Philosophy: Queen of Sciences?

Philosophy can easily tell a story about how society runs, and how humans will think about these societal changes. The very nature of philosophy is to ask questions, to see how objects and people and nature work at its very core. Because of this curiosity about the knowledge that the world can offer, science and philosophy are directly related. Philosophy shares the same knowledge pool as science, and because of its link to scientific findings and processes, it earns its title as the ‘queen of sciences.

Philosophy is commonly known as the ‘queen of the sciences.’ The word philosophy is a neologism that is attributed to the term ‘Pythagoras,’ which literally means ‘love of wisdom’ in Greek. This represents philosophy as a “high or supreme achievement of men,” and notes philosophers as proponents of wisdom (Maziarz 275). In this sense, philosophy implies that the processes of questioning and the results of this interrogation as “embodied in a personal or public enterprise of value to mankind” (Maziarz 275). It is an age-old study of wisdom and knowledge, and this is the first, impenetrable link between philosophy and science.

In Paolo Parrini’s article “Science and Philosophy,” he notes that, though there are strong links between science and philosophy, they are not simply links. The article reads: “on the contrary, they are complex and very often conflicting” (89). It notes an example about Galileo; he undertook research that covered problems that were both experimental and mathematical in nature, and he questioned how one should study different topics and such, as well as how it should be introduced. “In his mind, how one should describe something in words, what methodological principles and theoretical and ontological standpoints to adopt on the nature of the object under investigation, were intermeshed in a strict sense with the scientific questions” (Parrini 90). Each scientific question that leads to experimentation, to finding new things that sometimes change how the entire world functions, starts with some type of wisdom, a thought process, that is the scientist’s personal philosophy in regards to how they see the world.

Philosophy has greatly influenced scientific thought. Parrini writes that the examples are too numerous to name all of them, and that is exactly correct. Every scientist or mathematician thinks very deeply about their experiments and findings, and many compare and contrast these with others, and in terms of how they will affect lives.

One very remarkable example is the philosophy that is associated with the birth of non-Euclidean geometry. The elaboration of this type of geometric system has been one of the major reasons for the crisis found by several traditional philosophical concepts, “on the intuitive evidence of some logical and mathematical truth, and hence on their universal and necessary validity” (Parrini 92). Although the entire premise of this example is mathematic, there was a strong philosophical base behind this discovery.

Philosophy means ‘love of wisdom’ in its literal Greek translation, and that is how it stands, no matter how it is used – scientifically or psychologically. In the 2004 article "From Daily Life to Philosophy,” the author notes that an important first step to understanding how philosophy connects with daily life is to ask open-ended questions (Bransen 520). This particular article highlights various questions and life-situations in order to connect philosophy to life.

Bransen writes: “likewise, saying that someone is an expert in practice is to make a statement about the practice in general, about the expert’s ability to engage in a pattern of behavior over and over again” (524). The questions asked in science, the hypotheses that are studied, are weaved through and through with the science of philosophy. Science is about knowledge, expansion, and getting to know the world and nature a little better. Philosophy is very much the same.

Philosophy is a precise science: it is the science of knowledge and wisdom; it counts for the application of this knowledge and wisdom into any situation. Its title of Queen means that it has dominion over the other sciences, and directly affects these schools of thought in that its rules fit into every keyhole. Teaching philosophy is a very important part of science in that it marks the rules and the thought processes of each thought.

Works Cited

Bransen, Jan. "From Daily Life to Philosophy." Metaphilosophy 35.4 (2004): 517-535. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.

Maziarz, E. A. "Philosophy." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale, 2003. 275-281. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.

Parrini, Paolo. “Science and Philosophy.” Diogenes, 57 (4): 2010. 89-102. Web. 4 Feb. 2014. <http://dio.sagepub.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/content/57/4/89>.