Isn't all of science an intellectual descendant from philosophy which speculated on life's ultimate Qs&A's?

Question

My question is asked with a historical view of the origins of science.

Answer 1

Yes, in the sense that all fields of science seek answers to life's most fundamental questions: who are we, where did we come from, what are things made of, how do things work, what's up there in the sky, etc...

Answer 2

Yes, and a lump forms in my throat whenever I'm thinking about philosophical matters and then start wondering if sometime in the future what I'm thinking about will have become a hard science. There's so much we know already that what the future holds is a bit frightening. Will we ever know too much?

Answer 3

Yes it is. The earliest philosophers thought on different questions from nature that before were just answered by myth or religion ("because God made it that way"), this was an early form of science. Also look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy

Answer 4

Math, Science, Philosophy, and others are all interrelated. One isn't a descendant of the other since all need each other to have been created.

Answer 5

Well the mythological dimension brought people together to revel nature first. The rituals of mathmatics come from civilizations that could spare priests to calculate the days, producing advanced calendars and then to wage their piety on the stars... Coming to see the moon's phases and predict eclipses. The philosopher is a descendant of those priests.. well the "western" philosopher anyway.

We wouldn't have the same "science" today without these Greeks. Here's some things to think about: "what's in a name?" right --- the "new" ideas and theories are ascribed to Men of noble families, in the tradition of Homer, Hesiod... these bellicose people deified their heroes, lived in a world of Gods as Men. So they are constantly defining themselves on this backdrop... and the theorizing of nature likewise becomes 'individualized' in this tradition. An antagonism and literary debate ensues.. the dialectic of science and reason based in these mens' desire to be reviled and virtuous gods.

Another thing: the capital return of ideas, the promise of Thales success. Just as the calendar is an invention that behooves agricultral society, A study of the wind, fire, water, matter offers the hope of greater invention, greater prosperity. The architectural achievements made available through mathematics offered aqueducts where there was desert, roads where mud, acropolis where bald-faced hillside. Pythagoras isnt doing JUST mathemeatics, funadmaental axiomatic geometry.. he's purifying himself, He is the priest with a name, idealizing the abstract through his works and life.

Also a certain social structure, convivium, more-or less democratic place allowed for this speculation, that is, a level of freedom to make arts-- and to regard ideas as a kind of art.

Also on the backdrop of mythology , with Nietzsche, the opposition of the Dionysian, chaotic, tragic dimension with the Appolonian clarity, light, logos and reason. Heraclitus contra Socrates. The Greeks were a people that believed in the truth of tragedy, involving themselves in the chorus, dancing with thier fatal lives, understanding the world through the erotic, and the pitiful. A family immersed with the gods with no unifying principles, satyrs piping a song. The Appolonian enlightens us with harmony out of dischord, sheds light, offers the word as divinely pure and sanctimonious. Reason as yet another form of piety -- in itself a form of revelery.

Socrates takes this logos up with passion. Through many logical prestidigitations he Forces his interlocuters to accept their circularity and contradiction.. but How? The fundamental appeal to absurdity. The pride of each citizen resting on their virtue.. to deny that A=A was to ostracize oneself, to risk becoming men of contradiction and losing their estate in the assembly. Socrates feeds his interlocutors line after line, they should not accept, and forces the contradiction. In his demonstration.. what is proved? that man of rhetoric know nothing by way of logic and reason. And what is supplanted by way of mimesis, of narrative, poetry and analog!! the unpure forms of man--- the allegory of the cave, which defers reality to the explanation of it, to metempsychosis or the transmigration of the soul, by way of Story. How a man came to recognize the shield he used in the Trojan war in a past life. Of the daimon on his shoulder, telling him right from wrong. Of the acknowledgement of deja Vu. That my friend is the beginning of the end when he MAKES the pure world of the forms more real, the ultimate real. The ultimate deification and abstraction. That's why Socrates is where he is in Dante's Inferno-- the most sibilant echelon, the purveyor and mystic saint that paved the way for the church of God.

How different is Aristotle from this tradition?
Even this great man who was the first systematic and paradigmatic philosopher to engage on the world with encyclopedic detail... Is not 'free' from the religion of the "universal". Science develops, in proto-scientific method centuries immersed in the categorical, logical, and mathmatical.

For what 'reason"? Virtue, harmony, beauty, purity of human nature. To "know thyself" in the world. Scientists weren't" loving wisdom", they were living as pious figures, saintly, divine, and principled.

Answer 6

yes, i wish everyone who had an idea about science or religion(i'm using these terms loosely) would get together and talk about it. i'm sure it would result in a better outcome