Philosophy of Science in Epistemological Perspective

Abstract

Philosophy of science is a fairly new discipline. Many of the problems in this discipline were discussed by both Muslim and Western philosophers alike without putting these issues into a uniform body of knowledge identifying it as a new field with its specific problems, theories and proper methodology. After the rise of a new philosophical approach in the West, however, some more scientific issues were gathered under the aegis of this name and these were introduced to replace the classical metaphysical approach in philosophy. This new philosophical movement is known as ‘logical atomism’. Evaluating this new approach from an Islamic perspective, we see that it eliminates all kinds of metaphysics in the first place and introduces instead a new discipline that can be called ‘scientific metaphysics’ or ‘meta-philosophical scientism’. Secondly, this philosophical approach attempts to destroy the main perspective of other scientific traditions. We are then forced either to accept this position and thus move within its limits of reasoning or develop a totally new alternative to defend cogently our own perspective.

This article pursues the second alternative to establish afresh a philosophy of science from an Islamic perspective, which is also acceptable by other scientific approaches. To do that, we shall try to abstract ourselves from specific tenets of our tradition without losing its main ground and then try to reach universal characteristics of science that are applicable in all traditions. As history of science instructs, every science has its specific subject matter, method, theories and accumulation of discoveries. We need to identify then the subject matter of philosophy of science, its proper method, theories thus far accumulated and its discoveries. Since science is primarily a knowledge acquisition activity, its essence is imbedded in epistemology which makes it mainly a cognitive activity. Consequently, in this endeavour, our method should also be epistemological. Hopefully, this article exposes philosophy of science as a new discipline from the Islamic perspective with an epistemological approach.

The research involved in this paper was funded by the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA).