essays in science and philosophy

The Library of Consciousness

Alfred North Whitehead

Essays in Science and Philosophy

This is a collection of many of Whitehead’s papers that are scattered elsewhere. It was the penultimate book he published, and represents his mature thoughts on many topics. The first three chapters consist of Whitehead’s personal reflections illumined by flashes of his lively humor. They are picturesque and amusing. The remainder of the book consists of chapters on Philosophy, Education, and Science. They cover in depth his positions on many scientific and philosophical matters in an extraordinarily unified way. The final section of the book is devoted to excellent surveys of Geometry and Mathematics as well as a paper on Einstein’s theories.

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Essays in science and philosophy

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Alfred north whitehead (1861—1947).

Whitehead’s decades-long focus on the logical and algebraic issues of space and geometry which led to his work on extension, became an integral part of an explosion of profoundly original philosophical work He began publishing even as his career as an academic mathematician was reaching a close. The first wave of these philosophical works included his Enquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge , The Concept of Nature , and The Principle of Relativity , published between 1919 and 1922. These books address the philosophies of science and nature, and include an important critique of the problem of measurement raised by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. They also present an alternative theory of space and gravity. Whitehead built his system around an event-based ontology that interpreted time as essentially extensive rather than point-like.

Facing mandatory retirement in England, Whitehead accepted a position at Harvard in 1924, where he continued his philosophical output. His Science and the Modern World offers a careful critique of orthodox scientific materialism and presents his first worked-out version of the related fallacies of “misplaced concreteness” and “simple location.” The first fallacy is the error of treating an abstraction as though it were concretely real. The second is the error of assuming that anything that is real must have a simple spatial location. But the pinnacle of Whitehead’s metaphysical work came with his monumental Process and Reality in 1929 and his Adventures of Ideas in 1933. The first of these books gives a comprehensive and multi-layered categoreal system of internal and external relations that analyzes the logic of becoming an extension within the context of a solution to the problem of the one and the many, while also providing a ground for his philosophy of nature. The second is an outline of a philosophy of history and culture within the framework of his metaphysical scheme.

Table of Contents

• Major Thematic Structures
• Mathematical Works
• Writings on Education
• Philosophy of Nature
• Metaphysical Works
• Influence and Legacy
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources

1. Biography

Alfred North Whitehead was born on February 15 th , 1861 at Ramsgate in Kent, England, to Alfred and Maria Whitehead. Thought by his parents to be too delicate for the rough and tumble world of the English public school system, young Alfred was initially tutored at home. Ironically, when he was finally placed in public school, Whitehead became both head boy of his house and captain of his school’s rugby team. Whitehead always looked upon his days as a boy as a rather idyllic time. The education he received at home was always congenial to his natural habit of thinking, and he was able to spend long periods of time walking about in English country settings that were rich with history.

While Whitehead always enjoyed the classics, his true strength was with mathematics. Because of both its quality, and the unique opportunity to take the entrance examinations early, Alfred tested for Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1879, a year before he would otherwise have been allowed to enter. Whitehead’s focus was in mathematics, as were those of about half the hopefuls that were taking the competitive exams that year. While not in the very top tier, Whitehead’s exam scores were nevertheless good enough to gain him entrance into Trinity for the school year beginning in 1880, along with a £50 scholarship. While the money was certainly important, the scholarship itself qualified Whitehead for further rewards and considerations, and set him on the path to eventually being elected a Fellow of Trinity.

This happened in 1884, with the completion of his undergraduate work and his high standing in the finals examinations in mathematics for that year. Whitehead’s early career was focused on teaching, and it is known that he taught at Trinity during every term from 1884 to 1910. He traveled to Germany during an off-season at Cambridge (probably 1885), in part to learn more of the work of such German mathematicians as Felix Klein. Whitehead was also an ongoing member of various intellectual groups at Cambridge during this period. But he published nothing of note, and while he was universally praised as a teacher, the youthful Alfred displayed little promise as a researcher.

In 1891, when he was thirty years of age, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade. Evelyn was in every respect the perfect wife and partner for Alfred. While not conventionally intellectual, Evelyn was still an extremely bright woman, fiercely protective of Alfred and his work, and a true home-maker in the finest sense of the term. Although Evelyn herself was never fully accepted into the social structures of Cambridge society, she always ensured that Alfred lived in a comfortable, tastefully appointed home, and saw to it that he had the space and opportunity to entertain fellow scholars and other Cambrians in a fashion that always reflected well upon the mathematician.

It is also in this period that Whitehead began work on his first major publication, his Treatise on Universal Algebra . Perhaps with his new status as a family man, Whitehead felt the need to better establish himself as a Cambridge scholar. The book would ultimately be of minimal influence in the mathematical community. Indeed, the mathematical discipline that goes by that name shares only its name with Whitehead’s work, and is otherwise a very different area of inquiry. Still, the book established Whitehead’s reputation as a scholar of note, and was the basis for his 1903 election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

It was after the publication of this work that Whitehead began the lengthy collaboration with his student, and ultimately Trinity Fellow, Bertrand Russell, on that monumental work that would become the Principia Mathematica . However, the final stages of this collaboration would not occur within the precincts of Cambridge. By 1910, Whitehead had been at Trinity College for thirty years, and he felt his creativity was being stifled. But it was also in this year that Whitehead’s friend and colleague Andrew Forsyth’s long-time affair with a married woman turned into a public indiscretion. It was expected that Forsyth would lose his Cambridge professorship, but the school took the extra step of withdrawing his Trinity Fellowship as well. Publicly in protest of this extravagant action, Whitehead resigned his own professorship (though not his Fellowship) as well. Privately, it was the excuse he needed to shake up his own life.

At the age of 49 and lacking even the promise of a job, Whitehead moved his family to London, where he was unemployed for the academic year of 1910 – 11. It was Evelyn who borrowed or bullied the money from their acquaintances that kept the family afloat during that time. Alfred finally secured a lectureship at University College, but the position offered no chance of growth or advancement for him. Finally in 1914, the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London appointed him as a professor of applied Mathematics.

It was here that Whitehead’s initial burst of philosophical creativity occurred. His decades of research into logic and spatial reasoning expressed itself in a series of three profoundly original books on the subjects of science, nature, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. At the same time, Whitehead maintained his teaching load while also assuming an increasing number of significant administrative duties. He was universally praised for his skill in all three of these general activities. However, by 1921 Whitehead was sixty years old and facing mandatory retirement within the English academic system. He would only be permitted to work until his sixty-fifth birthday, and then only with an annual dispensation from Imperial College. So it was that in 1924, Whitehead accepted an appointment as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.

While Whitehead’s work at Imperial College is impressive, the explosion of works that came during his Harvard years is absolutely astounding. These publications include Science and the Modern World , Process and Reality , and Adventures of Ideas .

Whitehead continued to teach at Harvard until his retirement in 1937. He had been elected to the British Academy in 1931, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1945. He died peacefully on December 30 th , 1947. Per the explicit instructions in his will, Evelyn Whitehead burned all of his unpublished papers. This action has been the source of boundless regret for Whitehead scholars, but it was Whitehead’s belief that evaluations of his thought should be based exclusively on his published work.

2. Thought and Writings

A. major thematic structures.

The thematic and historical analyses of Whitehead’s work largely coincide. However, these two approaches naturally lend themselves to slightly different emphases, and there are important historical overlaps of the dominating themes of his thought. So it is worthwhile to view these themes ahistorically prior to showing their temporal development.

The first of these thematic structures might reasonably be called “the problem of space.” The confluence of several trends in mathematical research set this problem at the very forefront of Whitehead’s own inquiries. James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on electromagnetism had been published in 1873, and Maxwell himself taught at Cambridge from 1871 until his death in 1879. The topic was a major subject of interest at Cambridge, and Whitehead wrote his Trinity Fellowship dissertation on Maxwell’s theory. During the same period, William Clifford in England, and Felix Klein and Wilhelm Killing in Germany were advancing the study of spaces of constant curvature. Whitehead was well aware of their work, as well as that of Hermann Grassmann, whose ideas would later become of central importance in tensor analysis.

The second major trend of Whitehead’s thought can be usefully abbreviated as “the problem of history,” although a more accurate descriptive phrase would be “the problem of the accretion of value.” Of the two themes, this one can be the more difficult to discern within Whitehead’s corpus, partly because it is often implicit and does not lend itself to formalized analysis. In its more obvious forms, this theme first appears in Whitehead’s writings on education. However, even in his earliest works, Whitehead’s concern with the function of symbolism as an instrument in the growth of knowledge shows a concern for the accretion of value. Nevertheless, it is primarily with his later philosophical work that this topic emerges as a central element and primary focus of his thought.

b. The Early Mathematical Works

Whitehead’s first major publication was his A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications (“UA,” 1898.) (Whenever appropriate, common abbreviations will be given, along with the year of publication, for Whitehead’s major works.) Originally intended as a two-volume work, the second volume never appeared as Whitehead’s thinking on the subject continued to evolve, and as the plans for Principia Mathematica eventually came to incorporate many of the objectives of this volume. Despite the “algebra” in the title, the work is primarily on the foundations of geometry and formal spatial relations. UA offers little in the way of original research by Whitehead. Rather, the work is primarily expository in character, drawing together a number of previously divergent and scattered themes of mathematical investigation into the nature of spatial relations and their underlying logic, and presenting them in a systematic form.

While the book helped establish Whitehead’s reputation as a scholar and was the basis of his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, UA had little direct impact on mathematical research either then or later. Part of the problem was the timing and approach of Whitehead’s method. For while he was very explicit about the need for the rigorous development of symbolic logic, Whitehead’s logic was “algebraic” in character. That is to say, Whitehead’s focus was on relational systems of order and structure preserving transformations. In contrast, the approaches of Giuseppe Peano and Gottlob Frege, with their emphasis on proof and semantic relations, soon became the focus of mathematical attention. While these techniques were soon to become of central importance for Whitehead’s own work, the centrality of algebraic methods to Whitehead’s thinking is always in evidence, especially in his philosophy of nature and metaphysics. The emphasis on structural relations in these works is a key component to understanding his arguments.

In addition, UA itself was one in a rising chorus of voices that had begun to take the work of Hermann Grassmann seriously. Grassmann algebras would come to play a vital role in tensor analysis and general relativity. Finally, the opening discussion of UA regarding the importance and uses of formal symbolism remains of philosophical interest, both in its own right and as an important element in Whitehead’s later thought.

Other early works by Whitehead include his two short books, the Axioms of Projective Geometry (1906) and the Axioms of Descriptive Geometry (1907). These works take a much more explicitly logical approach to their subject matter, as opposed to the algebraic techniques of Whitehead’s first book. However, it remains the case that these two works are not about presenting cutting edge research so much as they are about the clear and systematic development of existing materials. As suggested by their titles, the approach is axiomatic, with the axioms chosen for their illustrative and intuitive value, rather than their strictly logical parsimony. As such, these books continue to serve as clear and concise introductions to their subject matters.

Even as he was writing the two Axioms books, Whitehead was well into the collaboration with Bertrand Russell that would lead to the three volumes of the Principia Mathematica . Although most of the Principia was written by Russell, the work itself was a truly collaborative endeavor, as is demonstrated by the extant correspondence between the two. The intention of the Principia was to deduce the whole of arithmetic from absolutely fundamental logical principles. But Whitehead’s role in the project, besides working with Russell on the vast array of details in the first three volumes, was to be the principal author of a fourth volume whose focus would be the logical foundations of geometry. Thus, what Whitehead had originally intended to be the second volume of UA had transformed into the fourth volume of the Principia Mathematica , and like that earlier planned volume, the fourth part of Principia Mathematica never appeared. It would not be until Whitehead’s published work on the theory of extension, work that never appeared independently but always as a part of a larger philosophical enterprise, that his research into the foundations of geometry would finally pay off.

c. Writings on Education

By the time the Principia was published, Whitehead had left his teaching position at Trinity, and eventually secured a lectureship at London’s University College. It was in these London years that Whitehead published a number of essays and addresses on the theory of education. But it would be a mistake to suppose that his concern with education began with the more teaching-oriented (as opposed to research-oriented) positions he occupied after departing Cambridge. Whitehead had long been noted as an exceptional lecturer by his students at Cambridge. He also took on less popular teaching duties, such as teaching at the non-degree conferring women’s institutions associated with Cambridge of Girton and Newham colleges.

Moreover, the concern for the conveyance of ideas is evident from the earliest of Whitehead’s writings. The very opening pages of UA are devoted to a discussion of the reasons and economies of well-chosen symbols as aids to the advancement of thought. Or again, the intention underlying the two Axioms books was not so much the advancement of research as the communication of achieved developments in mathematics. Whitehead’s book, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), published in the midst of the effort to get the Principia out, had no research agenda per se . This book was again entirely devoted toward introducing students to the character of mathematical thought, to the methods of abstraction, the nature of variables and functions, and to offer some sense of the power and generality of these formalisms.

Whitehead’s essays that specifically address education often do so with the explicit desire to revise the teaching of mathematics in England. But they also argue, both explicitly and implicitly, for a balance of liberal education devoted to the opening of the mind, with technical education intended to facilitate the vocational aptitudes of the student. Education for Whitehead was never just the mere memorization of ancient stories and empty abstractions, any more than it was just the technical training of the working class. It always entailed the growth of the student as a fully functioning human being. In this respect, as well as others, Whitehead’s arguments compare favorably with those of John Dewey .

Whitehead never systematized his educational thought the way Dewey did, so these ideas must be gleaned from his various essays and looked for as an implicit foundation to such larger works as his Adventures of Ideas (see below). Many of Whitehead’s essays on education were collected together in The Aims of Education , published in 1929, as well as his Essays in Science and Philosophy , published in 1948.

d. The Philosophy of Nature

Whitehead’s interest in the problem of space was, at least from his days as a graduate student at Cambridge, more than just an interest in the purely formal or mathematical aspects of geometry. It is to be recalled that his dissertation was on Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, which was a major development in the ideas that led to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment to measure the so-called “Ether drift” was a response to Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. Einstein himself offers only a generic nod toward the experiments regarding space and light in his 1905 paper on special relativity. The problem Einstein specifically cites in that paper is the lack of symmetry then to be found in theories of space and the behavior of electromagnetic phenomena. By 1910, when the first volume of the Principia Mathematica was being published, Hermann Minkowski had reorganized the mathematics of Einstein’s special relativity into a four-dimensional non-Euclidean manifold. By 1914, two years before the publication of Einstein’s paper on general relativity, theoretical developments had advanced to the extent that an expedition to the Crimea was planned to observe the predicted bending of stellar light around the sun during an eclipse. This expedition was cancelled with the eruption of the First World War.

These developments helped conspire to prevent Whitehead’s planned fourth volume of the Principia from ever appearing. A few papers appeared during the war years, in which a relational theory of space begins to emerge. What is perhaps most notable about these papers is that they are no longer specifically mathematical in nature, but are explicitly philosophical. Finally, in 1919 and 1920, Whitehead’s thought appeared in print with the publications of two books, An Enquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge (“PNK,” 1919) and The Concept of Nature (“CN,” 1920).

While PNK is much more formally technical than CN, both books share a common and radical view of nature and science that rejects the identification of nature with the mathematical tools used to characterize its relational structures. Nature for Whitehead is that which is experienced through the senses. For this reason, Whitehead argues that there are no such things as “points” of either time or space. An infinitesimal point is a high abstraction with no experiential reality, while time and space are irreducibly extensional in character.

To account for the effectiveness of mathematical abstractions in their application to natural knowledge, Whitehead introduced his theory of “extensive abstraction.” By using the logical and topological structures of concentric part-whole relations, Whitehead argued that abstract entities such as geometric points could be derived from the concrete, extensive relations of space and time. These abstract entities, in their turn, could be shown to be significant of the nature they had been abstractively derived from. Moreover, since these abstract entities were formally easier to use, their significance of nature could be retained through their various deductive relations, thereby giving evidence for further natural significances by this detour through purely abstract relations.

Whitehead also rejected “objects” as abstractions, and argued that the fundamental realities of both experience and nature are events. Events are themselves irreducibly extended entities, where the temporal / durational extension is primary. “Objects” are the idealized significances that retain a stable meaning through an event or family of events.

It is important to note here that Whitehead is arguing for a kind of empiricism. But, as Victor Lowe has noted, this empiricism is more akin to the ideas of William James than it is to the logical positivism of Whitehead’s day. In other words, Whitehead is arguing for a kind of Jamesian “radical empiricism,” in which sense-data are abstractions, and the basic deliverances of raw experience include such things as relations and complex events.

These ideas were further developed with the publication of Whitehead’s The Principles of Relativity with Applications to Natural Science (“R,” 1922). Here Whitehead proposed an alternative physical theory of space and gravity to Einstein’s general relativity. Whitehead’s theory has commonly been classified as “quasi-linear” in the physics literature, when it should properly be describes as “bimetric.” Einstein’s theory collapses the physical and the spatial into a single metric, so that gravity and space are essentially identified. Whitehead pointed out that this then loses the logical relations necessary to make meaningful cosmological measurements. In order to make meaningful measurements of space, we must know the geometry of that space so that the congruence relations of our measurement instruments can be projected through that space while retaining their significance. Since Einstein’s theory loses the distinction between the physical and the geometrical, the only way we can know the geometry of the space we are trying to measure is if we first know the distributions of matter and energy throughout the cosmos that affect that geometry. But we can only know these distributions if we can first make accurate measurements of space. Thus, as Whitehead argued, we are left in the position of first having to know everything before we can know anything.

