Question What is the basic difference between philosophy and science?

Accepted:
October 30, 2005

Comments

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. There are a number of answers that seem to have something going for them, but also face various difficulties

We might say that science is empirical, based on observation and experiment, whereas you can do philosophy with your eyes closed. But some parts of science are highly conceptual and far removed from the data, and on the other side a number of philosophers have denied that philosophy or any other form of inquiry could be entirely independent of empirical evidence.

We might say that science concerns how things are while philosophy concerns how things ought to be. But although questions about how we ought to act and what we ought to believe are central to philosophy, there are also other, more descriptive aspects of philosophy, such as metaphysical questions about what sorts of things exist.

We might say that science asks questions that we know in principle how to answer, whereas philosophy asks questions which, although they seem sensible, also seem fundamentally too hard for us. But there are also some scientific questions that we don't know how even to begin to answer, and on my very optimistic days I like to think that there are some philosophical questions that we can at least make some headway towards answering.

The difficulty Peter reports might encourage the thought that there is no "basic difference" between the two. For various sociological, historical, and bureaucratic reasons, we might label some rational inquiry "science" and some "philosophy", but one should not imagine that the labels follow fault lines within the world of inquiry.

(But then one wants to say: isn't the basic difference between science and philosophy, or the manifestation thereof, that the former would never stop to ask what the basic difference is between science and philosophy, while the latter is kept up at night by that question?)

Question What is the basic difference between philosophy and science? Accepted:October 30, 2005

Question What is the basic difference between philosophy and science?

Accepted:
October 30, 2005