Lehrende: Prof. Dr. Matthias Schemmel; Dr. Rodolfo Garau
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: Readings
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Credits: 3,0
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: 1 | 20
Kommentare/ Inhalte: The relation between philosophy and science has fundamentally changed since early modern times. Nowadays, the sciences are subdivided into a hierarchy of disciplines, each justifying itself by its own respective standards of professionalism. As a consequence, any normative aspiration by philosophy is rejected as a transgression of competence. The majority of early modern inquirers, on the contrary, saw no clear distinction between philosophy and "the sciences". Rather, they understood philosophy as an overarching intellectual endeavor towards the attainment of wisdom, comprising not only metaphysics, ethics, and (often) logic, but also what nowadays we call "sciences", and which early modernists usually referred to as "natural philosophy". Such a comprehensive understanding of philosophy also aimed to provide the edifice of knowledge with unity and coherence. By integrating the different branches of inquiry into an overarching framework, early modern philosophers endeavored to furnish "scientific" inquiry with a metaphysical background, to justify its modes of operation and research method, to explain its epistemic status, or to clarify the goal of scientific endeavor in relation to societal progress. This seminar explores different early modern reflections on, and models of, this now-lost idea of the unity of science and philosophy. It will be based on the close reading and discussion of texts of authors such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. Collectively, we will explore and discuss their respective (views on) science and philosophy and the relation between the two.