Whitehead argued that the solution to this problem was to separate the necessary relations of geometry from the contingent relations of physics, so that one’s theory of space and gravity is “bimetric,” or is built from the two metrics of geometry and physics. Unfortunately, Whitehead never used the term “bimetric,” and his theory has often been misinterpreted. Questions of the viability of Whitehead’s specific theory have needlessly distracted both philosophers and physicists from the real issue of the class of theories of space and gravity that Whitehead was arguing for. Numerous viable bimetric alternatives to Einstein’s theory of relativity are currently known in the physics literature. But because Whitehead’s theory has been misclassified and its central arguments poorly understood, the connections between Whitehead’s philosophical arguments and these physical theories have largely gone unnoticed.

e. The Metaphysical Works

The problems Whitehead had engaged with his triad of works on the philosophy of nature and science required a complete re-evaluation of the assumptions of modern science. To this end, Whitehead published Science in the Modern World (“SMW,” 1925). This work had both a critical and a constructive aspect, although the critical themes occupied most of Whitehead’s attention. Central to those critical themes was Whitehead’s challenge to dogmatic scientific materialism developed through an analysis of the historical developments and contingencies of that belief. In addition, he continued with the themes of his earlier triad, arguing that objects in general, and matter in particular, are abstractions. What are most real are events and their mutual involvements in relational structures.

Already in PNK, Whitehead had characterized electromagnetic phenomena by saying that while such phenomena could be related to specific vector quantities at each specific point of space, they express “at all points one definite physical fact” (PNK, 29). Physical facts such as electromagnetic phenomena are single, relational wholes, but they are spread out across the cosmos. In SMW Whitehead called the failure to appreciate this holism and the relational connectedness of reality, “the fallacy of simple location.” According to Whitehead, much of contemporary science, driven as it was by the dogma of materialism, was committed to the fallacy that only such things as could be localized at a mathematically simple “point” of space and time were genuinely real. Relations and connections were, in this dogmatic view, secondary to and parasitic upon such simply located entities. Whitehead saw this as reversing the facts of nature and experience, and devoted considerable space in SMW to criticizing it.

A second and related fallacy of contemporary science was what Whitehead identified in SMW as, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” While misplaced concreteness could include treating entities with a simple location as more real than those of a field of relations, it also went beyond this. Misplaced concreteness included treating “points” of space or time as more real than the extensional relations that are the genuine deliverances of experience. Thus, this fallacy resulted in treating abstractions as though they were concretely real. In Whitehead’s view, all of contemporary physics was infected by this fallacy, and the resultant philosophy of nature had reversed the roles of the concrete and the abstract.

The critical aspects of SMW were ideas that Whitehead had already expressed (in different forms) in his previous publications, only now with more refined clarity and persuasiveness. On the other hand, the constructive arguments in SMW are astonishing in their scope and subtlety, and are the first presentation of his mature metaphysical thinking. For example, the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

SMW goes far beyond the purely epistemic program of Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. The final three chapters, entitled “God,” “Religion and Science,” and “Requisites for Social Progress,” clearly announce the explicit emergence of the second major thematic strand of Whitehead’s thought, the “problem of history” or “the accretion of value.” Moreover, these topics are engaged with the same thoroughly relational approach that Whitehead previously used with nature and science.

Despite the foreshadowing of these last chapters of SMW, Whitehead’s next book may well have come as a surprise to his academic colleagues. Whitehead’s brief Religion in the Making (“RM,” 1926) tackles no part of his earlier thematic problem of space, but instead focuses entirely on the second thematic of history and value. Whitehead defines religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness” (RM 16). Yet it is still Whitehead the algebraist who is constructing this definition. Solitariness is understood as a multi-layered relational modality of the individual in and toward the world. In addition, this relational mode cannot be understood in separation from its history. On this point, Whitehead compares religion with arithmetic. Thus, an understanding of the latter makes no essential reference to its history, whereas for religion such a reference is vital. Moreover, as Whitehead states, “You use arithmetic, but you are religious” (RM 15).

Whitehead also argues that, “The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world,” and “Value is inherent in actuality itself” (RM 100). Whitehead’s use of the word “God” in the foregoing invites a wide range of habitual assumptions about his meaning, most, if not all, of which will probably be mistaken. The key element for Whitehead is value. God, like arithmetic, is discussed in terms of something which has a purpose. On the other hand, value is like being religious in that it is inherent. It is something that is rather than something that is used.

Shortly after this work, there appeared another book whose brevity betrays its importance, Symbolism its Meaning and Effect (“S,” 1927). Whitehead’s explicit interest in symbols was present in his earliest publication. But in conjunction with his theory of prehension, the theory of symbols came to take on an even greater importance for him. Our “uncognitive” sense-perceptions are directly caught up in our symbolic awareness as is shown by the immediacy with which we move beyond what is directly given to our senses. Whitehead uses the example of a puppy dog that sees a chair as a chair rather than as a patch of color, even though the latter is all that impinges on the dog’s retina. (Whitehead may not have known that dogs are color blind, but this does not significantly affect his example.) Thus, this work further develops Whitehead’s theories of perception and awareness, and does so in a manner that is relatively non-technical. Because of the centrality of the theory of symbols and perception to Whitehead’s later philosophy, this clarity of exposition makes this book a vital stepping stone to what followed.

What followed was Process and Reality (“PR,” 1929). This book is easily one of the most dense and difficult works in the entire Western canon. The book is rife with technical terms of Whitehead’s own invention, necessitated by his struggle to push beyond the inherited limits of the available concepts toward a comprehensive vision of the logical structures of becoming. It is here that we see the problem of space receive its ultimate payoff in Whitehead’s thought. But this payoff comes in the form of a fully relational metaphysical scheme that draws upon his theory of symbols and perception in the most essential manner possible. At the same time, PR plants the seeds for the further engagement of the problem of the accretion of value that is to come in his later work. Because each process of becoming must be considered holistically as an essentially organic unity, Whitehead often refers to his theory as the “philosophy of organism.”

PR invites controversy while defying brief exposition. Many of the relational ideas Whitehead develops are holistic in character, and thus do not lend themselves to the linear presentation of language. Moreover, the language Whitehead needs to build his holistic image of the world is often biological or mentalistic in character, which can be jarring when the topic being discussed is something like an electron. Moreover, Whitehead the algebraist was an intrinsically relational thinker, and explicitly characterized the subject / predicate mode of language as a “high abstraction.” Nevertheless, there are some basic ideas which can be quickly set out.

The first of these is that PR is not about time per se . This has been a subject of much confusion. But Whitehead himself points out that physical time as such only comes about with “reflection” of the “divisibility” of his two major relational types into one another (PR 288 – 9). Moreover, throughout PR, Whitehead continues to endorse the theory of nature found in his earlier triad of books on the subject. So the first step in gaining a handle on PR is to recognize that it is better thought of as addressing the logic of becoming, whereas his books from 1919 – 1922 address the “nature” of time.

The basic units of becoming for Whitehead are “actual occasions.” Actual occasions are “drops of experience,” and relate to the world into which they are emerging by “feeling” that relatedness and translating it into the occasion’s concrete reality. When first encountered, this mode of expression is likely to seem peculiar if not downright outrageous. One thing to note here is that Whitehead is not talking about any sort of high-level cognition. When he speaks of “feeling” he means an immediacy of concrete relatedness that is vastly different from any sort of “knowing,” yet which exists on a relational spectrum where cognitive modes can emerge from sufficiently complex collections of occasions that interrelate within a systematic whole. Also, feeling is a far more basic form of relatedness than can be represented by formal algebraic or geometrical schemata. These latter are intrinsically abstract, and to take them as basic would be to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But feeling is not abstract. Rather, it is the first and most concrete manifestation of an occasion’s relational engagement with reality.

This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.

Actual occasions are fundamentally atomic in character, which leads to the next interpretive difficulty. In his previous works, events were essentially extended and continuous. And when Whitehead speaks of an “event” in PR without any other qualifying adjectives, he still means the extensive variety found in his earlier works (PR 73). But PR deals with a different set of problems from that previous triad, and it cannot take such continuity for granted. For one thing, Whitehead treats Zeno’s Paradoxes very seriously and argues that one cannot resolve these paradoxes if one starts from the assumption of continuity, because it is then impossible to make sense of anything coming immediately before or immediately after anything else. Between any two points of a continuum such as the real number line there are an infinite number of other points, thus rendering the concept of the “next” point meaningless. But it is precisely this concept of the “next occasion” that Whitehead requires to render intelligible the relational structures of his metaphysics. If there are infinitely many occasions between any two occasions, even ones that are nominally “close” together, then it becomes impossible to say how it is that later occasions feel their predecessors – there is an unbounded infinity of other occasions intervening in such influences, and changing it in what are now undeterminable ways. Therefore, Whitehead argued, continuity is not something which is “given;” rather it is something which is achieved. Each occasion makes itself continuous with its past in the manner in which it feels that past and creatively incorporates the past into its own concrescence, its coming into being.

Thus, Whitehead argues against the “continuity of becoming” and in favor of the “becoming of continuity” (PR 68 – 9). Occasions become atomically, but once they have become they incorporate themselves into the continuity of the universe by feeling the concreteness of what has come before and making that concreteness a part of the occasion’s own internal makeup. The continuity of space and durations in Whitehead’s earlier triad does not conflict with his metaphysical atomism, because those earlier works were dealing with physical nature in which continuity has already come into being, while PR is dealing with relational structures that are logically and metaphysically prior to nature.

Most authors believe that the sense of “atomic” being used here is similar to, if not synonymous with, “microscopic.” However, there are reasons why one might want to resist such an interpretation. To begin with, it teeters on the edge of the fallacy of simple location to assume that by “atomic” Whitehead means “very small.” An electron, which Whitehead often refers to as an “electronic occasion,” may have a tiny region of most highly focused effects. But the electromagnetic field that spreads out from that electron reaches far beyond that narrow focus. The electron “feels” and is “felt” throughout this field of influence which is not spatially limited. Moreover, Whitehead clearly states that space and time are derivative notions from extension whereas, “To be an actual occasion in the physical world means that the entity in question is a relatum in this scheme of extensive connection” (PR 288 – 9). The quality of being microscopic is something that only emerges after one has a fully developed notion of space, while actual occasions are logically prior to space and a part of the extensive relations from which space itself is derived. Thus it is at least arguably the case that the sense of “atomic” that Whitehead is employing hearkens back more to the original Greek meaning of “irreducible” than to the microscopic sense that pervades physical science. In other words, the “atomic” nature of what is actual is directly connected to its relational holism.

The structure of PR is also worth attention, for each of the five major parts offers a significant perspective on the whole. Part I gives Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy and sets out the “categoreal scheme” underlying PR. The second part applies these categories to a variety of historical and thematic topics. Part three gives the theory of prehensions as these manifest themselves with and through the categories, and is often called the “genetic account.” The theory of extension, or the “coordinate account,” constitutes part four and represents the ultimate development of Whitehead’s rigorous thought on the nature of space. The last and final part presents both a theory of the dialectic of opposites, and the minimalist role of God in Whitehead’s system as the foundation of coherence in the world’s processes of becoming.

Two of the features of part I that stand out are Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy, and his proposed resolution of the traditional problem of the One and the Many. “Speculative philosophy” for Whitehead is a phrase he uses interchangeably with “metaphysics.” However, what Whitehead means is a speculative program in the most scientifically honorific sense of the term. Rejecting any form of dogmatism, Whitehead states that his purpose is to, “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). The second feature, the solution to the problem of the “one and the many,” is often summarized as, “The many become one, and increase by one.” This means that the many occasions of the universe that have already become contribute their atomic reality to the becoming of a new occasion (“the many become one”). However, this occasion, upon fully realizing in its own atomic character, now contributes that reality to the previously achieved realities of the other occasions (“and increase by one”).

The atomic becoming of an actual occasion is achieved by that occasion’s “prehensive” relations and its “extensive” relations. An actual occasion’s holistically felt and non-sequentially internalized concrete evaluations of its relationships to the rest of the world is the subject matter of the theory of “prehension,” part III of PR. This is easily one of the most difficult and complex portions of that work. The development that Whitehead is describing is so holistic and anti-sequential that it might appropriately be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake . An actual occasion “prehends” its world (relationally takes that world in) by feeling the “objective data” of past occasions which the new occasion utilizes in its own concrescence. This data is prehended in an atemporal and nonlinear manner, and is creatively combined into the occasion’s own manifest self-realization. This is to say that the becoming of the occasion is also informed by a densely teleological sense of the occasion’s own ultimate actuality, its “subjective aim” or what Whitehead calls the occasion’s “superject.” Once it has become fully actualized, the occasion as superject becomes an objective datum for those occasions which follow it, and the process begins again.

This same process of concrescence is described in its extensive characters in part IV, where the mereological (formal relations of part and whole) as well as topological (non-metrical relations of neighborhood and connection) characteristics of extension are developed. Unlike the subtle discussion of prehensions, Whitehead’s theory of extension reads very much like a text book on the logic of spatial relations. Indeed, a great deal of contemporary work in artificial intelligence and spatial reasoning identifies this section of PR as foundational to this field of research, which often goes by the intimidating title of “mereotopology.”

The holistic character of prehension and the analytical nature of extension invite the reader to interpret the former as a theory of “internal relations” and the latter as a theory of “external relations.” Put simply, external relations treat the self-identity of a thing as the first, analytically given fact, while internal relations treat it as the final, synthetically developed result. But Whitehead explicitly associates internal relations with extension, and externality with that of prehension. This seeming paradox can be resolved by noting that, even though prehension is the process of the actual occasion’s “internalizing” the rest of reality as it composes its own self-identity, the achieved result (the superject) is the atomic realization of that occasion in its ultimate externality to the rest of the world. On the other hand, the mereological relations of part and whole from which extension is built, are themselves so intrinsically correlative to one another that each only meaningfully expresses its own relational structures to the extent that it completely internalizes the other.

Whitehead was never one to revisit a problem once he felt he had addressed it adequately. With the publication of PR and the final version of his theory of extension, Whitehead never returned to the ‘problem of space’ except on those limited occasions when his later work required that he mention those earlier developments. Those later works were effectively focused upon the ‘problem of history’ to the exclusion of all else. The primary book on this topic is Adventures of Ideas (“AI,” 1933).

AI is a pithy and engaging book whose opening pages entice the reader with clear and evidently non-technical language. But it is a book that needs to be approached with care. Whitehead assumes, without explanation, knowledge on the part of his readers of the metaphysical scheme of PR, and resorts to the terminology of that book whenever the argument requires it. Indeed, AI is the application of Whitehead’s process metaphysics to the “problem of history.” Whitehead surveys numerous cultural forms from a thoroughly relational perspective, analyzing the ways in which these connections contribute both to the rigidities of culture and the possibilities for novelty in various “adventures” in the accumulation of meanings and values. Many of the forces in this adventure of meaning are blind and senseless, thus presenting the challenge of becoming more deliberate in our processes of building and changing them.

In line with this, two other works bear mentioning: The Function of Reason (“FR,” 1929) and Modes of Thought (“MT,” 1938). FR presents an updated version of Aristotle’s three classes of soul (the vegetative, the animate, and the rational); only in Whitehead’s case, the classifications are, as the title states, functional rather than facultative. Thus, for Whitehead, the function of reason is “promote the art of life,” which is a three-fold function of “(i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better” (FR 4, 8). Thus, reason for Whitehead is intrinsically organic in both origin and purpose. But the achievement of a truly reasonable life is a matter that involves more than just the logical organization of propositional knowledge. It is a matter of full and sensitive engagement with the entire lived world. This is the topic of MT, Whitehead’s final major publication. In arguing for a multiplicity of modes of thought, Whitehead offered his final great rebellion against the excessive focus on language that dominated the philosophical thought of his day. In this work, Whitehead also offered his final insight as to the purpose and function of philosophy itself. “The use of philosophy,” Whitehead concluded, “is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace.” In this respect, “philosophy is akin to poetry” (MT 174).

3. Influence and Legacy

Evaluating Whitehead’s influence is a difficult matter. While Whitehead’s influence has never been great, in the opening years of the 21 st century it appears to be growing in a broad range of otherwise divergent disciplines. Fulfilling his own vision of the use of philosophy, Whitehead’s ideas are a rich trove of alternative approaches to traditional problems. His thoroughgoing relational and process orientation offers numerous opportunities to reimagine the ways in which the world is connected and how those connections manifest themselves.

The most prominent area of ongoing Whiteheadian influence is within process theology. While Whitehead’s explicit philosophical treatments of God seldom went beyond that of an ideal principle of maximal coherence, many others have developed these ideas further. Writers such as Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb have speculated on, and argued for, a much more robust, ontological conception of God. Nothing in Whitehead’s own writings require such developments, but neither are they in any way precluded. The God of process theology tends to be far more personal and much more of a co-participant in the creative process of the universe than that which one often finds in orthodox religions.

Within philosophy itself, Whitehead’s influence has been smaller and much more diffuse. Yet those influences are likely to crop up in what seem, on the surface at least, to be improbable places. The literature here is too vast to enumerate, but it includes researches from all of the major philosophical schools including pragmatism, analytical, and continental thought. The topics engaged include ontology, phenomenology, personalism, philosophical anthropology, ethics, political theory, economics, etc.

There are also a variety of ways in which Whitehead’s work continues to influence scientific research. This influence is, again, typically found only in the work of widely scattered individuals. However, one area where this is not the case is Whitehead’s theory of extension. Whitehead’s work on the logical basis of geometry is widely cited as foundational in the study of mereotopology, which in turn is of fundamental importance in the study of spatial reasoning, especially in the context of artificial intelligence.

There is also a growing interest in Whitehead’s work within physics, where it is proving to be a valuable source of ideas to help re-conceive the nature of physical relations. This is particularly true of such bizarre phenomena as quantum entanglement, which seems to violate orthodox notions of mechanistic interaction. There is a renewed interest in Whitehead’s arguments regarding relativity, particularly because of their potential tie-in with other bimetric theories of space and gravity. Other areas of interest include biology, where Whitehead’s holistic relationalism again offers alternative models of explanation.

