is another layer of protection that does not hinder the sharpness of the mental organ at all. Fingers likewise have very little flesh, because there is a lot of intelligence in the hands—a fleshy hand would be a stupid one. Thighs can be fleshy because there is little intelligence there. We have necks because the body is a cauldron of desire, appetite, and irrationalism—and so the neck acts as, in Plato’s terms, an “isthmus,” that separates the mental organ from the lower organ, allowing it to function in as unimpeded a way as possible. If the mental organ sat directly on the body, it would be engulfed in the raging chaos of the body, and real thinking would be impossible. Why are the intestines so long and winding? Because it adds to the amount of time that food can remain in our stomachs and nourish us—if we had stomachs that directly emptied into the colon, then we would constantly be needing food, and have no time whatsoever for thinking. And on and on and on—this way of imbuing meaning into things is taken along every inch of the body, inside and outside, and through to the wider world, into the universe itself, and down to the smallest elements. All of it becomes susceptible to reason and meaning.
Now, you can probably see why Plato’s philosophy of science has fallen out of fashion—it isn’t exactly what we would call science today. It’s more akin to what we would see as myth or creationism or something along those lines. But it is far more rigorous than the myths that were around in Plato’s own time—he was Greek after all, and nobody had more myths than them! The fact that he felt the need to write this philosophy of science was proof that he wanted to do something different than what existed—create a middle ground between myth/religion and pure empty cold science. And that is precisely what philosophy has always been meant for—and it is needed more today than ever.