Philosophy, Science, and History
Feminist historians and philosophers of science typically work on clearly identified and carefully articulated constellations of problems. Some of these problems come into focus when feminist scholars consider how scientists have conducted or practiced their studies of nature and society. Other problems arise when feminist scholars turn their attention to how and why historians and philosophers have arrived at their conceptions of science. This chapter will focus instead on the period and place in Western culture before philosophy and science are conceived of as particular forms of human inquiry, and before anyone spoke of “western culture.” In this period we can see the origins of philosophy and science and how they differed from myth, the dominant cultural genre in Archaic Greece.
There is, of course, another less precise usage of the term philosophy. It can be used to indicate the answers that members of a society give to questions about their origins, about the coming-to-be and workings of the world in which they find themselves, or about the source and force of their laws and customs. Philosophy in this sense includes speculation of the sort that is found in traditional poetry, folk tales, and sagas, all of which are usually grouped under the umbrella term, myth. Myth, like the narratives that preserve it, is universal. It is and has been a universal human activity because speech is part of our biological-historical inheritance. We are the kind of animals for whom it is natural to have a culture, and speech is the primary but not sole means by which human societies keep alive the memory of the past, their religion and ritual, ethics and etiquette, arts, crafts, and technology, customs and folkways – all of the knowledge they need to maintain their culture and their cultural identity. Speaking in a relaxed sense, we can say that myth is the way in which the members of a society preserve their history and their philosophy.
Yet a defining characteristic of philosophy and science and history, as philosophers, scientists, and historians, including many feminists, use these terms, is their difference from myth. If philosophy and science are the opposite of myth, a problem arises. Despite the widespread, if not always acknowledged, assumption of philosophers and scientists that any rational person who thinks long and hard enough about human experience will eventually ask philosophical and scientific questions, philosophy and science in the sense in which they are the opposite of myth are not universal. They emerge during a particular period in human history, the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and in a particular society at a particular place, the Greek-speaking cities on the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. If any rational person who thinks long and hard enough about human experience will ask philosophical and scientific questions, why did philosophy and science emerge, when and where they did? Are we to conclude that these ancient Greek thinkers were “more rational” than their predecessors, assuming that rationality admits of degrees? What should we infer from the fact that most of these Greek thinkers, or at least he ones we know about, were male? Can we avoid the conclusion that those living in societies in which there is no evidence of what we call philosophy and science are less rational than contemporary society or ancient Greek society? Must we agree that there was a Greek miracle, as some historians, in lieu of another explanation, have concluded?
The goal of this chapter is to show that these questions can be answered or put aside once we recognize that the emergence of philosophy and science depended on material cultural resources. It is reasonable to ask why, if material culture is so important in the origins of science and philosophy and is a factor in explaining the near absence of women in these disciplines, this fact has yet to be widely recognized. The answer is that philosophers, including some feminists, have dismissed or distorted the history of philosophy and science. The dismissal of the history of philosophy can be traced to assertions of influential twentieth-century philosophers of science, made at the point in which the philosophy of science was gaining dominance in the English-speaking philosophical world, that the history of philosophy was history and not philosophy (Reichenbach 1951; Carnap 1930/1959; Schlick 1932/1967). When the study of the history of philosophy could not be eliminated for reasons that were economical and institutional as much as philosophical, it was replaced by “rational reconstructions,” that is, the formulation of arguments based on statements “found” in a text from an earlier period in philosophy. These arguments provide the answer that the author of this text would have offered to some “perennial philosophical problem” had he known then what philosophers know now. In rationally reconstructed arguments, little or no distinction is drawn between present day concepts, distinctions, methods, and arguments, and those of the society in which the text was produced. These discussions proceed without much if any consideration of the forms of life or social practices represented in and by the concepts earlier philosopher shared with their audiences. This occurs even when the problem at issue concerns a just society, a just man, or a just act, or asks whether and how we know the natural world of which we are a part.
In the wake of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, itself a revolutionary if not paradigm-changing text, some philosophers of science admitted that the history of science had a place in philosophy of science. It is not clear, however, if one looks at contemporary work in the philosophy of science, including work by feminist philosophers of science, that history has a necessary place. Philosophers have been even more reluctant to admit the importance of the history of philosophy for their discipline. Nearly a century after the Logical Positivists first dismissed the history of philosophy as a history of errors (Schlick 1932/1967) or as logically untenable and therefore meaningless (Carnap 1930/1959), debate continues among philosophers about whether texts from philosophy’s history need should be studied in their historical context, whether “appropriationist” approaches (as rational reconstructions are sometimes called) are desirable or inevitable (Laerke, Smith, and Schliesser 2013), and whether the “problems of philosophy” are perennial or contingent (Waugh and Ariew 2013). Indeed, appropriationist approaches are so widely adopted toward earlier philosophical texts that many philosophers continue to consider contextual approaches to the history of philosophy – when they are acquainted with them at all – as history and not philosophy.