4. References and Further Reading

Those of Whitehead’s primary texts which have been mentioned in the article are listed below in chronological order. More technical works have been “starred” with an asterisk. Original publication dates are given, as well as more recent printings. Of these more recent printings, those done by Dover Publications have been favored because they retain the pagination of the original imprints. On the other hand, the volume of the secondary literature on Whitehead is truly astounding, and a comprehensive list would go far beyond the limits of this article. So while the secondary works listed below can hardly be viewed as definitive, they do offer a useful starting place. The secondary sources are divided into two groups, those that are relatively more accessible and those that are relatively more technical.

a. Primary Sources

• *A Treatise on Universal Algebra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898.)
• *The Axioms of Projective Geometry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906.)
• The two Axioms books are models of expository clarity, yet they are still books on formal mathematics. Hence, they have been reluctantly “starred.”
• *Principia Mathematica , volumes I – III, with Bertrand Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910 – 1913.)
• An Introduction to Mathematics (London: Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, 1911. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.)
• *An Enquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919.)
• The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Mineola: Dover, May 2004.)
• *The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Mineola: Dover Phoenix Editions, 2004.)
• Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925. New York: The Free Press, 1967.)
• This later edition is particularly useful because of the detailed glossary of terms at the end of the text.
• Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985.)
• The Aims of Education (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929. New York: The Free Press, 1967.)
• Easily one of the most difficult books in the entire Western philosophical canon, this volume earns two asterisks.
• The Function of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962.)
• *Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933. New York: The Free Press, 1985.)
• Modes of Thought (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938. New York: The Free Press, 1968.)
• Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1948.)

b. Secondary Sources

(Relatively more accessible secondary texts:)

• This is an important recent survey of some of the ways in which Whitehead’s thought is being employed in contemporary physics.
• This book is a particularly useful companion to PR because of the care with which Kraus has flow-charted the relational structures of Whitehead’s argument.
• These volumes are the definitive biography of Whitehead.
• This is a solid and very readable survey of contemporary process theology.
• This book is a collection of essays on Whitehead’s work by his contemporaries.

(Relatively more technical secondary texts:)

• This text is a college level introduction to mereotopology, and includes an extensive bibliography on the subject and its history.
• This book is an examination of the historical development of Whitehead’s metaphysical ideas.
• Hall’s work attempts, among other things, to derive an ethical theory from Whitehead’s metaphysics.
• This work is widely considered to be one of the most important pieces of secondary literature on Whitehead.
• Nobo, Jorge Luis.: Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.)
• This work is widely viewed as the definitive text on Whitehead’s theory of science and nature.

Author Information

Gary L. Herstein Email: [email protected] Southern Illinois University at Carbondale U. S. A.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

Essays in Science and Philosophy/Chapter 1

Autobiographical Notes

I was born in 1861, February 15, at Ramsgate in the Isle of Thanet, Kent. The family, grandfather, father, uncles, brothers engaged in activities concerned with education, religion and Local Administration: my grandfather, born of yeoman stock in Isle of Sheppey, was probably a descendant of the Quaker George Whitehead, whom George Fox in his Journal mentions as living there in the year 1670. In the year 1815, my grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, at the age of twenty-one, became head of a private school in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, to which my father, Alfred Whitehead, succeeded at the correspondingly early age of twenty-five, in the year 1852. They were, both of them, most successful schoolmasters, though my grandfather was by far the more remarkable man.

About 1860 my father was ordained as a clergyman of the Anglican Church; and about 1866 or 1867 he gave up his school for clerical duty, first in Ramsgate, and later in 1871 he was appointed Vicar of St. Peters Parish, a large district mostly rural, with its church about two or three miles from Ramsgate. The North Foreland belongs to the parish. He remained there till his death in 1898.

He became influential among the clergy of East Kent, occupying the offices of Rural Dean, Honorary Canon of Canterbury, and Proctor in Convocation for the Diocese. But the central fact of his influence was based on his popularity with the general mass of the population in the Island. He never lost his interest in education, and daily visited his three parochial schools, for infants, for girls, and for boys. As a small boy, before I left home for school in 1875, I often accompanied him. He was a man with local interests and influence; apart from an understanding of such provincial figures, the social and political history of England in the nineteenth century cannot be comprehended. England was governed by the influence of personality: this does not mean “intellect.”

My father was not intellectual, but he possessed personality. Archbishop Tait had his summer residence in the parish, and he and his family were close friends of my parents. He and my father illustrated the survival of the better (and recessive) side of the eighteenth century throughout its successor. Thus, at the time unconsciously, I watched the history of England by my vision of grandfather, father, Archbishop Tait, Sir Moses Montefiore, the ​ Pugin family, and others. When the Baptist minister in the parish was dying, it was my father who read the Bible to him. Such was England in those days, guided by local men with strong mutual antagonisms and intimate community of feeling. This vision was one source of my interest in history, and in education.

Another influence in the same direction was the mass of archæological remains with their interest and beauty. Canterbury Cathedral with its splendour and its memories was sixteen miles distant. As I now write I can visualize the very spot where Becket fell a.d. 1170, and can recall my reconstruction of the incident in my young imagination. Also there is the tomb of Edward, The Black Prince (died a.d. 1376).

But closer to my home, within the Island or just beyond its borders, English history had left every type of relic. There stood the great walls of Richborough Castle built by the Romans, and the shores of Ebbes Fleet where the Saxons and Augustine landed. A mile or so inland was the village of Minster with its wonderful Abbey Church, retaining some touches of Roman stone-work, but dominated by its glorious Norman architecture. On this spot Augustine preached his first sermon. Indeed the Island was furnished with Norman, and other mediaeval churches, built by the Minster monks, and second only to their Abbey. My father’s church was one of them, with a Norman nave.

Just beyond Richborough is the town of Sandwich. At that time it retained the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its Flemish houses lining the streets. Its town-records state that in order to check the silting up of the harbour, the citizens invited skilful men from the Low Countries — “cunning in waterworks.” Unfortunately they failed, so that the town remained static from that period. In the last half century, it has been revived by a golf course, one of the best in England. I feel a sense of profanation amidst the relics of the Romans, of the Saxons, of Augustine, the mediæval monks, and the ships of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Golf seems rather a cheap ending to the story.

At the age of fourteen, in the year 1875, I was sent to school at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, at the opposite end of southern England. Here the relics of the past were even mote obvious. In this year (1941) the school is to celebrate its twelve-hundredth anniversary. It dates from St. Aldhelm, and claims Alfred the Great as a pupil. The school acquired the monastery buildings, and its grounds are bounded by one of the most magnificent Abbeys in existence, with tombs of Saxon princes. In my last two years there the Abbots’ room (as we believed) was my private study; and we worked under the sound of the Abbey bells, brought from the Field of The Cloth of Gold by Henry VIII.

T have written thus far in order to show by example how the imaginative life of the southern English professional class during the last half of the nineteenth century was moulded. My own experience was not in the least bit ​ exceptional. Of course details differ, but the type was fairly uniform for provincial people.

This tale has another reference to the purpose of this slight autobiography. It shows how historical tradition is handed down by the direct experience of physical surroundings.

On the intellectual side, my education also conformed to the normal standard of the time. Latin began at the age of ten years, and Greek at twelve. Holidays excepted, my recollection is that daily, up to the age of nineteen and a half years, some pages of Latin and Greek authors were construed, and their grammar examined. Before going to school pages of rules of Latin grammar could be repeated, all in Latin, and exemplified by quotations. The classical studies were interspersed with mathematics. Of course, such studies included history — namely, Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. I can still feel the dullness of Xenophon, Sallust, and Livy. Of course we all know that they are great authors; but this is a candid autobiography.

The others were enjoyable. Indeed my recollection is that the classics were well taught, with an unconscious comparison of the older civilization with modern life. I was excused in the composition of Latin Verse and the reading of some Latin poetry, in order to give more time for mathematics. We read the Bible in Greek, namely, with the Septuagint for the Old Testament. Such Scripture lessons, on each Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, were popular, because the authors did not seem to know much more Greek than we did, and so kept their grammar simple.

We were not overworked; and in my final year my time was mostly occupied with duties as Head of the School with its responsibility for discipline outside the class-rooms, on the Rugby model derived from Thomas Arnold, and as Captain of the Games, chiefly cricket and football, very enjoyable but taking time. There was however spare time for private reading. Poetry, more especially Wordsworth and Shelley, became a major interest, and also history.

My university life at Trinity College, Cambridge, commenced in the autumn of 1880; and, so far as residence is concerned, continued without interruption until the summer of 1910. But my membership of the College, first as “scholar” and then as “fellow,” continues unbroken. I cannot exaggerate my obligation to the University of Cambridge, and in particular to Trinity College, for social and intellectual training.

The education of a human being is a most complex topic, which we have hardly begun to understand. The only point on which I feel certain is that there is no widespread, simple solution. We have to consider the particular problem set to each institution by its type of students, and their future opportunities. Of course, for the moment and for a particular social system, some forms of the problem are more widespread than others — for instance, the problem now set to the majority of State Universities in the U.S.A. ​ Throughout the nineteenth century, the University of Cambridge did a brilliant job. But its habits were adapted to very special circumstances.

The formal teaching at Cambridge was competently done, by interesting men of first-rate ability. But courses assigned to each undergraduate might cover a narrow range. For example, during my whole undergraduate period at Trinity, all my lectures were on mathematics, pure and applied. I never went inside another lecture room. But the lectures were only one side of the education. The missing portions were supplied by incessant conversation, with our friends, undergraduates, or members of the staff. This started with dinner at about six or seven, and went on till about ten o’clock in the evening, stopping sometimes earlier and sometimes later. In my own case, there would then follow two or three hours’ work at mathematics.

Groups of friends were not created by identity of subjects for study. We all came from the same sort of school, with the same sort of previous training. We discussed everything — politics, religion, philosophy, literature — with a bias toward literature. This experience led to a large amount of miscellaneous reading. For example, by the time that I gained my fellowship in 1885 I nearly knew by heart parts of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Now I have forgotten it, because I was early disenchanted. I have never been able to read Hegel: I initiated my attempt by studying some remarks of his on mathematics which struck me as complete nonsense. It was foolish of me, but | am not writing to explain my good sense.

Looking backwards across more than half a century, the conversations have the appearance of a daily Platonic dialogue. Henry Head, D’Arcy Thompson, Jim Stephen, the Llewellen Davies brothers, Lowes Dickinson, Nat Wedd, Sorley, and many others — some of them subsequently famous, and others, equally able, attracting no subsequent public attention. That was the way by which Cambridge educated her sons. It was a replica of the Platonic method. The “Apostles” who met on Saturdays in each others’ rooms, from 10 p.m. to any time next morning, were the concentration of this experience. The active members wete eight or ten undergraduates or young B.A.’s, but older members who had “taken wings” often attended. There we discussed with Maitland, the historian, Verrall, Henry Jackson, Sidgwick, and casual judges, or scientists, or members of Parliament who had come up to Cambridge for the weekend. It was a wonderful influence. The club was started in the late 1820’s by Tennyson and his friends. It is still flourishing.

My Cambridge education with its emphasis on mathematics and on free discussion among friends would have gained Plato’s approval. As times changed, Cambridge University has reformed its methods. Its success in the nineteenth century was a happy accident dependent on social circumstances which have passed away — fortunately. The Platonic education was very limited in its application to life.

In the autumn of 1885, the fellowship at Trinity was acquired, and with ​ additional luck a teaching job was added. The final position as a Senior Lecturer was resigned in the year 1910, when we removed to London.

In December, 1890 my marriage with Evelyn Willoughby Wade took place. The effect of my wife upon my outlook on the world has been so fundamental that it must be mentioned as an essential factor in my philosophic output. So far I have been describing the narrow English education for English professional life. The prevalence of this social grade, influencing the aristocrats above them, and leading the masses below them, is one of the reasons why the England of the nineteenth century exhibited its failures and successes. It is one of the recessive factors of national life which hardly ever enters into historical narrative.

My wife’s background is completely different, namely military and diplomatic. Her vivid life has taught me that beauty, moral and æsthetic, is the aim of existence; and that kindness, and love, and artistic satisfaction are among its modes of attainment. Logic and Science are the disclosure of relevant patterns, and also procure the avoidance of irrelevancies.

This outlook somewhat shifts the ordinary philosophic emphasis upon the past. It directs attention to the periods of great art and literature, as best expressing the essential values of life. The summit of human attainment does not wait for the emergence of systematized doctrine, though system has its essential functions in the rise of civilization. It provides the gradual upgrowth of a stabilized social system.

Our three children were born between 1891 and 1898. They all served in the First World War: our eldest son throughout its whole extent, in France, in East Africa, and in England; our daughter in the Foreign Office in England and Paris; our youngest boy served in the Air Force: his plane was shot down in France with fatal results, in March, 1918.

For about eight years (1898-1906) we lived in the Old Mill House at Grantchester, about three miles from Cambridge. Our windows overlooked a mill pool, and at that time the mill was still working. It has all gone now. There are two mill pools there; the older one, about a couple of hundred yards higher up the river, was the one mentioned by Chaucer. Some parts of out house were very old, probably from the sixteenth century. The whole spot was intrinsically beautiful and was filled with reminiscences, from Chaucer to Byron and Wordsworth. Later on another poet, Rupert Brooke, lived in the neighbouring house, the Old Vicarage. But that was after our time and did not enter into our life. I must mention the Shuckburghs (translator of Cicero’s letters) and the William Batesons (the geneticist) who also lived in the village and were dear friends of ours. We owed our happy life at Grantchester to the Shuckburghs, who found the house for us. It had a lovely garden, with flowering creepers over the house, and with a yew tree which Chaucer might have planted. In the spring nightingales kept us awake, and kingfishers haunted the river.

My first book, A Treatise on Universal Algebra , was published in February, ​ 1898. It was commenced in January, 1891. The ideas in it were largely founded on Hermann Grassmann’s two books, the Ausdehnungslehre of 1844, and the Ausdehnungslehre of 1862. The earlier of the two books is by far the most fundamental. Unfortunately when it was published no one understood it; he was a century ahead of his time. Also Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s Quaternions of 1853, and a preliminary paper in 1844, and Boole’s Symbolic Logic of 1859, were almost equally influential on my thoughts. My whole subsequent work on Mathematical Logic is derived from these sources. Grassmann was an original genius, never sufficiently recognized. Leibniz, Saccheri, and Grassmann wrote on these topics before people could understand them, or grasp their importance. Indeed poor Saccheri himself failed to grasp what he had achieved, and Leibniz did not publish his work on this subject.

My knowledge of Leibniz’s investigations was entirely based on L. Couturat’s book, La Logique de Leibniz , published in 1901.

This mention of Couturat suggests the insertion of two other experiences connected with France. Elie Halévy, the historian of England in the early nineteenth century, frequently visited Cambridge, and we greatly enjoyed out friendship with him and his wife.

The other experience is that of a Congress on Mathematical Logic held in Paris in March, 1914. Couturat was there, and Xavier Léon, and (I think) Halévy. It was crammed with Italians, Germans, and a few English including Bertrand Russell and ourselves. The Congress was lavishly enter- tained by various notables, including a reception by the President of the Republic. At the end of the last session, the President of the Congress congratulated us warmly on its success and concluded with the hope that we should return to our homes carrying happy memories of “La Douce France.” In less than five months the First World War broke out. It was the end of an epoch, but we did not know it.

The Treatise on Universal Algebra led to my election to the Royal Society in 1903. Nearly thirty years later (in 1931) came the fellowship of the British Academy as the result of work on philosophy, commencing about 1918. Meanwhile between 1898 and 1903, my second volume of Universal Algebra was in preparation. It was never published.

In 1903 Bertrand Russell published The Principles of Mathematics . This was also a “first volume.” We then discovered that our projected second volumes were practically on identical topics, so we coalesced to produce a joint work. We hoped that a short period of one year or so would complete the job. Then our horizon extended and, in the course of eight or nine years, Principia Mathematica was produced. It lies outside the scope of this sketch to discuss this work. Russell had entered the University at the beginning of the eighteen nineties. Like the rest of the world, we enjoyed his brilliance, first as my pupil and then as a colleague and friend. He was a great factor in our lives, during our Cambridge period. But our ​ mental points of view — philosophical and sociological — diverged, and so with different interests our collaboration came to a natural end.

At the close of the University session, in the summer of 1910, we left Cambridge. During our residence in London, we lived in Chelsea, for most of the time in Carlyle Square. Wherever we went, my wife’s æsthetic taste gave a wonderful charm to the houses, sometimes almost miraculously. The remark applies especially to some of our London residences, which seemed impervious to beauty. I remember the policeman who saw a beautiful girl let herself into our house in the early hours after midnight. She had been presented at Court and had then gone to a party. The policeman later enquired of our maid whether he had seen a real person or the Virgin Mary. He could hardly believe that a real person in a lovely dress would be living there. But inside there was beauty.

During my first academic session (1910-1911) in London I held no academic position. My Introduction to Mathematics dates from that period. During the sessions from 1911 to the summer of 1914, I held various positions at University College, London, and from 1914 to the summer of 1924 a professorship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in Kensington. During the later years of this period I was Dean of the Faculty of Science in the University, Chairman of the Academic Council which manages the internal affairs concerned with London education, and a member of the Senate. I was also Chairman of the Council which managed The Goldsmith’s College, and a member of the Council of the Borough Polytechnic. There were endless other committees involved in these positions. In fact, participation in the supervision of London education, University and Technological, joined to the teaching duties of my professorship at the Imperial College constituted a busy life. It was made possible by the marvellous efficiency of the secretarial staff of the University.

