Philosophy Of Science

🇬🇧Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy

1861–1947

"Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."

🇺🇸Daniel Dennett

Philosophy

analytic philosophy

1942–2024

"Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores."

🇺🇸Thomas Kuhn

Philosophy

Western philosophy

1922–1996

"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion."

🇩🇪George Berkeley

Philosophy

Empiricism

1685–1753

"Abstract terms should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves."

🇫🇷Gaston Bachelard

Philosophy

historical epistemology

1884–1962

"To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer."

🇭🇺Ervin László

Philosophy

b. 1932

"Systems at each level of integration function as wholes with respect to their parts and parts with respect to higher level wholes."

🇺🇸Judea Pearl

Science

b. 1936

"A quantity Q is identifiable, given a set of assumptions A, iffor any two models M1 and M2 that satisfy A, we have"

🇨🇦Ian Hacking

Philosophy

historical epistemology

1936–2023

"A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'."

🇧🇷Guido Beck

Science

1903–1988

"You need only a sheet of paper and so mathematics starts."

"a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance."

🇨🇦Patricia Churchland

Philosophy

humanism

b. 1943

"InConversation Radio Interview with Robyn Williams"

"Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr; Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks."

"The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing."

"Obviously enough, we cannot decide what evolution entails without a fairly sharp conception of what it is."

"A far as perception is concerned, the only things with which an observer has direct and immediate contact are his or her experiences."

🇫🇷Louis Althusser

Philosophy

Marxism

1918–1990

"While speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific discourse on ideology."

🇦🇷Mario Bunge

Philosophy

Materialism

1919–2020

"At all times pseudoprofound aphorisms have been more popular than rigorous arguments."

"The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange."

🇫🇷Pierre Duhem

Science

Positivism

1861–1916

"A physical theory reputed to be satisfactory by the sectarians of one metaphysical school will be rejected by the partisans of another school."

Ernest Gellner

Philosophy

critical rationalism

1925–1995

"Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society."

🇬🇧Mary Midgley

Literature

1919–2018

"Arguments can always be answered. Moral philosophy, unlike straight moralizing, arises from and trives on plurality of values."