That the emergence of science depended on material cultural resources and that science continues to depend on such resources cannot be denied. Still this fact has not influenced discussions in the philosophy of science as much as we might expect, despite reminders that the history and practice of science consist of experimental interventions in or with the world, made possible by various apparatus, instruments, and machines, as well as by more mundane things like pulleys, springs, glass, metal, string, wax, and wood (Hacking 1983: 149ff). The claim that philosophy and history also depended on material cultural resources was advanced by Eric Havelock a half century ago, and while it has been recognized by those working in Ancient Greek philosophy (Detienne 1986; Cole 1991; Waugh, 1991; Robb 1994; Naddaf 2005) it has not received as much attention from historians of philosophy and historians and philosophers of science as it should have. If philosophy and science are dependent on material culture, then one cannot engage in the study of these disciplines – or their history – without placing them in their cultural and historical context. For feminist philosophy of science, history and material culture have not only a place but also a necessary and central place.
The History of Science and Philosophy
(H)istoria like philosophia and muthos were names of ancient Greek cultural genres before they became the names of putative cultural universals.1 (H)istoria is the Greek word for inquiry, learning through inquiry, the knowledge one has obtained through inquiry, or an account of one’s inquiries, that is, a narrative or history. It is the last sense in which we use history; Herodotus, described as the first historian, wrote a narrative of his inquiries, travels, and studies. History for us is knowledge through texts or documents (Veyne 1984). The earliest scientific and philosophical thinking comes down to us under the title (h)istoria peri phuseōs, an inquiry into nature, the title of works written by individual thinkers from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Taken as a group these thinkers are referred to as the Presocratics, a group from and about whom we possess little in the way of texts or documents. The absence or limited availability of the kinds of material cultural resources we take for granted matters a great deal here, but this is by no means the end of the story.
We possess some fragments from the Presocratics that appear to be in their authors’ original wording, as well as summaries from later – sometimes much later – commentators. These summaries, called testimonia, or the doxographical tradition, were written by ancient commentators. We believe that some commentators had access to manuscripts containing works of the Presocratics, and others, only access to the works of earlier commentators having this access. It is likely that an oral tradition about the Presocratics is reflected in the doxographical record.
What is most striking about these earliest inquiries into nature is that they were, at one and the same time, poetic, philosophical, and scientific. They are written in poetry or “gnomic prose” – loosely connected axiomatic statements, together with expressive poetic language, featuring an accumulation of words and expressions having similar associative meanings and with a liberal use of literary devices such as alliteration and assonance (Thesleff 1966: 90). Nonetheless gnomic prose is the first step toward a scientific style of writing, that is, a style that employs strict argumentation, has a systematic structure of exposition, lacks emotionally evocative, ornamental, and superfluous language, and favors abstract nouns and expressions (Thesleff: 1966: 89). This is the style of writing that is exemplified in Aristotle and to a lesser degree in the Hippocratics, and is reproduced and reflected in Xenophon’s technical writings and in some of Plato’s later dialogues (ibid.).
Tradition has it that the Milesian philosophers, the first scientific philosophers, were the first to write in prose, but we possess only a partial fragment from Anaximander, and none from Thales or Anaximenes. In any case, the Presocratic authors of these texts would not have described their work as poetry, philosophy, or science, or to be more precise, they would not have used the Greek terms poiēsis and philosophia that we transliterate as poetry and philosophy. This raises the question as to how they did think of their work, a question that will take us to a cultural situation quite different from our own. At present, we should note that neither would they have described their work as science since science is a transliteration of the Latin scientia. There is little reason to believe that poiēsis was used in our sense of poetry before the fifth century BCE; the verses composed earlier by Homer and Hesiod, described by the Greeks as the teachers of Hellas, were described as songs. There are no uncontested uses of philosophia or its cognates before the fifth century BCE; for those thinkers we call the Presocratic philosophers philosophy and philosopher would have been new and unfamiliar terms. Philosophia or its cognates are not used in our sense of these terms until the fourth century BCE when both Plato and Isocrates claim philosophia for the activity each purports to teach. The most famous fifth-century occurrence of a cognate expression comes at 2.40.1 in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, where Pericles proclaims: “We Athenians can philosophize without loss of manliness” (or, “without becoming effeminate”). [The disparity between women and men in positions of authority in professional philosophy may prompt the thought that somewhere in the profession’s unconscious lurks still the anxiety that Pericles was trying to allay. On the other hand, since the early modern period, philosophers have sometimes talked as if the mind has no sex, but, as it turns out, it did (Schiebinger 1991).] The closest Greek equivalent to “science” in the sense of exact rigorous thought – epistēmē – is first found in Plato. If “science” is taken as shorthand for “natural science” the closest Greek equivalent is historia peri phuseōs, which is the name given to the works of the Presocratics, whether written in poetry or prose.
What is, perhaps, more puzzling than the fact that the earliest examples of scientific and philosophical thinking are found in poetry and gnomic prose, performed or read aloud before an audience, is that, until recently, this fact has received little more than a passing comment in studies of Presocratic philosophy. The disdain for the history of philosophy that resulted in appropriationist studies being far more common than contextualist studies partly accounts for this lack of discussion. More important, however, is the reason behind this disdain for the history of philosophy, the importance accorded formal languages, at the expense of natural languages, by the philosophers who ushered in the “linguistic turn,” the name given to the period in the English-speaking philosophical world when the philosophy of science became dominant. The value of formal languages lies in their independence from context, unlike the “slag of historical languages” (Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath 1929/1973). As a consequence, many philosophers took formal languages as the model for language, ignoring the differences between speech and written language, or explaining natural languages and how they work on the model of logic. But the independence from context that is the virtue of formal lan...