This experience of the problems of London, extending for fourteen years, transformed my views as to the problem of higher education in a modern industrial civilization. It was then the fashion — not yet extinct — to take a narrow view of the function of Universities. There were the Oxford and Cambridge type, and the German type. Any other type was viewed with ignorant contempt. The seething mass of artisans seeking intellectual enlightenment, of young people from every social grade craving for adequate knowledge, the variety of problems thus introduced—all this was a new factor in civilization. But the learned world is immersed in the past.

The University of London is a confederation of various institutions of different types for the purpose of meeting this novel problem of modern life. It had recently been remodelled under the influence of Lord Haldane, and was a marvellous success. The group of men and women — business men, lawyers, doctors, scientists, literary scholars, administrative heads of departments — who gave their time, wholly or in part, to this new problem ​ of education were achieving a much needed transformation. They were not unique in this enterprise: in the U.S.A. under different circumstances analogous groups were solving analogous problems. It is not too much to say that this novel adaptation of education is one of the factors which may save civilization. The nearest analogy is that of the monasteries a thousand years earlier.

The point of these personal reminiscences is the way in which latent capabilities have been elicited by favourable circumstances of my life. It is impossible for me to judge of any permanent value in the output. But I am aware of the love, and kindness, and encouragement by which it was developed.

To turn now to another side of life, during my later years at Cambridge, there was considerable political and academic controversy in which I participated. The great question of the emancipation of women suddenly flared up, after simmering for half a century. I was a member of the University Syndicate which repotted in favour of equality of status in the University. We were defeated, after stormy discussions and riotous behaviour on the part of students. If my memory is correct, the date was about 1898. But later on, until the war in 1914, there were stormy episodes in London and elsewhere. The division of opinion cut across party lines; for example, the Conservative Balfour was pro-woman, and the Liberal Asquith was against. The success of the movement came at the end of the war in 1918.

My political opinions were, and are, on the Liberal side, as against the Conservatives. I am now writing in terms of English party divisions. The Liberal Party has now (1941) practically vanished; and in England my vote would be given for the moderate side of the Labour Party. However at present there are no “parties” in England.

During our residence at Grantchester, I did a considerable amount of political speaking in Grantchester and in the country villages of the district. The meetings were in the parish schoolrooms, during the evening. It was exciting work, as the whole village attended and expressed itself vigorously. English villages have no use for regular party agents. They require local residents to address them. I always found that a party agent was a nuisance. Rotten eggs and oranges were effective party weapons, and I have often been covered by them. But they were indications of vigour, rather than of bad feeling. Our worst experience was at a meeting in the Guildhall at Cambridge, addressed by Keir Hardie who was then the leading member of the new Labour Party. My wife and I were on the platform, sitting behind him, and there was a riotous undergraduate audience. The result was that any rotten oranges that missed Keir Hardie had a good chance of hitting one of us. When we lived in London my activities were wholly educational.

My philosophic writings started in London, at the latter end of the war. The London Aristotelian Society was a pleasant centre of discussion, and close friendships were formed. ​

During the year 1924, at the age of sixty-three, I received the honour of an invitation to join the Faculty of Harvard University in the Philosophy Department. I became Professor Emeritus at the close of the session 1936-1937. It is impossible to express too strongly the encouragement and help that has been rendered to me by the University authorities, my colleagues on the Faculty, students, and friends. My wife and I have been overwhelmed with kindness. The shortcomings of my published work, which of course ate many, are due to myself alone. I venture upon one remark which applies to all philosophic work: — Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.

It is out of the question to deal with Harvard and its many influences at the end of a chapter. Nor is such a topic quite relevant to the purpose of this book. To-day in America, there is a zeal for knowledge which is reminiscent of the great periods of Greece and the Renaissance. But above all, there is in all sections of the population a warm-hearted kindness which is unsurpassed in any large social system.

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Essays in science and philosophy.

By alfred north whitehead.

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Essays in Science and Philosophy

Alfred north whitehead.

First published January 1, 1947

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William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy

Evidence, explanation, and realism: essays in philosophy of science.

• Peter Achinstein (author)
• Oxford University Press , 2010
• Purchase Online

The essays in this volume address three fundamental questions in the philosophy of science: What is required for some fact to be evidence for a scientific hypothesis? What does it mean to say that a scientist or a theory explains a phenomenon? Should scientific theories that postulate “unobservable” entities such as electrons be construed realistically as aiming to correctly describe a world underlying what is directly observable, or should such theories be understood as aiming to correctly describe only the observable world?

Distinguished philosopher of science Peter Achinstein provides answers to each of these questions in essays written over a period of more than 40 years. The present volume brings together his important previously published essays, allowing the reader to confront some of the most basic and challenging issues in the philosophy of science, and to consider Achinstein’s many influential contributions to the solution of these issues.

He presents a theory of evidence that relates this concept to probability and explanation; a theory of explanation that relates this concept to an explaining act as well as to the different ways in which explanations are to be evaluated; and an empirical defense of scientific realism that invokes both the concept of evidence and that of explanation.

Science and Philosophy: A Love–Hate Relationship

• Open access
• Published: 02 August 2019
• Volume 25 , pages 297–314, ( 2020 )

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• Sebastian De Haro   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3000-5967 1 , 2  

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In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy; in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive perspectives that should be helpful in developing a synergetic relationship between the two. I will review three lines of reasoning often employed in arguing that philosophy is useless for science: (a) philosophy’s death diagnosis (‘philosophy is dead’); (b) the historic-agnostic argument/challenge “show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don’t know of any”; (c) the division of property argument (or: philosophy and science have different subject matters, therefore philosophy is useless for science). These arguments will be countered with three contentions to the effect that the natural sciences need philosophy. I will: (a) point to the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism (or: ‘in order to deny the need for philosophy, one must do philosophy’) and examine the role of paradigms and presuppositions (or: why science can’t live without philosophy); (b) point out why the historical argument fails (in an example from quantum mechanics, alive and kicking); (c) briefly sketch some domains of intersection of science and philosophy and how the two can have mutual synergy. I will conclude with some implications of this synergetic relationship between science and philosophy for the liberal arts and sciences.

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1 Introduction

In this paper I will argue that: (i) The natural sciences need philosophy; and (ii) That scient ists need philosophy. I will also address some possible consequences of these theses for the Liberal Arts and Sciences. In doing so, I will have to define the sense in which I mean that science ‘needs’ philosophy and make a distinction between different ways in which different aspects or branches of science need philosophy. Most of my examples will be from physics. This being part of my professional bias, I claim that the arguments that apply to physics apply to biology, earth science, and other natural sciences as well. As I will argue, the most important distinction to be made is not between one natural science and another, but between fundamental and applied science. Once this distinction is made, the harm of treating all of the sciences en bloc, on the model of physics, can be minimized.

Why should I be defending the use of philosophy? After all, the thesis that philosophy is useful for science is not likely to be agreed upon by all practicing scientists. Science, not philosophy, is widely regarded as the more secure source of knowledge. For it has a method for declaring theories wrong: in other words, for falsifying its results. This method is called Experiment. And science has given us machines, abundant energy, technology, and a healthy attitude of scepticism. The scientific worldview has freed us from prejudice, ignorance, and the ironclad rule of authority. Natural scientists, not philosophers, have earned the trust of the public opinion in matters of truth, learning, and understanding. Experimental results, and not the scholastic distinctions of the philosophers, are the final judges in the court of Science. This, at least, would seem to be a widely held view, and partly for good reasons. So why care about philosophy after all?

The relation between science and philosophy is an intricate and somewhat problematic subject, Footnote 1 as I will review in the next Section. On the one hand, some great scientists have been great philosophers—not necessarily in the professional sense, but in the sense of deep thinking: science and philosophy often went together in the work of great figures such as Newton and Leibniz, so that it is sometimes hard—and perhaps unnecessary, and certainly anachronistic—to say where science ends and where philosophy begins. But on the other hand, philosophy is often regarded as useless, so that a philosophical outlook is irrelevant for science at best, and harmful at worst—as evinced by long pages of armchair philosophy that is blissfully uninformed by science. Or so the story goes. Hence my topic of the ‘love–hate relationship’.

Here I will concentrate on basic aspects of the relation between the two, and reduce the applications to education to a few final considerations. Reaching clarity about the fact that philosophy is useful for science is by itself an important and urgent task. Understanding this relationship is a first key step toward developing a synergetic relationship between the two fields.

2 Science Doesn’t Need Philosophy

Let us start with the objections to the first thesis above, that the sciences need philosophy. There are various good reasons why scientists can claim—and have claimed—that science does not need philosophy or that, more or less equivalently, philosophy is useless for science. I will consider three lines of reasoning here: the argument from the decline or death of philosophy, the historical or empirical argument, and the argument based on the contention that science and philosophy have different objects and methods.

The death of philosophy

Stephen Hawking has declared the official ‘death’ of philosophy, seemingly echoing Nietzsche’s famous ‘God is dead’. Commenting on questions such as the behaviour of the universe and the nature of reality, Hawking writes: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” (Hawking and Mlodinov 2010 , p. 5). In this argument, knowledge must be grounded on natural science. Questions such as, “what is the nature of physical reality”, “what things are out there in the world?” are questions that used to be within the domain of philosophy, but are now part of science. Something in philosophy must therefore be missing, without which philosophy is left a ‘dead’ discipline. And when a discipline is dead, one might just as well ignore it. Footnote 2 Since philosophers haven’t kept up with modern science, they have cut themselves off from our most secure source of knowledge and discovery. Hence the question: can we dismiss Hawking’s provocative suggestion that philosophers have largely been neglecting the natural sciences, thereby manoeuvring themselves towards a margin of irrelevance, if in our world the natural sciences are becoming increasingly dominant?

The historic-agnostic or empirical argument

The historic-agnostic argument is more cautious, and can be summarized as an agnostic stance about the usefulness of philosophy for science. It amounts to something like this: “I have never seen any examples of the usefulness of philosophy for science or, when I have seen usefulness in anything that philosophers were saying about science, it was because they were doing science not philosophy”. The argument can be appended with an enumeration of instances where the limited scope of a philosophical framework hampered progress in science and perhaps also a theoretical account of why that was the case.

Examples to this effect would seem to abound. Think of Plato’s requirement, expressed in the Timaeus , that the movements of the planets should be taken to be based on uniform circular motions. This mathematical postulate was grounded on the philosophical and theological doctrine that the most perfect motion was circular, because the motion of the mind when it reflects upon itself is circular (Plato (T) 34a, 36c, 40a). It became apparent very early on that this axiom was untenable for concentric spheres. Hipparchus and Ptolemy had to add a contrived system of eccentrics and epicycles to save the phenomena. Nevertheless, they still formally adhered to the Platonic postulate, which has been seen by many as a hampering factor in the progress of cosmology (Dijksterhuis 1950 , Part I, II D 15 and III C 68).

Another example could be Descartes’ requirement that all of physics should be based on the mechanical interactions between corpuscula with no other properties than form, size, and quantity. The dictum that physical interactions ought to take place by local contact collided with Newton’s theory of gravity, which entailed action at a distance. The dictum led Descartes to formulate his clever and imaginative, but arbitrary and unexplanatory theory of gravity on the basis of vortices, and a theory of magnetism based on the supposed screw-shapes of particles. Making the observed macroscopic phenomena supervene on microscopic details that were unobservable, and could therefore be amended at zero risk, allowed him to give qualitative and imaginative explanations of those phenomena: but he fell short of finding quantitative descriptions—let alone predictions. It took Newton to show, in Book II of the Principia, that Descartes’ vortex theory was not only physically inconsistent—additional external forces would be required to keep the vortices moving—but also inconsistent with Kepler’s laws. Richard Westfall gave the following fulminating evaluation of Descartes’s philosophy in connection to mechanics: “Most of the major steps forward in mechanics during the [17th] century involved the contradiction of Descartes. Although the mechanical philosophy asserted that the particles of matter of which the universe is composed are governed in their motions by the laws of mechanics, the precise description of motions led repeatedly to conflict between the science of mechanics and the mechanical philosophy.” (Westfall 1971 , p. 138). Again, one might take this as an instance where philosophy constrains scientific progress by its adherence to pre-conceived and non-negotiable ontological ideas.

In a third, more recent example, Lawrence Krauss has argued that, when it comes to the most philosophical questions about for instance quantum mechanics, such as ‘what is a measurement?’, he finds the reflections of physicists more useful than those of philosophers (Krauss 2012 ), again reflecting the agnostic stance that says: “Show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don’t know of any.”

The historical argument, then, generally amounts to the following: “Look at the relationship between science and philosophy in the past. Any attempts at close collaboration or integration between science and philosophy have always failed. It is useless to try.”

Division of property: method and subject matters

The third argument lies at the root of the other two. It says that philosophy and the natural sciences have different subject matters, therefore a small basis of overlap: they can live happily together without interfering with each other. This would explain the tendency of philosophers, signalled by Hawking, to retreat into the study of human affairs and human societies, leaving the study of nature to natural scientists.

The underlying reasoning can be understood as follows. The traditional distinction, at any rate since the nineteenth century, between the natural sciences and the humanities, is in their subject matters: nature would be the subject matter of the natural sciences, whereas humanities would busy themselves with the products of the human mind. The social sciences would then focus on human behaviour and social realities. Science would only be interested in brute matters of fact and not in social or linguistic constructs, and it would know those matters of fact by means of experiments carried out under certain conditions and subject to requirements of transparency and replicability. Placing philosophy in the camp of the humanities and the social sciences as opposed to the natural sciences: it also would deal with products of the mind and social constructs. This would both institutionalise philosophy’s independence from science, as well as establish its uselessness for science.

To this difference in subject matters corresponds a difference in method, emphasized by Wilhelm Dilthey: erklären (to explain) would be the task of the natural sciences; the humanities would instead aim at verstehen (to understand, or comprehend): not to give a reductive account in terms of causal relation, but to create a comprehensive view where parts can be related to the whole. Science would aim at formulating general laws of nature via the universal language of mathematics; a universal language that, even if it would include probabilistic laws, would admit of no ambiguities; the goal of the scientist would then be: to explain the behaviour of nature in terms of laws that can be falsified or verified by experiments. It should be said that this methodological argument can be held quite independently from differences in subject matters.

Philosophical interpretation of science would, according to some, either be mere speculation, reflective of our lack of knowledge, or a matter of subjectivity and personal taste: therefore irrelevant for science. In a more permissive vein along the same line of reasoning, one might concede that there are interpretational issues and matters of debate in science, but maintain that they only concern the human aspects of science, the use humans make of science: matters of ethics or subjective meaning of concepts; interpretations, being quite independent of the truth itself that science discovers, do not or should not have any significant bearing on science. Debates would result from uncertainty and lack of knowledge, rather than being part of science.

3 Biting the Bullet? Characterising ‘Philosophy’

Maybe these criticisms are not so off the mark. Maybe we should as philosophers just bite the bullet, and accept that we have managed to make ourselves irrelevant by disengaging from the latest concerns of science (a)—perhaps because we are not interested in science (c), or because we are not good at it (b). Of course, this would be an oversimplification. For there are plenty of philosophers who are interested in science, as well as scientifically well-informed. But for the next two paragraphs, I wish to entertain the thesis that maybe those criticisms are right, before I say a bit more about how I will use the word ‘philosophy’ in the rest of the paper. Scientists often lament that philosophers are ignorant of science, that they do armchair science, that they never test their theoretical conjectures, that philosophers make empirical claims that are known to be false, etc. This may have been historically true of some philosophers like for example Hegel, and perhaps it would not be hard to find current books, written by philosophers, illustrating these shortcomings. Footnote 3 So yes, maybe Hawking’s criticism—that one mischievous and catchy sentence, “philosophy is dead… Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”—even if outrageously oversimplifying, does have bite.

But biting or not: it remains a false oversimplification. The rest of my essay will be concerned with how science needs philosophy. That should of course not make us forget the other fact—that philosophy needs science just as badly—but this essay will put that question aside.

At this point I should say a bit more about what I mean by ‘philosophy’. Defining philosophy is not an easy task; and the nature of philosophy, or of the philosophical life, has been one of the traditional philosophical questions—it was in Athens, at any rate: but, fortunately, I will not be concerned with the nature of philosophy, as such, in this essay, but rather with parts of philosophy that are close to science.

I will be especially concerned with philosophy of science, more specifically with what one could call ‘the philosophy of X’, where X is a scientific discipline such as physics, chemistry or biology. General philosophy of science is of course particularly relevant for science, since it reflects on the nature and structure of scientific theories, and on the scientific process itself. But my main argument will be about the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science concerned with specific disciplines. In this way, philosophy of science fulfils various roles. It engages critically, at various levels, with the foundations, methods, and results of the sciences. Thus it not only makes explicit what is often only mentioned implicitly by scientific theories, but it also analyses the concepts and methods of scientific theories, and engages with the interpretation of their results. Furthermore, philosophy is, as we will see in Sect.  4 , sometimes used more constructively to develop new scientific theories—what I will call science’s ‘heuristic function’.

But saying that philosophy of science is relevant to science does not mean that the importance of philosophy is limited to philosophy of science. For philosophy of science itself builds on discussions in other parts of philosophy—not only the history of philosophy, but also ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, to name a few. Thus, although my main argument is geared towards the relevance of philosophy of science, one should not lose these broader aspects of philosophy of science of sight. Subdivisions within philosophy are drawn for practical reasons, but when analysing specific problems they can also be artificial—as we will see in Sect.  4 b), where philosophy of physics requires discussing questions that belong to epistemology and ontology. Thus metaphysics, once banned by the logical positivists in the heyday of their youthful excesses, now thrives happily in analytic philosophy in ways that would have made Carnap, and even Quine, frown. But never mind the old glories—philosophy will never obey all your commands and prohibitions, and it will use whatever tools it can get hold of.

