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JOHANN OESTERREICHER's avatar

The rejection of Aristotelian physics for Newtonian mechanics is often seen as science triumphing over philosophy, but it’s really philosophy evolving into science. Each paradigm shift, from Boyle’s chemistry to Darwin’s evolution, represents a collaboration between empirical observation and conceptual reasoning. Philosophy sharpens the questions, and science refines the answers, creating a feedback loop that drives human knowledge forward.

I liked the idea that review papers in science often resemble philosophical treatises more than empirical studies. Also, that philosophy excels at framing the "big questions," while science specializes in finding tangible answers.

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Gairik Sachdeva's avatar

Empirical scientific methods and philosophical musings absolutely feed into each other! In Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift model, philosophy contributes both in the pre-science phase, as you allude to here, and also in the model crisis phase, finding gaps in current theories. I love exploring similar progressions in my writing on this platform. Recently, I’ve been captivated by Sara Imari Walker’s Assembly Theory hypotheses as a pre-paradigmatic field of science. She’s trying to explain the origins of life!

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