PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

“Until the eighteenth century science was included in what was commonly called “philosophy,” but since that time the word “philosophy” has been confined, on its theoretical side, to what is more speculative and general in the topics with which science deals. It is often said that philosophy is unprogressive, but this is largely a verbal matter: as soon as a way is found of arriving at definite knowledge on some ancient question, the new knowledge is counted as belonging to “science,” and “philosophy” is deprived of the credit. In Greek times, and down to the time of Issac Newton, planetary theory belonged to “philosophy,” because it was uncertain and speculative, but Newton took the subject out of the realm of the free play of hypothesis, and made it one requiring a different type of skill from that which it had required when it was still open to fundamental doubts. Anaximander, in the sixth century BC, had a theory of evolution, and maintained that men are descended from fishes. This was philosophy because it was a speculation unsupported by detailed evidence, but Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was science, because it was based on the succession of forms of life as found in fossils, and upon the distribution of animals and plants in many parts of the world.

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: “Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don’t know.” But it should be added that philosophical speculation as to what we do not yet know has shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge. The guesses of the Pythagoreans in astronomy, of Anaximander and Empédocles in biological evolution, and of Democritus as to the atomic constitution of matter, provided the men of science in later times with hypotheses which, but for the philosophers, might never have entered their heads. We may say that, on its theoretical side, philosophy consists, at least in part, in the framing of large general hypotheses which science is not yet in a position to test; but when it becomes possible to test the hypotheses they become, if verified, a part of science, and cease to count as “philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

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