4 Science Needs Philosophy

I now get back to the response to the anti-philosophy arguments given in Sect.  2 . What can one answer to these arguments, which seem to echo our most endearing notions and intuitions about the nature of science? Can we really deny that science and philosophy are two different worlds; that their subject matters and methods differ? Can we deny that science seeks to explain brute matters that are quite independent of human life? Can we deny the fact that unquestioned philosophical preconceptions have at times been hampering factors of scientific progress? Of course, we can’t, as I hinted at in the previous Section: philosophy corrupts the youth—I think we all need to start from that. But that’s only one side of the story, and not the most interesting part for us.

As I will argue, the doctrine that philosophy is useless for science is not only false: it is also harmful for education, society, and ultimately science itself. I will do this by advancing three arguments for the usefulness of philosophy for the natural sciences. These arguments include refutations of the misconceptions presented in Sect.  2 . They are neither wholly original nor exhaustive, but they should be a first step towards the development of a synergetic relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences.

Given the tensions between science and philosophy, vividly expressed by physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss in recent works, trying to gain some clarity in this confused subject is by itself an important and urgent task.

Why philosophy is useful (Ad 2a))

The fallacy of anti-philosophicalism

Let me start with a simple contention that responds to a small, logical, part of the previous arguments: what I have called the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism and its refutation. The refuting argument boils down to something like this: “In order to argue that one does not need philosophy, one must do philosophy.” Indeed, a convincing argument to the effect that “philosophy is useless for science” will necessarily entail the act of philosophizing. Even if ‘useful’ is a practical notion, arguing for the uselessness of discipline A for discipline B requires philosophical knowledge about B: one needs to argue that A is irrelevant to the subject matter, method, and goals of B. To declare categorically the uselessness of philosophy for science is therefore to have complete knowledge of the goals, method, and subject matter of science. But one can only argue about what those goals and subject matter should be by doing philosophy—more specifically, philosophy of science. Furthermore, we can only infer general statements about the usefulness of philosophy for science, from the study of a limited number of historical cases, by appending that study with a philosophical argument: hence by doing philosophy, in the way that historians and philosophers of science do it.

Does this debunk the argument about the death of philosophy? I submit that it does. For he who wants to insist on philosophy being useless for science must not try to rationally argue for this conviction, but must keep it as a matter of private opinion: for as soon as he starts to rationalize his view, he must start philosophizing. If there is some truth in that, as Hawking announces, philosophy is dead—and there may be some sense in which this is true—and that “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”, then scientists can only do so by becoming philosophers of science themselves, hence resurrecting philosophy. Hawking acknowledges this by engaging in the discipline he has declared to be ‘dead’, thereby becoming a philosopher. Indeed, training in philosophy has at least this use, that it prevents us from being bad philosophers.

But, when arguing for the usefulness of philosophy, a logical argument is not necessarily the most convincing one. For it might lead us to replace the fallacy by a more cautious statement: “philosophy is useless for science, except for one thing: to argue that philosophy has no other use for science whatever.” Nevertheless, the fact that the former statement was false and the latter sounds arbitrary and contrived, leads us to question the soundness of an approach that declares philosophy to be close to useless. It might lead us to the idea that perhaps there is some genuine value in philosophy which is useful or even necessary for science and for scientists after all. I will defend the view that philosophy is useful to scientists, and that some amount of philosophical activity is necessary in order to construct a theoretical framework for doing science.

Paradigms and presuppositions (why science can’t live without philosophy)

The necessity of philosophy for science can easily be understood from a Kuhnian perspective on how science develops. Thomas Kuhn explicates progress in science not as a linear process of theoretical formulation and experimental verification or refutation of scientific theories, but in terms of revolutions and changes of paradigm (Kuhn 1962 ). A paradigm is for Kuhn not a cookbook recipe about the mathematical laws and mechanical workings of the universe or a set of equations and technical terms and procedures. Paradigms include ways of looking at the world, practices of instrumentation, traditions of research, shared values and beliefs about which questions are considered to be scientific. Nowadays we might want to stretch this concept even further to include institutional conditions, governmental constraints and market stimuli that may be supportive of particular paradigms. Footnote 4 Scientists working in different paradigms view the world in different ways, Kuhn has emphasized. Their basic assumptions about the kinds of entities there are in the world differ, as do the kinds of primary properties they attribute to those entities. Scientists working in different paradigms may disagree, as did Einstein and Bohr, about what makes a good theory or a good explanation; or about what it means to understand a problem. In other words, there are a wide range of ontological, epistemic, and ethical presuppositions weaved into any given scientific paradigm (for some examples of this, see Sect.  4 b). If it is the case that a paradigm cannot come to birth, gain support, defeat its competitors, consolidate, and eventually die without such a set of explicit or at least tacit presuppositions, then presuppositions must be an intrinsic and necessary part of science regarded as a pursuit of truth. Such philosophical presuppositions are contributory to scientific theories, even if the theories are formally independent of them, because axioms cannot even be formulated without an agreement, taken from common and technical language, and justified within a wider paradigm, over what the terms mean and what kinds of entities they apply to; without implicit or explicit assumptions about how the terms relate to experimentally measurable quantities; without prescriptions for how the results of the theory can be verified or falsified. Paradigms also suggest meaningful goals and open questions for the theory. Thus philosophy plays a heuristic role in the discovery of new scientific theories (de Regt 2004 ): paradigms can function as guides towards the formulation of theories that describe entities of one type or another. As de Regt has cogently argued (see also the examples in the next Section), many great scientific innovators have at some point studied the works of philosophers and developed philosophical views of their own. This did not always happen very systematically, but the interest in philosophy developed by these scientists was at least above average and in turn had an important heuristic function in the formulation of new scientific theories (de Regt 2004 ).

Implicit in the heuristic role of philosophy is also an important analytic function, as I stressed in Sect.  4 . Footnote 5 One task of philosophy is to scrutinize the concepts and presuppositions of scientific theories, to analyse and lay bare what is implicit in a particular scientific paradigm. It is a philosophical task—one which is often carried out by physicists—to clarify the concepts of space, time, matter, energy, information, causality, etc. that figure in a given theory. This analysis is philosophical in so far as it makes explicit the implicit assumptions in the uses of these concepts: assumptions that scientific theories do not themselves normally state. Hence it moves beyond the point where the concepts appear as irreducible elements in the postulates of a theory. This analytic function should ultimately allow for a further step of integration, where the concepts of one science are related to the concepts of another.

The analytic function of philosophy might not only feed back into science, but become a starting point for philosophy itself: discovering what entities science assumes there to be in the world can be a useful starting point for philosophical reflection on nature. It seems key that philosophical stances on nature and science be compatible with the kinds of objects and relations that science finds. In the example given earlier: mechanistic philosophy did not admit the concept of action at a distance because the only forces allowed by the dominant philosophical paradigm were mechanical, hence the opposition to Newton’s gravity theory; whereas Kepler’s Pythagoreanism did allow for such a concept. Footnote 6

To summarize, then, some of the tasks for philosophy that we have found in relation to science:

To allow for, indeed to naturally incorporate into its own framework and build upon, the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world, and their properties and relations; Footnote 7

To scrutinize the terms and presuppositions of science, i.e. to make explicit the implicit assumptions of scientific theories: to critically analyse and clarify what the terms used by science mean, how they are articulated, and what assumptions they require, as well as how they relate to the entities that philosophy argues there to be in the world;

To discover standards for what good theories, valid modes of explanation, and appropriate scientific methods are: to offer an epistemology that does not thwart, but stimulates scientific progress;

To provide ethical guidance and discover (broad) goals for science;

To point out and articulate the interrelations between concepts that are found in different domains of the natural sciences as well as the social sciences and the humanities;

To explain how observations fit in the broader picture of the world, and to create a language where scientific results and broader human experience can complement and mutually enrich each other.

This list is neither exhaustive nor unique. Some of these general ideas will be instantiated in the two examples given in the next section.

The above points to a necessary relationship between science and philosophy. Science needs philosophy, as we have seen, in its two functions: heuristic, and analytic. Especially during changes of paradigm, philosophical debate will be part of the activities of science. None of this is to say that scientists need to be philosophers: most of them are not. So, philosophers may be drawn in at that point. But it is also not to say that professional philosophers should be doing all of the above tasks. Part of those tasks—surely 1 to 4—are often performed by scientists. Thus what I envisage here is a collaboration between scientists and philosophers. Indeed, I think we should be careful in distinguishing the disciplinary differences from the professional or individual ones. Saying that science, as a systematic theoretical and experimental study of the natural world, needs philosophy—which I have defined, in the analytic tradition, as the study of all the results of the sciences and humanities using the method of conceptual analysis—is not to say that each scientist requires philosophy. Philosophy may be merely a useful tool for scientists.

Why the historical argument fails: quantum information, alive and kicking (Ad 2b))

In this section, I give two examples where philosophical discussion has been genuinely contributory to science, along the lines discussed in 4a)ii. Before I do that, I will address the negative examples given in 2b)—examples where philosophy’s influence was rather hampering: the iron clad of mechanistic philosophy and Plato’s dictum that celestial motions should be along circles.

Working from 4a)ii we can now easily see that these examples in fact become a case in point: they illustrate the importance of philosophy for science. They make clear the need for having the right philosophical framework when doing science. If a conceptual enterprise such as philosophy were completely neutral, or indeed useless, to science, it could not be harmful to it in any important way either. But the fact is that: (A) some philosophical doctrines have been harmful for science while others have been productive; (B) it is impossible to have no philosophy at all (as I argued in 4a)); (C) the reason philosophy was harmful in some cases is because it was used in a positive way, according to its heuristic function from 4a)ii. And this heuristic function can indeed also be used positively. The correct course of action, then, is not to neglect philosophy—because, as per (A) and (B), philosophy can’t be neglected—but to embrace its presence and to use it in an intelligent and positive way, as in (C). It follows from (A) to (C) that philosophy must be relevant to science in its own specific way, even if it is only in the manner of setting necessary intellectual preconditions of freedom of mind, of trust in the power of reason and of experimental observation, etc. History shows that it is hard for scientists to free themselves from outdated philosophical modes of thought. This highlights the importance of investing in having a philosophical framework that allows for the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world. Specific tasks for philosophy are as listed in 4a)ii.

Next we will study positive historical examples where 4a)ii is at work, thereby refuting the historical argument formulated in 2b). To refute the historical argument, it suffices to show one example where philosophy has been genuinely contributory to the progress of science. The example will be interesting in so far as it also sheds light on why it was that philosophy contributed to science, thus instantiating elements of 4a)ii. There are many such examples. Kepler Footnote 8 and Sommerfeld were both inspired by Pythagorean philosophical ideas when working out their models of the harmonies of the solar system and of the atom, respectively. Let me here concentrate on another, more recent, example. It concerns the current revolution in quantum information technology. In the past ten years we have seen the first commercialization of quantum randomness: the first bank transaction built on the basis of a code encrypted not by the usual algorithms of classical cryptography (which rely on unproven mathematical assumptions such as the difficulty in factorizing large prime numbers), but based on the new field of quantum cryptography: a technique for encoding messages based on the notion of entanglement between particles at long distances. Quantum cryptography has been successfully developed and commercialized by several groups over the past twenty years or so.

As it turns out, the quantum information revolution is rooted in the efforts of scientists who saw philosophical enquiry as a necessary step in their quest for knowledge. There are two key moments in the history of quantum mechanics when physical progress crucially depended on asking the right philosophical questions. Let me take these two episodes as case studies of the question how philosophical ideas influence science, in terms of philosophy’s heuristic and analytic functions.

Einstein versus quantum mechanics

In 1927, conflicting views on quantum physics started to crystallize. Towards the end of the 5th Solvay conference in Brussels, Werner Heisenberg declared quantum mechanics to be a “closed theory, whose fundamental physical and mathematical assumptions are no longer susceptible of any modification” (Bacciagaluppi and Valentini 2006 , p. 437). In doing so, Heisenberg was voicing the shared feelings of his colleagues Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, also present at the conference. But Einstein and Schrödinger would have none of it: the Copenhagen interpretation—as the new view of quantum mechanics came to be known—had philosophical implications that they deemed undesirable. Among those properties was the lack of determinacy in physical quantities and events. Also, Heisenberg and co. seemed to introduce a possible role for human observers in the definition of the concepts that went into science.

A few years later, in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen made the nature of their discomfort with quantum theory explicit in a famous article that came to be known as the EPR thought experiment. They considered pairs of correlated particles separated at long distances. The possibility to measure a property (for example, the momentum) of the first particle automatically gives information about the value of that property for the second particle, without measuring that property for the second particle, since the particles are in a state of correlation. And the possibility to measure the complementary property (for example, the position) of the first particle would as well determine the value of that quantity for the second particle. But because of the assumption that measurements done on the first particle cannot affect the properties of the second particle (after all, the particles are well-separated), the second particle must have had the values of its position and momentum determined before any measurements were done on the first particle (since, according to the formalism of quantum mechanics, a measurement of the first particle determines the value of that property for the other particle, in both cases). Since, according to standard quantum mechanics, a particle cannot simultaneously have determinate values for both its position and its momentum, this means that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory: for it does not predict properties for the second particle that, according to the argument, it can clearly have.

The EPR argument is philosophical in the sense explained earlier, in Sect.  3 : for it analyses the foundations of quantum mechanics, trying to think clearly about the assumptions being made by standard quantum mechanics. But it also contains two substantive ontological assumptions. The first is what EPR call the ‘criterion of reality’ that if, using the formalism of quantum mechanics, one can predict with probability one the result of a measurement, then there is an element of physical reality corresponding to the physical quantity, with value equal to the predicted value of the measurement. The second assumption is what they call ‘locality’: namely, that elements of physical reality pertaining to one system cannot be affected by measurements performed on another system that is spacelike separated from the first.

Thus EPR’s quest was both physical and philosophical. In addition to these two ontological assumptions, they also impose ‘completeness’ as an epistemic desideratum that a theory should satisfy: namely, that ‘every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory’.

This led EPR to push the physical arguments farther than anybody had ever done before. The study of paradoxes borne out by thought experiments such as EPR has always played a major role in physics; but the resolution of such paradoxical situations almost invariably requires a philosophical stance about the principles and methods that are valued and deemed legitimate.

The EPR paper was truly philosophical in so far at it analysed and questioned the conceptual foundations of quantum theory. Especially EPR’s construal of the notion of completeness, and their criterion of reality, are explicit epistemic and ontological positions.

Does this mean that Einstein was being professional philosophers while he worked on that paper? Of course not. One should distinguish doing philosophy —something that, like I said before, can be done by both physicists and philosophers—from one’s professional label. Einstein was doing the philosophy that physics required at that point in time—and it was philosophy because he was reflecting on, and critically and constructively engaging with, the conceptual foundations of quantum theory. To do that, he needed philosophical tools. But he was of course also doing physics. So, by bringing philosophical methods into physics, he was advancing physics. I believe it is artificial, at such interdisciplinary intersections, to attempt to make too fixed a demarcation between physics and philosophy. Einstein was simply doing ground-breaking work that required methods from both fields.

Physics and the hippies

The next episode in this story of physics and philosophy took place many years later. After the publication of EPR, physicists continued to philosophize about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but eventually the discussion died out. During the cold war, science and in particular physics gained much prestige. As class sizes grew, increasingly less time was spent on big questions and philosophical debates in the classrooms. While part of the reason for this decrease of attention on philosophical issues may have been pragmatic—philosophical discussions with large groups of students are hard to manage, and grading essay questions in exams is significantly more time consuming than computational questions—a vision was certainly at play about what education in science and technology should prepare students for. The interpretation of quantum mechanics was unlikely to prepare students who could provide societies with new gadgets or governments with new powerful weapons, whereas technical mastery of the formulas actually might. The old generation of physicists had received thorough training in the humanities—Werner Heisenberg once said “My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing” (Buckley and Peat 1996 , p. 6) and they had indulged in philosophical musings about the meaning of it all. Now the new generation of strong-headed physicists uttered the war whoop “Shut up and calculate” and instructed their students to rally behind their utilitarian flag. Making gadgets was the new goal of physics.

The instrumentalist view of science regnant during the decades after the war is explained by Lee Smolin as follows: “When I learned physics in the 1970s, it was almost as if we were being taught to look down on people who thought about foundational problems. When we asked about the foundational issues in quantum theory, we were told that no one fully understood them but that concern with them was no longer part of science. The job was to take quantum mechanics as given and apply it to new problems. The spirit was pragmatic; “Shut up and calculate” was the mantra. People who couldn’t let go of their misgivings over the meaning of quantum theory were regarded as losers who couldn’t do the work.” (Smolin 2007 , p. 312).

