Spencer Heath Archive

Item 683

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

April 26, 1956?

 

 

 

     Philosophy of science is a phrase commonly thought to designate a purely quantitative approach such as is characteristic of the physical and natural sciences. Those who favor it seem willing to omit or neglect all considerations of human and qualitative or emotional values, such as art, religion, morality, spirituality. Those who oppose a philosophy of science base their opposition upon the supposed exclusively quantitative methodology of the natural sciences.

 

     In my own view, there is no such thing as special or different kinds of philosophy. Philosophy, as such, must deal either with feeling or with thought, emotionality or rationality. If it deals with feeling or emotionality, it may be art or it may be reli­gion, but it cannot be philosophy; to be authentic, it must deal with what is known, and not merely what is felt or believed. It must be rational, not emotional. The only knowledge we have that is rational and non-emotional is the knowledge derived from the natural sciences and verified in objective experience. Only on such knowledge, rational knowledge, for its premises, can any rational philosophy be based. Philosophy, therefore, to be rational, must rest upon the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. Hence there is no rational or authentic philosophy but the philosophy of science.

 

     Philosophy, by most definitions, must be a form or mode of understanding, and not a technological procedure. All such procedures involve either feeling or reason, but there is no motivation other than emotional. Without emotion, cold reason may preside, but without emotion, no action follows.

     The truth about science is that on its research and understanding side, it is prompted by esthetic motivation, a feeling that order, symmetry and beauty are to be found. But it does not pre-judge its conclusions. On the side of application, however, all its conclusions are pre-judged. They are all desiderata towards which it aims, whether the desire is to create or to destroy. The moment science comes into the field of action, it is wholly emotional in its purpose and intent. Only its methodology is rational. Hence, those supposedly philosophic minds who decry the rationality of science, are only looking at one side of it — the side of understanding and method, whether found in nature or adopted by man. The objection to a philosophy of science as being coldly rational depends on disregard of its entire field of human employment, the technological or engineering field.

     To repeat, philosophy is like science in that it must deal with what is known and understood, and not with what is felt and enjoyed or endured. Since there is no rational knowledge but scientific knowledge, there can be no rational philosophy, in fact no philosophy at all apart from religion and art but the philosophy of science.