Philosopher Colin McGinn may not be the most popular professor in the academy these days, but his recent thoughts on “The Science of Philosophy” (which might just qualify as one of the shortest academic papers ever) have left me pondering whether science is just a branch of philosophy. Here is an excerpt (footnotes omitted):
“What is the nature of philosophy? Two views have been influential. One view is that philosophy is “continuous with science”–a kind of proto science or a commentary on the sciences or a synthesis of them. According to this view, philosophy is an empirical discipline, though more removed from the data than typical science: it is not different in kind from physics, chemistry and biology. Thus the subject of philosophy comes under the general heading of “science” because of its methodological similarity to the regular sciences. * * * The second view is that philosophy is quite unlike empirical science, both in methodology and subject matter: it is an a priori discipline, removed from observation and experiment. According to this view, philosophy is to be contrasted with empirical science, and is often regarded as properly one of the “humanities”. * * * Thus philosophy is held not to be a branch of science, having its own distinctive nature as a field of enquiry.”
In other words, is philosophy a science, or science a way of doing philosophy? Which view provides a better description of what philosophers do? What would Wittgenstein say?