But instrumentalism had to give way to other kinds of motivation for doing physics. Economic recession, budget cuts, and the decrease in the number of physics jobs made class sizes decrease again. Physicists once again had the time to think about the meaning of what they were doing. In a second, seemingly unrelated line of developments, the CIA, afraid that Americans would lag behind the Soviets, decided to fund laser physicist Harald Puthoff at Stanford University’s SRI lab in Menlo Park, California, for the study of psychic phenomena. Additional money came from NASA. Soon Puthoff would be associated with a third strand of events around the Bay Area. A dubious consortium of hippie physicists and quasi-crackpots formed an unlikely discussion group. They alternated their musings about all things quantum and the meaning of life with drinking parties and psychedelic drug use. They came to be known as the Fundamental Fysiks Group and eventually found a generous patron in self-help industry forerunner and multi-millionaire guru Werner Erhard. One goal of the hippie scientists was to use quantum mechanics for superluminal (faster-than-light) communication. This would include communication with their deceased colleagues. Needless to say, many of their arguments were misguided, but their contribution to physics was of lasting endurance. They not only put the interpretation of quantum mechanics on the research and teaching agenda; they analysed the EPR arguments and the important contributions to this discussion made by John Bell, David Bohm, and others, which had escaped the attention of scientists until then; they helped clarify the issues at stake, developed new thought experiments of their own, and raised awareness that quantum nonlocality might be useful in long-distance communication. Save the crucial (wrong) conclusion that superluminal communication was possible, several set-ups and techniques the hippies considered did not differ significantly from the ones that quantum communication uses nowadays. As David Kaiser has argued (Kaiser 2012 , p. xxiii), “The group’s efforts helped to bring sustained attention to the interpretation of quantum mechanics back into the classroom. And in a few critical instances, their work instigated major breakthroughs that—with hindsight—we may now recognize as laying crucial groundwork for quantum information science.”

Like Einstein, the Fundamental Fysiks Group worked at the intersection of physics and philosophy. They brought philosophical methods and literature to bear on problems in physics, and as such they did the kind of work that I argue physics periodically needs—regardless of who does that work, whether it is the physicists themselves or the professional philosophers.

The two examples illustrate some of the tasks of philosophy for science listed in Sect.  4 a)ii. Progress in fundamental issues such as entanglement and quantum communication stemmed from physicists’ willingness to engage in debates about ontological and epistemic issues such as the role of the observer, the completeness of the mathematical description of nature, the desiderata for a good description of nature, and so on. Progress not driven by such philosophical questions is hard to imagine in this case; the philosophical debate that actually took place acted as a positive, guiding force that pushed science further; fuelled by the posing of legitimate and relevant philosophical questions in their quest for new physics, by their being insistent on philosophical clarity and coherence rather than content with just technical mastery of the formulas, which was the trend of the day.

Synergy between science and philosophy (on objects and methods) (Ad 2c))

There are two sides to the objection regarding the difference between science and philosophy as forms of scholarship: subject matters on the one hand, methodology on the other.

I will be brief about the distinction in subject matter. Philosophy studies every subject matter that the sciences also study (recall my ‘philosophy of X’ from Sect.  3 ), but it does this with different aims and methods. The universe, possible universes other than our own, elementary particles, life, are all subjects of concern for both natural science and philosophy. Therefore, on those overlaps science and philosophy cannot be distinguished on the basis of their subject matters alone. The difference is often sought in their formal objects and methodologies: the earlier mentioned distinction between erklären and verstehen could be reframed as the statement that the natural sciences seek explanations in the modes of causal efficacy and material causation, whereas philosophy is interested in formal analysis, goals, and intentionality. This difference in methodology is often summed up by the mantra: ‘philosophy asks why-questions, science asks how-questions’. And I agree: their methods are different, and their aims (in particular, the specific interest from which they study ‘the same subject matter’) are also different. But I also submit that any such division cannot be made once and for all—the division is both vague at any point in time, as well as dynamical.

By declaring that there is such a division of intellectual activities, natural scientists and philosophers can comfortably go about their work without competing or stepping on each other’s shoes. But, as I am suggesting, the mantra is as comfortable as it is lacking in accuracy in fully reflecting the nature of the relationship between science and philosophy. Agreed: science and philosophy are in principle different forms of scholarship. For established fields of science such as classical mechanics or electromagnetism, there may be much truth in the statement that science is practically interested in how-questions, defined by the framework of the particular paradigm one is working in. But that is so only because a number of why-questions have been answered within the wider paradigm and are not being questioned any further. When paradigms are in the making, there is no clear-cut distinction between the scholar asking the how-questions and the scholar asking the why-questions. Any how-question may lead us to a why-question, and any answer to a why-question may lead us to answers to multiple how-questions. When placed in front of a why-question in the quest for a new theory, the scientist cannot retreat into the shell of specialism. He or she must struggle with the question using whichever intellectual means are available. He or she may need to establish, as the founding fathers of quantum mechanics attempted to do, what a measurement is before they can convincingly argue that there is such a thing as uncertainty in the microscopic world. The scientific quest presupposes having a number of philosophical issues settled first: or, at least, it presupposes engaging with the various conceptual options, and taking a stance on them. In so doing, the subject matters and methods of philosophers and of scientists become entangled: the relationship between science and philosophy becomes dynamical.

This is particularly true in our time, when science has expanded into realms—from far-away galaxies to the multiverse to neuroscience to molecular engineering—that were unknown territory just a number of decades before. Science is aimed at truth about the natural world, and although methodological distinctions can be made formally, one must be aware of their limitations: in particular, it would be wrong to conclude that a methodological distinction allows us to dismiss philosophy for the sake of science.

This brings us to another point: if science needs philosophy, scientific results should also be the starting point of philosophical reflection about nature. It is probably here that Hawking’s criticism of philosophy has an important core of truth to it (see footnote 1).

There is another reason why science needs philosophy. Scientific knowledge is not technical specialism cut off from the rest of human knowledge. The moment this happens would signal the forthcoming death of science. Scientific results constitute knowledge to be integrated into the broader human quest for answers about ourselves and about the universe. Philosophy helps the scientist articulate her findings in a kind of knowledge that can be shared with others, not experts in her field; it will help her discuss with other intellectuals and contribute to the general human task of getting to know the world and ourselves better.

To summarize my main argument so far: the relationship between science and philosophy may be in bad shape, and philosophy may be in bad shape, but it cannot be dead as long as we are trying to understand the universe around us. Historically, philosophy has been very influential for science, as has science been for philosophy. Any instances where philosophy had a negative effect on science in fact contribute to highlighting the importance of thinking carefully about the relation between philosophy and science. Science cannot do without philosophy because there are philosophical stances implicit in the presuppositions and goals of any scientific paradigm and in how theories are connected to reality: and it is the task of philosophy of science to critically engage with those presuppositions. Thus science needs philosophy to scrutinize those presuppositions, stances, and goals. And philosophical tools are sometimes required to make progress—as the EPR and quantum information revolution illustrate. Finally, science requires philosophy to connect its findings to the rest of human knowledge. Philosophy can act as a language connecting disciplines that are far away from each other.

Since the subject matters of science and of philosophy are partially overlapping, formal or methodological distinctions between science and philosophy only have limited ranges of applicability and certainly do not imply independence of the two disciplines. In other words, the boundaries between science and philosophy are not water-tight, nor should they be.

5 Liberal Arts and Sciences: Freeing the Mind

Having argued, at the end of the previous section, that science as such needs philosophy, I will now look at the implications of this statement for education. That is, I would like to add a few reflections about how scient ists need philosophy, and how this is to be reflected in education.

Let me start by examining what does and does not follow from what we have established so far. From the assertion that science needs philosophy in some way it does not follow that each individual scientist should be a skilled philosopher, or in fact should have any kind of developed skill in philosophy. A scientist faced with a philosophical question in the course of her research might choose to neglect it and still do a relatively good job at her research, at least for some time. Also, despite the fact that every scientist has a philosophy that is at least weaved into the presuppositions and goals of the given theory or paradigm that the scientist works in, perhaps appended with her own private reflections, it is true that science can be done for the sake of science with neglect of the philosophical presuppositions and for exclusively utilitarian goals. Obviously, utilitarian values do not offer a sustainable basis for science as a whole and for maintaining public trust in the meaningfulness of fundamental research. But for the individual scientist, they might just suffice. Furthermore, even in the case that the scientist has her own philosophical views, she is free to keep them private and not let them interfere with the research she is doing. In fact, scientists may work together on the same scientific problem while sustaining different ontological or epistemic presuppositions. Philosophy may be even less relevant for the applied scientist (although, especially for her, ethical issues will be important!). So, for all practical purposes, the individual scientist might get away with neglecting philosophy. What use, one might cynically enquire, will the laser physicist have in formal training in philosophy? Even taking the point that every scientist in fact makes use of philosophical thought of one kind or another—a set of ideas about the scientific practice, about the nature of the objects and relations that constitute her subject matter, etc.—one may still argue that it is enough for the individual scientist to work within the philosophical framework of a specific paradigm; to employ, in her daily work as a scientist, the intuitions that she internalized in the context of the specific paradigm or tradition in which she was trained. There is no need for receiving specific training in philosophical matters. Thus philosophy courses of the kind I have in mind cannot be seen as necessary prerequisites for any single scientist. But I argue that they are useful for them, and that scientists would benefit from them: and so, that science programmes ought to have such courses —again, without going into details, which would require a separate paper.

So, this suggests the following question. Shouldn’t the education of future scientists somehow reflect the connection that we have found between the sciences and philosophy? Indeed, particularly in the context of liberal arts and sciences, it is key that education reflects that connection. Science students in modern liberal arts and sciences programs should receive training in philosophy specific to their particular sciences. The kind of training I am arguing for here goes beyond general courses such as logic and philosophy of science, which are very important and are already part of some liberal arts and sciences curricula, as electives at least. It also goes beyond ethics, which is obviously an important training for scientists—although here one should go beyond the theoretical cocktail-party way in which some of these courses are taught, since their relevance often escapes the student. Perhaps such courses should be based more on actual scientific episodes and practices. But ethics is in itself a very large subject, and I have something else in mind here that more directly relates to my case studies: namely, philosophical reflection specific to each of the sciences, in fact specific to each particular science course a student takes. I mean courses such as ‘The Philosophy of X’, where X is a discipline or a collection of related disciplines (see the discussion in Sect.  3 ). And I would argue that such materials could also be part of every science course, rather than separate courses, and so are best taught by scientists. If one is intrepid, one might wish to add a course on theory construction: but I admit, this will not be easy, though it could be very beneficial at the graduate level.

Historically, it has been a goal of liberal arts and sciences education to educate the social, political, and intellectual elites. In our century, the liberal arts and sciences are often advertised in somewhat different, but related terms: ‘training the leaders of the future who can solve global problems’ is something one often hears as part of the institutional rhetoric about liberal arts and sciences. Selective admission procedures, small class settings, and emphasis on basic logical, argumentative, and rhetorical skills do confirm this vision. Clearly, some of these leaders will also be leaders in their respective scientific fields, whether in applied or in fundamental science. So, if the liberal arts and sciences aim at training the intellectual elites of the future, in particular they should be interested in the scientists who can really make a difference in research and scientists who will be the leaders of other scientists. More precisely; I will take a useful practical distinction made by Lee Smolin, even if I don’t agree with the broad-brush way Smolin applies it to string theory, nor with the details of his comparison with Kuhn’s idea of revolutionary science. The distinction goes back to Einstein, who wrote in a letter (letter to Robert A. Thornton 7 December 1944, EA pp. 61-574): “I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historical and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.” Footnote 9 In this rich quotation, Einstein argues, as he did in many other occasions, for the significance of training in the history and philosophy of science, which gives the scientist independence of thought, which is precisely the kind of liberation of the mind that liberal arts programs also seek. Second, he calls this freedom of mind the mark of distinction between a mere specialist and a real seeker after truth. Smolin explicates this as follows. He divides scientists into seers and scientists who are master craftspeople. The seers are the ones leading the way, the ones who can see the whole forest, in Einstein’s words ‘the seekers after truth’. The master craftspeople are the ones who are very good at their particular trade, but have never seen a forest—be out of lack of interest or lack of sight. Smolin relates these two categories of scientists to the two types of science in Kuhn—normal science and revolutionary science. Footnote 10 In normal science, all the details of a given paradigm are explored and worked out. This is mainly the master craftspeople’s work. They explore the mine, excavate the tunnels, take out the valuable jewels in a mine that was found and planned by others. Revolutionary science, on the other hand, is the task of going into new territory, of doing the exploratory work required to establish radical new ideas; that is the work of the seers, the people who can think out of the existing paradigm—although never entirely—who can point out weaknesses in theories and propose new ways forward. Freedom of mind, among other things, is one of the characteristics of such scientists, and knowledge of history and philosophy contribute to that free way of thinking. If liberal arts and sciences programs advertise themselves as forming the leaders of the future, shouldn’t they be seeking to form master craftspeople as well as seekers, searchers of truth? Shouldn’t they be the breeding ground for scientists with a certain capacity of independence from prejudice and from the opinion of the majority as well as the ability to persuade others to pursue their radical ideals?

For a different perspective on this topic, see Kitchener ( 1988 ).

This is not what Hawking does, and the reason for it will become clear in the next section. He does not ignore philosophy, but engages with it.

I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting some of the above criticisms of current philosophy. For some examples, see Ladyman and Ross ( 2007 : pp. 17–24).

For the importance of tools and instrumentation, contexts, and power in different science cultures, see Galison and Stump ( 1996 ) and Galison ( 1997 ).

This ‘analytic’ function of philosophy does not strictly correlate with analytic philosophy. Both the analytic and continental traditions have of course been concerned with analysis of science and of its results.

This holds true despite the fact that Kepler was one of the initiators of mechanistic science, and that also Newton in various ways held mechanical views. He regarded his theory of gravity as a phenomenological, inductively generalized law of nature that would nevertheless require further explanation as to its causes.

See for examples the debates about the status of the wave-function in quantum mechanics: it is an important question whether the wave-function is a real entity existing in the world, or whether it merely represents the information about a system. This is a question that the formalism by itself does not answer, but nevertheless is important for how quantum mechanics is interpreted and used.

For a visualisation of Kepler’s model of the universe, see Katherine Brading’s Digital Visualization Project: https://katherinebrading.wordpress.com/news/digital-visualization-project .

Quoted by Smolin (2007) , pp. 310–311.

I take Smolin’s identification of the contrast of seers versus master crafspeople with revolutionary versus normal science to be merely a suggestive analogy. For there are important historical disanalogies too, which nevertheless do not militate against the point I am making about education.

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Acknowledgements

I thank the organizers of the conference Rethinking Liberal Education, where this paper was presented, for an inspiring conference. I also thank Dennis Dieks and Jeroen van Dongen for a long-term collaboration which has helped shape some of the ideas presented in this essay. I would also like to thank Palmyre Oomen and Rudi te Velde for discussions on these topics as well as thoughtful comments on the manuscript. I thank Jeremy Butterfield and two anonymous referees for their comments on the manuscript.

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De Haro, S. Science and Philosophy: A Love–Hate Relationship. Found Sci 25 , 297–314 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09619-2

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09619-2

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Particles And Waves: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Science

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This volume brings together six published and two new essays by the noted philosopher of science, Peter Achinstein. It represents the culmination of his examination of methodological issues that arise in nineteenth-century physics. He focuses on the philosophical problem of how, if at all, is it possible to confirm scientific hypotheses that postulate `unobservables’ such as light waves, molecules, and electrons? This question is one that not only was of great interest to nineteenth-century physicists and methodologists, but continues to occupy philosophers of science up to the present day.

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Daniel Dennett obituary

Controversial US philosopher who sought to understand and explain the science of the mind

Daniel Dennett, who has died aged 82, was a controversial philosopher whose writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology helped shift Anglo-American philosophy from its focus on language and concepts towards a coalition with science.

His naturalistic account of consciousness, purged as far as possible of first-person agency and qualitative experience, has been popular outside academia and hotly opposed by many within it.

One of the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism , along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris , he also wrote on Darwinism, memes, free will and religion.

“Figuring out as a philosopher how brains could be, or support, or explain, or cause, minds” was how Dennett, aged 21, defined his project. Having gained a philosophy degree at Harvard University in 1963, he was then doing a BPhil at Oxford University under the behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle, but spent most of his time in the Radcliffe science library learning about the brain.

Many philosophers were (as they still are) trying to accommodate the mind, and its subjectivity, in third-person science. Yet it seems impossible to identify “intentionality” (the “aboutness” of thoughts) or “qualia” (the “thusnesses” of experience) as nothing but brain states or behaviour.

In dealing with “intentionality”, Dennett, however, had a novel strategy – “first content, then consciousness” – that reversed the usual line of enquiry. He proposed “to understand how consciousness is possible by understanding how unconscious content is possible first”.

Nature, he argued, has its own unwitting reasons – “free-floating rationales” that are “independent of, and more fundamental than, consciousness”. The ability of organisms to respond appropriately, if unconsciously, to things in the environment is a “rudimentary intentionality”. And, over aeons, the “blind, foresightless, purposeless process of trial and error” has knitted “the mechanical responses of ‘stupid’ neurons” (in certain creatures’ brains) into a “reflective loop [that] creates the manifest illusion of consciousness,” he thought. “Mind is the effect, not the cause.” As spiders mindlessly spin webs, homo sapiens has spun “a narrative self”.

What Ryle had dismissed as “the ghost in the machine” could thus be exorcised, not by denying its existence but by seeing it for what it is – a conjuring trick rather than magic, an illusion fabricated by what (in his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) he called evolution’s “reverse engineering”.

Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness was published in 1969. Sixteen other books and numerous papers adapted and extended its thesis – that intentionality can be ascribed, along a spectrum with no clear dividing line, impartially to minds, human brains, bees, computers, thermostats: it is a functional relation between object and environment. As to exactly when, in evolutionary or personal history, conscious intentionality arose, “don’t ask,” he said.

We can take what he called a “physical stance” towards something (considering its constituents and their causal interlockings) or a “design stance” (seeing it as fabricated, by evolution or humans, to serve a particular function) or an “intentional stance” (explaining its behaviour in terms of goals that it would sensibly pursue if it were rational).

“The intentional stance is thus a theory-neutral way of capturing the cognitive competences of different organisms (or other agents) without committing the investigator to overspecific hypotheses about the internal structures that underlie the competences.” We treat chess-playing computers, some animals and humans, as if they had beliefs and desires. But, he was furiously asked, don’t we humans actually have them?

