Philosophy of Science, History Of
Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philosophy in the twentieth century. Its defining moment was the meeting (and clash) of two courses of events: the breakdown of the Kantian philosophical tradition and the crisis in the sciences and mathematics in the beginning of the century. But what we now call philosophy of science has a rich intellectual history that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It is intimately connected with the efforts made by many thinkers to come to terms with the distinctive kind of knowledge (epistēmē, scientia) that science offers. Though science proper was distinguished from natural philosophy only in the nineteenth century, the philosophy of natural philosophy had almost the very same agenda that current philosophy of science has.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) thought that there was a sharp distinction between our understanding of facts and our understanding of the reasons for those facts. Though both types of understanding proceed via deductive syllogism, only the latter is characteristic of science, because only the latter is tied to the knowledge of causes. In Posterior Analytics, Aristotle illustrates this difference by contrasting the following two instances of deductive syllogism:
Syllogism A
Planets do not twinkle.
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