Philosophy Versus Science

Generally when thinking about history the word philosophy doesn’t even come to mind, but it should. Without philosophy people wouldn’t know why they exist, the point of atoms, or even the reason why some human beings get diseases. Philosophy has even emerged into something even bigger, science. But, philosophy hasn’t always been a science it actually developed into one and here’s why.

According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, a philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Philosophy all started in the greek times with the ancient Greeks educating the Romans and continually spreading around their ideas and thoughts. The ancient Greeks even gave us the 3 basics of what philosophy is today, the first aspect is metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with knowing substance, cause, identity, and space. The second aspect is epistemology, the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. The third aspect is ethics, which is the philosophical understanding of good and bad, and right and wrong. This is how it all began and throughout the years many others tried to develop philosophies such as materialism, idealism, and empiricism. But, not everyone believed in these theories, some people argued against these and many other theories by stating their knowledge or reciting scriptures from the bible, or even just stating their beliefs. Also during this time Aristotle, who was as much a scientist as a philosopher established a school of philosophy in 334 and wrote the first book on psychology. The book was the first mentions of many ideas that are basic to psychology today, such as the laws of association. This made many people start wondering whether or not Aristotle’s theories were correct about philosophy. Churches during this time came very offended and felt as if some philosophers were interrogating them about their religion and some members even began to question their position with God, and whether or not what they believed was true. This continues on to the dark ages, where many people started to detract from their religion because after inventions were being created in mathematics, biology, medicine, and astronomy, members began to think that “Maybe these philosophers actually have a point here, the scriptures that we use in the bible are not adding up to the things that happen and that are created around us”. After the church began to split, philosophers had to find a way to prove to the church and others that their theories was right, but how? WIth the solution, came Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon wrote the Novum Organum of 1620 where he refined the art of logical thinking and proposed a new method for science. Bacon came up with the idea that we use induction, which was working from facts to theory. This was a way so that people from the church would realize that some of their beliefs were false and so other philosophers could see that they actually needed to do research instead of going off of knowledge. Also, during this time was Galileo Galilei who made one of the first distinctions which sticks with us today in the modern era. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Secondary qualities were things that required the presence of a conscious, living creature, tastes, odors, colors, and sounds. Primary qualities were physical properties that could be measured, and therefore be made the subject of scientific analysis which came in effect with Francis Bacon’s idea of induction. And you would think that after Bacon and Galilei that people would start to believe in them, but that wasn’t the case for Rene Descartes. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, wrote a book called Meditations where he started a philosophy from scratch by doubting everything he could that went ll the way up to God down to Aristotle. But, in Descartes research he found something that he could not doubt which was the fact that he was there doing the doubting. In this, Descartes felt