Yes and no, apparently. There is no one-to-one match between brain states and mental states. It is the creature as a whole that has intentionality. The discrete individually identifiable mental states that we seem to be having are (in reality) “an edited and metaphorialised version of what’s going on in our brains” – equivalent to “user illusions” on a computer screen: like the hourglass, folder and dustbin icons, they betoken the complex processes occurring behind the scenes.

“No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking, or the feeler that does the feeling,” said Dennett, nor is, or does, the brain as a whole. Instead there are “multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating multiple drafts as they go” – until, from among “concurrent contentful events in the brain … a select subset of such events ‘wins’ … The way to explain the miraculous-seeming powers of an intelligent intentional system is to decompose it into hierarchically structured teams.” These consist of “relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi that produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole”.

“Yes we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots” was the headline of an article about him in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and Dennett endorsed it with amusement. He loved making furniture, building fences, mending roofs, tinkering with cars and boats; and, among the many things he constructed were sets of nested Russian dolls to illustrate his philosophy. The outside doll was “Descartes”; inside that was “the Middle Ghost” (a reference to Ryle’s) – but inside that was a “Robot”. “We are not authorities about our own consciousness,” he said. The robot is masked by the ghost.

Dennett pronounced qualia to be illusions. Ever since Descartes, we have tended to assume that we have “mental images”, as if, said Dennett, we could view little pictures, visible only to ourselves in an inner “Cartesian theatre”.

If so, we should be able to count the number of stripes on the tiger we are imagining, and say whether we have been seeing it face-on or sideways. No such definite information is available. Mental images are indeterminate in a way that pictures cannot be, and closer to generalised linguistic descriptions. So limited and poor is our access to our own conscious experiences, said Dennett, that it “does not differ much from the access another person can have to those experiences – your experiences – if you decide to go public with your account”. Indeed “our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds”. We take an intentional stance on ourselves.

Dennett’s views remained pretty consistent throughout numerous books and papers, but in recent years he became more lenient towards mental imagery. He was impressed by neuroscientific research suggesting that there are specific observable brain activities that potentially may be decoded as imaging processes.

And, having been stern in denying what is disparagingly called “folk psychology” (a term he invented), he began to describe himself as “a mild realist” about mental states, prepared to concede that “the traditional psychological perspective” is not merely something described by third-person observers.

Avoiding accusations that he smuggled in the subjectivity he so adamantly denied, Dennett had recourse to “memes”, a concept (invented by Dawkins) modelled on that of genes. Memes are units of cultural practice, including anything from language to drama to wearing a baseball cap backwards to clapping as a form of praise. They are, in Dennett’s words, ‘“prescriptions” for ways of doing things that can be transmitted to, and from, human brains, and that “have their own reproductive fitness, just like viruses”. We are infected by memes, and it is “the memes invasion … that has turned our brains into minds”.

Dennett also applied a Darwinian approach to free will. “A billion years ago, there was no free will on this planet, but now there is. The physics has not changed; the improvements in ‘can do’ over the years had to evolve.” We are now able to predict probable futures, and to pursue or avert them. We are not deluded about having that capacity; as we are, he fulminated, about religion. Breaking the Spell (2006) was judiciously named. That was what he was urging religious people to do.

Born in Boston, Dennett spent the first five years of his life in Lebanon. His father, also Daniel, was a counter-intelligence officer posing as a cultural attache to the American embassy in Beirut. He died in a plane crash in 1947 (later, Dennett’s sister, the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett, would claim Kim Philby’s connivance in it). Dennett’s mother, Ruth Leck, a teacher and editor, took the children back to Massachusetts.

Reprieved from matching up to his father’s expectations, Dennett said, he nonetheless grew up in his father’s shadow. But little could sap his exuberant self-confidence. Characteristically, the title of his 1991 book was Consciousness Explained.

In 1959, having just begun a maths degree at Weslyan University, Connecticut, Dennett read Willard van Orman Quine ’s From a Logical Point of View. He was so excited that he decided “to be a philosopher, and go to Harvard and tell this man Quine why he is wrong”. The first two he managed, though for a time he worried that Quine (later a great friend) was more interested by Dennett’s sculpture than his philosophising.

Dennett did contemplate being a sculptor, and would, he said, certainly have studied engineering had his family not been so arts-oriented. Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, in 1993 he joined the Humanoid Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to construct a robot (Cog) that would be not only intelligent but conscious. The project ended in 2003, and Cog was retired to a museum.

Dennett was Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts, and visiting professor at a host of other universities, including Oxford and the London School of Economics. His memoir, I’ve Been Thinking , was published in 2023.

He and his wife, Susan (nee Bell), whom he married in 1962, lived in North Andover, Massachusetts, and he also hobby farmed in Maine for more than 40 summers, blissfully “tillosophising” on a tractor, sailing his boat Xanthippe, fixing buildings and digging drains. Dennett loved solving puzzles and disinterring the inner workings of machines – above all those of “the miraculous-seeming” mind. “No miracles allowed,” he said.

He is survived by Susan, a daughter, Andrea, and son, Peter, and six grandchildren, and his sisters, Cynthia and Charlotte.

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Malgorzata Peszynska named a University Distinguished Professor

Malgorzata Peszyńska, newly honored as a University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, has charted a remarkable path—shaped by uncommon talent, grit, and a spirit of joyful independence.

Renowned for her exploration of the physical world through the prism of mathematics and computation, Peszyńska's work has yielded fascinating insights over her distinguished career. Her research has fostered innovation and enabled applications with global impact on pressing environmental concerns and natural resource management.

In recognition of her achievements, she has earned Oregon State's highest academic honor. The university awards this distinction to a select few faculty nominated by their peers, with the College of Science having the highest number at 19.

"Dr. Malgorzata Peszyńska is nationally and internationally recognized as a leader in mathematical and computational modeling of complex processes, and her work has been particularly significant in building bridges across disciplinary boundaries," Provost Ed Feser wrote in the university’s announcement of this honor.

Peszyńska will present a university distinguished lecture , along with one other 2024 distinguished professor: Todd S. Palmer in the College of Engineering. She will present her lecture on Wednesday, May 8, at 1:30 – 3 p.m. in the Memorial Union Horizon Room. Her lecture is titled, “Math Matters: Multi-* Modeling, Analysis and Simulation.” Register for the lecture here .

“This is an honor and accomplishment, and evidence of appreciation coming from the many colleagues, students and collaborators,” Peszyńska said. “It is also a responsibility, and I am not the only one deserving, but now I can stand on the shoulders of giants and pay it forward.”

As the Joel Davis Faculty Scholar in Mathematics, Peszyńska is acclaimed for her pioneering work in numerical analysis and modeling. Her recognition as an AAAS Fellow in 2020 highlights her “exceptional contributions to multidisciplinary mathematical and computational modeling of flow and transport in porous media."

Peszyńska's work has been supported by more than $3M from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other agencies and industries. She has authored more than 119 research publications in high impact computational mathematics journals including SIAM journals and in the interdisciplinary venues such as the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, Advances in Water Resources, Geophysics, and other high-Impact journals, and her publications have received more than 2,000 citations.

Over the years, her achievements have garnered numerous awards: She received the Geosciences Career Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), She's also been recognized as a Distinguished Fellow by the Kosciuszko Foundation and served as a 2009-2010 Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Warsaw, 2006 Mortar Board Top Professor award, 2016 Graduate faculty award and more.

A mathematical odyssey in energy and climate

Peszyńska specializes in modeling, analysis, and numerical analysis of models, a discipline that seeks to describe real-world systems mathematically, so they can be simulated, analyzed predicted and—when there are problems—solved.

With expertise that spans disciplines, Peszynska primarily works to mathematically solve problems related to environment and, recently, climate change. Her modeling of mass and energy flow and transport includes porous media phenomena in aquifers, oil and gas reserves, carbon sequestration, solar cells and the effect of permafrost warming. Perhaps most notable is her work on phase transitions in methane hydrate transfer and evolution, as well as in using computational mathematics to study complex pore-scale environments. This work aims to understand and predict the presence and behavior of fluids in nature to mitigate potential disasters, like hazardous explosions or methane emissions contributing to global warming and addressing challenges in climate science and geophysics.

In her recent NSF-supported work on studying permafrost changes, Peszyńska seeks to predict and mitigate potential large-scale events such as building collapses and coastal erosion, highlighting the urgency for more modeling in this area.

Her research team employs computers to approximate solutions, striving for accuracy even when the true solution is unknown, she explained. Ultimately, they contemplate how computational algorithms can approximate truth without certainty, delving into the mysteries of mathematics.

"There's so much about the methods themselves that intrigue us in this mystery," she said. "How do you achieve that? How can you anticipate whether your computational algorithm will yield a prediction close enough to the true solution, regardless of what that true solution might be, without actually having knowledge of it?"

Peszyńska will explore this and other questions in her public lecture . She will also “delve into how her research team explores multi-scale multi-physics systems using complex computational mathematics, inspired by real-life applications. She will discuss their investigation of porous media at nano-, pore-, lab-, and field scales, predicting their responses to environmental changes. She will also emphasize the importance of fostering interdisciplinary collaborations within Oregon State University and with external partners to encourage students to embrace complexity over simplicity.”

Malgorzata Peszynska on the southeast side of Mt. Bachelor, Oregon, where two trails meet at the East West Divide. Peszynska's journey has also taken her on trails from East to West, over 5,000 miles from Poland to Oregon.

From Warsaw to worldwide impact: A wholehearted journey

Born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, Peszynska discovered her passion for mathematics at a young age. Encouraged by her family, she cultivated that passion alongside her love for the natural world, leading her to study mathematics in the context of physical phenomena and ultimately specialize in mathematical modeling and computational solution of flows through porous media and their geological applications.

She earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the Warsaw University of Technology and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Augsburg in Germany. She also holds a habilitation degree from the Warsaw University of Technology.

Her interest in real-life applications is driven, in part, by a personal passion for the natural environment and outdoor activities. And she commits fully to her pursuits, whether delving into complex equations, building interdisciplinary teams, or enjoying leisure activities like skiing and sailing. Embracing her mantra to "Make your own kind of music," she consistently tries to choose the complex and challenging path over the simple and easy.

Reflecting on the most meaningful milestones and accomplishments that led to this recognition, Peszynska shared that it's not about one single thing but rather a tapestry of efforts woven from countless interesting problems and diverse potential directions.

“At every fork in the road, we are choosing a path and sometimes we succeed in making progress,” she said. “At times, the most cited papers are the easiest for us, and sometimes those least noticed are the hardest but might make an impact much later. This may be scary when looking ahead, but it gets easier over time.”

She likens her role as a mathematician to that of a translator, bridging gaps between disciplines and applying mathematical rigor. Collaborating with colleagues from within mathematics and across other fields has empowered her to tackle real-world modeling projects with significant practical implications, even in the absence of a clear existing mathematical framework for analysis. From exploring multi-scale modeling techniques to navigating complex algorithms, these partnerships have broadened her perspective and fueled innovation.

As a mentor, she encourages students to discover their passions and gently nudges them to work diligently towards their goals, knowing they might change their minds along the way. But, she said, “There's no substitute for hard work. Sometimes, it's not just about assignments or tasks; it's about doing repetitive steps and finding the discipline to keep going. One of my past mentors said, ‘All you can do is work.’ And that's true. It means showing up every day, putting in your hours, and eventually, things will click. In turn, mentoring isn't easy. You offer advice, but ultimately, it's up to them to decide what works best for them. It's not unique—I don't have all the answers. Live and let live, I suppose—that's another principle I try to uphold.”

One of her former students, Scott Clark ('08), listed in Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30, shared, “Dr. Peszyńska’s guidance led me down the interdisciplinary path that would become the foundation of my later graduate and professional work. ... She had a direct, positive impact on my career trajectory, and I would not be where I am today without her.”

At that, she humbly replied, “We have a lot of brilliant undergraduate students, and they just need an opportunity to fly. … And so we should be accommodating them, I think. Yeah, let them fly."

She has also found leading the community in various professional circumstances gratifying – “building one connection at a time and not letting go.” Peszyńska has served as a program director for computational mathematics for the NSF and in multiple roles for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Additionally, she organizes conferences, serves on editorial boards, and participates in review panels for prestigious institutions.

Malgorzata Peszyńska and her students and postdocs celebrating the graduation of Lisa Bigler (Ph.D. 2022).

Challenges and rewards: Bridging disciplinary divides

Peszynska’s success in bridging complex mathematics and diverse real world disciplines has much to do with her independent and joyful spirit.

She describes her atypical view of computational and applied math as an "attitude," rather than a discipline. “My work leans closer to art in its abstract form, or closer to science and engineering in its useful side. This dichotomy is not always understood or appreciated, and it feels funny and sometimes tedious that we may have to prove ourselves over and over. Doesn't everyone want to have clean air, enough food, exciting and intellectually stimulating complex work and stability of life? Live and let live!

“But my strategy is to not try to win anyone over to interdisciplinary work but rather to enjoy the intellectual and emotional joy of learning the new language while appreciating the cultural differences. The reward is that you build the bridges rather than straddle the fence.”

To apply her discipline and contribute wholly to critical concerns is very hard work, and she competes mostly with herself, harnessing discipline if ever enthusiasm wanes. Just as she advises her students: Do the work.

“On the lighter side, most days I wake up happy in the morning to continue doing this work,” she said. “It's fun, more fun than video games because I can make my own with the simulations. So that's exactly what I hope for others, especially students, that they will find fun in it—potentially even more, making a difference, one step closer to a better world.” Curious minds may explore Peszyńska’s website for its challenges and interactive learning. Exploring innovative solutions can feel akin to solving puzzles, but even more rewarding.

The lasting impact of her work, that she will hold most dear, is the enduring value of lifelong learning and the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration—with its potential to shape the future. And she truly hopes that students will experience and appreciate the intrinsic joy and real-world impact that computational and applied mathematics have to offer.

“I am thrilled to see Malgo Peszyńska get this well-deserved recognition,” said Eleanor Feingold, dean of the College of Science. “Her world-class work in mathematical and computational modeling, coupled with her dedication to interdisciplinary collaboration, are instrumental in shaping the future of environmental science.”

Along her journey, Peszyńska has had to choose between many forks in the road. With too many options to follow in one lifetime, she acknowledges the opportunities left behind for future lives.

What might she pursue in her next life? Well, she might need two (or more). “Right now, my count goes into the upper teens.”

Read more stories about: news , faculty and staff , women in science , mathematics , research , awards & recognition , climate change , interdisciplinary

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news for & about the philosophy profession

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died.

Professor Dennett wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially consciousness . He is also recognized as having made significant contributions to the concept of intentionality and debates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books include Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He published a memoir last year entitled I’ve Been Thinking . There are also several books about him and his ideas. You can learn more about his work here .

Professor Dennett held a position at Tufts University for nearly all his career. Prior to this, he held a position at the University of California, Irvine from 1965 to 1971. He also held visiting positions at Oxford, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and other institutions during his time at Tufts University. Professor Dennett was awarded his PhD from the University of Oxford in 1965 and his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963.

Professor Dennett is the recipient of several awards and prizes including the Jean Nicod Prize, the Mind and Brain Prize, and the Erasmus Prize. He also held a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. An outspoken atheist, Professor Dennett was dubbed one of the “ Four Horsemen of New Atheism ”. He was also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, an honored Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Organization.

He died this morning from complications of interstitial lung disease.*

The following interview with Professor Dennett was recorded last year:

(via Eric Schliesser)

Related: “ Philosophers: Stop Being Self-Indulgent and Start Being Like Daniel Dennett, says Daniel Dennett “. (Other DN posts on Dennett can be found here .)

*This was added after the initial publication of the post. Source: New York Times .

Obituaries and remembrances elsewhere:

• The Telegraph  
• New York Times
• The Splintered Mind  (Eric Schwitzgebel)
• The Philosophers’ Cocoon   (Marcus Arvan)
• Ars Technica    (Jennifer Ouellette)
• Digressions and Impressions (Eric Schliesser)
• The Guardian  
• Psychology Today   (Walter Veit)
• Washington Post  
• Scientific American (John Horgan)

Quite a loss. I agree with folks like Andrew Brook and Don Ross that Dennett (on whom I have written) built a full philosophical system. His last interview must have been a YouTube chat with Jordan Peterson, just days ago. Looking back now, I am even more annoyed that Peterson (on whom I have also written) spoke so much and listened so little… R.I.P., mister Dennett.

What a total waste of a final moment for a great philosopher

Not shameful to get your ideas out to an audience that might not otherwise hear them.

He didn’t though, as Marc points out.

I agree with you, and I don’t actually think the interview was particularly noteworthy one way or the other, but Peterson didn’t really understand some basic stuff right from the get-go (like what philosophers mean by “intentionality”), so that combined with Peterson’s loopy monologues as noted really limited to the value of the discussion even from a “get your ideas out” perspective.

Exactly, Joshua. Oktober says “no shame” and of course there is no shame, no one said there was, but in fact the interview is a waste, turned tragic by being the last.

Dennett would be amused.

I enjoyed but was unfamiliar with Dennett. As a result of the Peterson interview I bought a couple of his Dennett’s books. I get you don’t like Peterson. His over communication was an examination of the case for atheism by a thoughtful and articulate non-atheist testing his beliefs – not part of the philosophy echo chamber. They agreed to talk again. Sad Dennett passed away.

He was my favourite philosopher. I considered him the greatest philosopher of his generation, due to his charisma, the ease at which he danced with ideas, and his legendary sense of humour.

Check out this one. Perhaps it’ll compensate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320

Jordan Peterson is a charlatan and a complete fraud.

RIP Daniel Dennett

Fully agreed.

