Raíces filosóficas del pensamiento científico

Abstract

The beginning of this work takes us back to the ancient Greece, where the first philosophers laid the foundations for rational thought, the logos. The Ionian physicists, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus and Parmenides, or the pluralists already raised some of the great questions of philosophy and, in particular, some of the points that we will deal with, concerning the relationship between philosophy and modern science: change, the qualities, the being… After the sophistic stage, Socrates put philosophy back on track, and it was one of his pupils, Plato, who was responsible for developing the first great philosophical system of the West. With his theory of Ideas, Plato discovered immaterial being and thus metaphysics. He therefore opened up a new field of knowledge, the implications of which were to serve not only the early Christians, for example St. Augustine, to develop a philosophy based on their faith. Even in the scientific revolution, both in Galileo's mathematical universe and in the laws of nature as understood by Newton and Descartes, it is difficult not to see a certain echo of Platonism. The next great system of Greek philosophy was carried out by one of Plato's pupils, Aristotle. The philosopher of Stagira went against his master, understanding the essence of being, not as something separate from the body, but inseparable from it. Being is not only matter, but matter and form, forming an indissoluble compound. The Stagirite understood that only in this way was it possible to explain change, which had been, since Heraclitus and Parmenides, the great question of Greek thought. Aristotle will inspire medieval scholasticism, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, which will shape the Aristotelian-scholastic image of the world, to which the scientific revolution will be so firmly opposed. However, as we shall see at the end of this paper, the thought that emerged as a result of the scientific revolution was not able to explain the world to the same extent as the Aristotelian categories. Then Alexander the Great inaugurated the Hellenistic era. For the first time in the history of the West, philosophy and natural science were separated. The former, with its capital in Athens, focused on man and how he should live his life. Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics and Skeptics were the great schools of the Hellenistic era. The natural sciences flourished in Alexandria, around the library and museum. Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes and Hipparchus are some of the great names of this period. We leave the Greek world behind to plunge into Rome. Philosophically, it could be said that it was the Helad that conquered Rome; the Hellenistic and Platonist schools continued in Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, which inspired the first Christian philosophers. In strictly scientific matters, theoretical knowledge gave way to practical knowledge, Ptolemy and Galen being the only new exceptions. The Christian Middle Ages began by uniting Platonism with faith in Christ, as we have already mentioned. Patristics was followed by scholasticism, which found its greatest exponent in St Thomas, and with him, Aristotelianism definitively found its place in Christian thought. In the scientific sphere, from the 13th century onwards, interest in the natural sciences was reborn in Saint Albert the Great, Rogerius Bacon and Grosseteste, for example. In fact, we could say that modern science found its foundations in the late Middle Ages. The medieval period was brought to a closing by William of Ockham, who dynamited traditional metaphysics, and with it the relationship between faith and reason on which much of Christian philosophy had been based. He thus opened the way for what was to become modern science. The Renaissance is, above all, a period of change; literary, political and even magical interests. We also find some predecessors of the scientific method, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Telesius. On the other hand, the religious issues arising from the Reformation will greatly influence the philosophy born in the scientific revolution. The revolution, in its purely scientific aspect, ranges from Copernicus to Newton. However, in its philosophical aspect, on which we will focus, there are four characters to take into account: Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and Newton. The first, although an advocate of the experimental method, can hardly be included among the fathers of modern science, since the complexity of his method makes it impracticable. However, the eminently practical character that, according to him, science should have, makes him a forerunner, and perhaps the spiritual father of the industrial revolution. Galileo puts forward a new concept of experiment in which the mind, through theory, plays an active role in the process of observing nature. To this end, he postulates a Universe written in mathematical language which allows its precise description, as well as the prediction of its behaviour. Hence, the modern scientific method was born, leaving behind all unquantifiable qualities and finality in nature. The founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, begins his philosophy with a universal doubt that calls into question all knowledge. In this way, using his famous method, he constructed a philosophy of mechanistic character, in which the dualism between matter (understood as pure extension) and the mind (totally distinct from matter) stands out. At last, Isaac Newton culminated the scientific revolution. He took up the principle of economy on which Ockham had based his philosophy and, in the light of his theory of gravitation, he conceived a uniform nature indistinguishable in heaven and earth, and postulated a corpuscular world, extensive and impenetrable, with no other quality than its motion and inertia. These corpuscles move in obedience to the laws of nature, which ultimately have a theological foundation. We will end by discussing some of the notions that the mechanistic worldview neglects, such as teleology or form. We will see how these conceptions entail major problems which, nevertheless, Aristotelian philosophy manages to solve with solvency