I’m not sure final appearances are particularly important, but for what it’s worth, Brian Keating posted what might be a more recent interview: https://youtu.be/5r8vMk0Zgds

As I understand it, some of his last work was warning about the social-engineering style attacks (scamming, propaganda, etc) that large language models enable.

I am deeply said about this. I have no smart quips at the moment.

One of the best to ever do it. And he lived a rich, full life in all facets. An endearing figure even if in the moments of deep disagreement. His work is so conversational that this loss feels personal even if you haven’t met him.

It’s a sad year for philosophy.

When was philosophy happy?

A terrible loss. DCD was one of my all time favorites.

Although Dan had a long and fruitful life that had to come to an end, I’m sad beyond words, both as a philosopher and as an acquaintance…

A very great loss to philosophy–and to very many friends. He will be deeply and warmly missed.

Very sad. A great loss. He was exceptional

Sad day. I am sure the influence of his ideas will persist and grow with time

As well as being a genuinely nice person, he was especially good at hitting that difficult sweet-spot between rigor and accessibility. I still teach “Where Am I?” at least once a year. RIP.

Over and above his individual contributions, which were many and towering, Daniel Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in a way that engages critically but constructively with science and with scientists. He once wrote that “There is no philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage was taken on board without examination”, but he recognized more clearly than almost anyone in philosophy how transformed its own deepest questions were by modern science, most of all by the theory of evolution. These are lessons that have penetrated deeply into areas of philosophy far from Dennett’s own home territory: his work has had a great influence on modern philosophy of physics, for instance. (He has been one of the greatest inspirations and exemplars for my own work.)

He was one of the greatest philosophers of the last century, and one of the very few who have had a transformative influence far beyond academic philosophy. This is a devastating loss.

his work has had a great influence on modern philosophy of physics, for instance. (He has been one of the greatest inspirations and exemplars for my own work.)

I’d be very interested in hearing you say a bit more about this, if you’re willing. I admire a lot of Dennett’s work, but this isn’t something I would have expected or found obvious, so it’s of interest to me.

The largest and clearest is Dennett’s permissive, functionalist stance on higher-level ontology, developed in The Intentional Stance and then stated explicitly in ‘Real Patterns’. That plays quite a large role in the most-commonly-discussed versions of the Everett (many-worlds) interpretation: the idea is that Everettian branches can be understood as emergent structures in the micro-ontology of quantum mechanics and as such can be taken as real (not illusory) even though they’re not directly included in that micro-ontology. If you’re familiar with the intentional stance, you’ll see the parallel with Dennett’s insistence that people really have beliefs and desires, because beliefs and desires are patterns of disposition to action revealed through the intentional stance. My old paper ‘Everett and Structure’ (preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0107144 ) is reasonably accessible and uses that idea explicitly. (Conversely, some of the strongest opposition to the Everett interpretation comes from people like Maudlin who rather systematically reject that way of thinking about macro-ontology.)

That same idea turns up (more recently) in work on inter-theoretic relations: see Alex Franklin and Katie Robertson’s “Emerging into the rainforest: emergence and special-science ontology” ( https://philarchive.org/rec/FRAEIT-2 ) and Eleanor Knox and my “Functionalism Fit for Physics” ( https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/22655/ ), where it provides an account of how the ontology of higher-level theories can be related to that of lower-level theories that’s more permissive and a better fit to scientific practice than something like mereology. (Eleanor and I also refer to the idea of the intentional stance more directly.)

A little more indirectly, Dennett (again mostly through ‘real patterns’) had a big influence on the development of ontic structural realism, mostly via James Ladyman and Don Ross (substantial chunks of their Every Thing Must Go draw heavily on Dennett), and ontic structural realism in turn has become one of the major options in thinking about the metaphysics of physics (albeit there are many versions, some more indebted to Dennett than others). My own version of structural realism (preprint at https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20048/ ) is among other things a sort of synthesis of ‘Real Patterns’ with Simon Saunders’ approach to ontology in physics.

Over and above this, I think Dennett’s model of how to do philosophy of a given science in a way that contributes to that science itself has been a significant influence on recent generations of philosophers of physics. One significant trend in the last couple of decades in philosophy of physics (partly downstream of a rather more mainstream acceptance of the reality of the measurement problem by at least some sections of physics) has been closer, and more constructive, engagement in mainstream physics practice, and for me at least (and anecdotally for some others) Dennett’s example has played a role in that.

(It would be fair to say that Dennett’s influence is most obvious in one strand of the broader philosophy of physics community: roughly, the bit developed in the UK, and by UK-trained people like me who’ve moved away, and our students, in the last couple of decades. Obviously that’s the strand that’s most visible to me and to which I’m most sympathetic.)

I was lucky enough to get to discuss some of this with Dennett at a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute just a few weeks ago (the only time we met in person): he said he was pleased to see his ideas being put to good use!

Thanks for this – it’s very interesting and helpful. I wouldn’t have expected it, but it sounds reasonable and plausible.

Ok when I first heard this news a couple of hours ago, I said that I didn’t have anything interesting to say, I was just sad. But now that I’ve had a couple of hours to process I do want to share a story. I have many wonderful Daniel Dennett stories but this one is my favorite.

Dan took an interest in me when I was finishing undergraduate. Because I was full of chutzpa and had no sense of professional norms, I sent him a paper of mine out of the blue and asked him if it would be possible to come do an MA with him. He wrote back and explained to me that the MA program at Tufts was really for people who weren’t quite ready for a PhD program and told me that instead I should go to the best PhD program I could and then come to a postdoc with him later, a generous offer that I ended up never taking up for complicated reasons.

Five and a half years after that, I was on the full-on philosophy job market for the first time. I applied for a job at Tufts, and sent in a writing sample. He was not on the search committee but apparently got excited that I had applied and read my application. The paper I submitted was on Rousseau, which incidentally could not be farther from his areas. Apparently in three places in the essay I mistyped “freedom” as “freeedom.” Dan spontaneously wrote like this 1500 word essay entitled “On Kukla’s Distinction between ‘Freedom’ and ‘Freeedom'”, giving this huge elaborate and absolutely hilarious close interpretation of my purported distinction between the two concepts. He sent it to me via snail mail, printed out, with a lovely note saying that he hoped it would work out for me to come to Tufts. It did not, in the end, but it was the most charming and funny and thoughtful and attentive thing that a senior philosopher has ever done for me. I have no idea how somebody as busy as Daniel Dennett could possibly have found the time to do this, for no reason other than to playfully engage with me and demonstrate that he took me, a 24 year old “girl” who was nobody and who was not even his student, seriously.

Wonderful story

When you talk about yourself as “nobody”, you discredit yourself and anyone who saw your potential.

Attitude is spirit! Your spirit lives on in the attitudes of curiosity, meticulous research, and generous sharing. Thank you, Dan.

It is very sad that the world of science and philosophy lost a great person like Daniel Dennet. His views on brain function were innovative and interesting. I read several of his books that were also translated to Persian. They were excellent, especially “From Bacteria to Bach and back”.

Academia survives in part because there are wonderful scholars (thoughtful, intense, creative) who happen to be wonderful human beings (kind, open to cold-calls, gentle with people at an earlier stage of emotional development). Dan was certainly one of these people.

But he was also something more, which perhaps accounts for the fact that I was in tears this morning when I heard the news.

For many of us, Dan was a companion from adolescence well before we ever — if we did — meet him in person. I ended up in cognitive science in part because of the voice I encountered, in his pages, at the age of 14. So losing him feels like losing a part of one’s self.

Dan was continually, radically, accessible. In a funny, odd way, he was the Anglo-American Zizek — making sense of past confusions in a way that the intelligent amateur could use to enrich their world. Without Dan, we’d have been immeasurably poorer not just as scholars, but also for the scholars who wouldn’t exist but for his exoteric work.

Dan was hugely influential on me as a philosopher and writer. We first met when I was a graduate student and while I didn’t see him regularly, we kept up a long-running discussion over the years about intentionality, consciousness, AI, truth and sailing–the last because that was something we both enjoyed.

He taught me how to both write serious philosophy and speak to a wider audience at the same time, and he cheered me on at my first philosophy talk at Tufts and at my first big-stage TED talk. (His presence made me way more nervous than having Steven Spielberg and Al Gore sitting in front of me). I consider him one of the best, and the world will be less bright without him in it.

Dan was the ultimate intellectual and a super mensch. He will be sorely missed!

Dennett, I believe, was the last great verificationist. The world of philosophy is the worse for his loss. We need more like him, not less.

In 2003 I wrote an long essay for Salon on the then state of ‘artificial intelligence’ in general, and the Loebner chatbot Turing test competition in particular. In the course of my research I spoke with Dan Dennett by phone and email about his initial support of, and later repudiation of the Loebner competition. I found some of what he had to say unconvincing, and in my essay I poked fun at him.

A few years later Douglas Hofstadter — another person I had met only through email and telephone — was to be in town to give a lecture in one of Dennett’s evening seminars at Tufts, and he invited me to attend his lecture and then join him and Dennett and a few others for dinner. I accepted, but I was extremely nervous. After all, these people were famous intellectuals and I was just some guy who wrote a story for Salon.

Hofstadter brought a copy of my essay to the dinner, and kept reading from all the parts where I had made fun of Dennett. Dennett, for his part, was an extremely good sport about it all, and it ended up being a thoroughly enjoyable outing. When the check came, Dennett insisted on paying for my meal.

I blogged about the whole experience in my post ‘Mindful of Philosophy,’ which has a lot more background on Dennett, the turning test, the Loebner competition, the dinner party, and all that.

He was a true gentleman and I feel lucky to have met him.

Philosophy has just lost one of its most powerful voices and heroes. Daniel Dennett was a member of the critically endangered species of polymath, a talent that is becoming less and less common while social media, artificial intelligence, religious dogma, and restrictive government policies creep in to make us, humans, more and more thoughtless, lucrative, and tax-worthy.

He was a genius of rare abilities to the extreme, a philosopher who neuroscientists considered one of their own. A person of this sort is born, perhaps, once every few centuries, and we didn’t appreciate how lucky we were to have lived alongside him. Now, Daniel C. Dennett is joining the long line of philosophy’s greatest thinkers who are forever etched in our thoughts and memories. If the theists are right, and God exists, then it won’t bode well for the theists who insultingly write on his X (Twitter) profile that he’s now at God’s mercy. Rather, it’s the other way around: that deity will have to watch out if he knows what’s good for him. Heaven is under new management, and God just got a demotion for two thousand years of such incompetently sloppy work. I imagine him rolling up his sleeve, as he storms into God’s office, saying “Move aside, oaf! It’s going to literally take a genius to unravel the mess you made since time immemorial!”

As a titan who towers among the giants of philosophy, of old and new, and whose legendary eccentricity, exceptional brilliance, and peerlessly witty humour were too much for one discipline to handle, a great void, vast like a supermassive black hole at the epicenter of a galaxy with an insatiable hunger to devour all in its path, has emerged abruptly. I know that, if he were here, he’d tell us to get our acts together and continue what he started. There is so much to be done in philosophy, and Dennett gave it his all, fighting the dogma, intolerance, and cruelties of religions, and the myriad forms of ignorance taking up the anodyne appearances of “theories” in various disciplines. Don’t let instrumentalism die.

The best way to honour our fallen champion is by rallying by his memory and legacies and finishing what he started. If there is a theism-versus-atheism debate, bring up his name. If there is some mumbo-jumbo about free will or consciousness, bring up his name; dilute the idea of unconstrained free will; reduce consciousness to a series of memes! Cite his name in your articles and books, and keep citing him. Let’s build on his theories and make instrumentalism a dominant perspective, not only in philosophy but in society at large. No matter what anyone says, Dennett didn’t “die”; he merely took on another form as our collective thoughts. He is now bigger than ever; theists will never be able to shake him off. And the best way to keep him alive is by building on his legacy.

Tonight, I toast to a legendary man whose accomplishments would require too many volumes to list and explain here.

Long live Daniel Dennett (1942– ) and instrumentalism!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCcdmoHktOU

We will not fully understand the magnitude of this loss for a long time. Undoubtedly one of the most brilliant philosophers of our time.

I am very sad for this loss. His latest Ted Talk summarizes his accrued view of thought: The 4 biggest ideas in Philosophy. Daniel Dennett. https://youtu.be/nGrRf1wD320?si=bvzXU8Mteqj5lUpR RIP.

I echo the many tremendous tributes here. Besides enjoying his presentations at APAs, Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room had profound influence on my thinking. I wish he could know the debt I owe him.

1.- From Bacteria to Bach and back. Talks at Google: https://youtu.be/IZefk4gzQt4?si=-VLaU7jKlZcdZTmh

2.- Cognition all the way down. by Michael Levin & Daniel Dennett. https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas

Please enjoy. RIP

The world has lost a towering intellect. His wisdom changed my life forever, I will never forget him. This loss feels very personal even though I didn’t know him at all. Perhaps RIP wouldn’t make much sense given he was one of the four Horsemen, but his body of work will live on considerably longer.

On the contrary, resting in piece—or pieces, but resting—is exactly what an athiest would expect to do!

Dan Dennett is very high on my list of favourite people in philosophy. Here are some personal vignettes that indicate why.   Dan gave a talk at Cornell while I was a grad student there around the time that “Real Patterns” was published in J.Phil, a paper much of the faculty was skeptical about. The talk was “Two Black Boxes” and the commentary I gave on it in the Discussion Club was the first talk I gave in the USA.  Dan was very generous and encouraging through the visit, in contrast to the general competitiveness, mean-spiritedness, and hierarchy that permeated philosophy of mind at the time.   As a newly-minted PhD, I would see Dan at conferences, such as the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the APA. At one of these, he taught me not humility but humiliation. Not the phenomenon, but game: name a book you haven’t read but you should have, as indicated by how many others playing have read it—the more who have, the higher your score. (It derives from David Lodge’s Changing Places, but, alas, at that time, that was one of those books I hadn’t read but should have.). 5-6 of us played it at a bar, crammed into a booth, with Dan taking delight in leading the way. I remember him exclaiming “No!” when I produced both Quine’s  Word and Object  and Wittgenstein’s  Philosophical Investigations .    One story this prompted from Dan was his recounting finding himself, as an undergraduate at Harvard, in one of Quine’s classes, where the philosophy graduate students seemed “wickedly smart”—it turns out that that class included a number of people who quickly became superstars in philosophy, the most notably of whom was David Lewis. Dan noted that he wasn’t sure if he belonged in that group, but thankfully he went on to work with Gilbert Ryle at Oxford, writing a D.Phil. that became  Content and Consciousness .   Dan was one in a cast of stellar keynotes at a conference on metarepresentation that another Dan, Dan Sperber, organised in Vancouver in 1997. I got a last-minute invite after someone else dropped out, giving a talk that meshed together some early extended cognition thinking a la wide computation with some evolutionary psychology bashing. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby were amongst the illuminati in the audience, which made that all the more nerve-racking. I remember walking away from my talk with Dan literally giving me an enthusiastic “two-thumbs up” from the corner of the front row.    In more recent years, amongst the various Dennett-fests that were organised was one in Poland, more-than-coinciding with a book tour for  From Bach to Bacteria  (I think) and its translation into Polish. I accepted an invitation to speak at the otherwise spacetime awkward conference—I was in the process of moving from Canada to Australia—primarily to pay my respects to Dan, not having seen him for some years. The highlight was a happenstance breakfast with him alone for an hour on one of the mornings before the day got under way. It was an opportunity to talk more about the importance of his early support for Ruth Millikan (e.g., see the preface to Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories), for junior scholars, and to make it clear how he had made a positive difference to my own pathway in philosophy.

Dennett’s delightful ability to develop and defend complex philosophical and scientific ideas using playful and accessible prose was unparalleled in philosophy. Stylistically speaking, I think of him as maybe the first great American philosopher, in the sense that he was committed to doing difficult and subtle and first-rate intellectual work without pretension and jargon, and without gatekeeping, by using language close to the vernacular. (In this American tradition, I would also place writers like Isaac Asimov and Richard Feynman, two other intellectual giants who prized plain speech above all.)

Growing up in India, I had little to no exposure to mainstream analytic philosophy, with the sole exception of Dennett’s work (though obviously I didn’t categorize it as “analytic philosophy” back then), which I think is a testament to the power of his writing and its ability to cross borders.

Here is a self-indulgent remembrance of my experience as Dan’s mentee: https://www.devinsanchezcurry.com/dcd/

Since many have shared some beautiful anecdotes of how Dan has helped them over the years, I wrote a little tribute as well: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-and-philosophy/202404/daniel-c-dennett-tribute-to-a-philosophical-giant

In this interview from September 2023 Dennett talks about some of the books that most influenced him: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/daniel-dennett-book-recommendations/

How to achieve speed and scale in the clean energy transition

The Stanford Forum on the Science of Energy Transition brought together scientific experts, technology innovators, and industry leaders to explore practical pathways to a decarbonized future.

From left to right: Rajeev Ram of MIT; Brandon Hurlbut, a co-founder of Boundary Stone Partners; and Stanford’s Yi Cui and Sally Benson discuss challenges and innovations in transforming the grid. (Image credit: Saul Bromberger)

How do we transition to clean energy with enough speed and scale to prevent the most extreme impacts of climate change? This question loomed large for many of the speakers and participants at the Stanford Forum on the Science of Energy Transition , held on campus April 10 for an audience of students and invited guests.

To stabilize global temperatures, we need to find ways to reduce and remove our carbon emissions from Earth’s atmosphere by tens of gigatons every single year. By comparison, gas-powered vehicles in the U.S. together produce about a gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

Many of the speakers agreed action over the next few decades is critical, and addressing climate change will require coordinated efforts across the scientific community, climate technology innovators, government, the private sector, and others to transition the world’s $100 trillion economy to clean energy.

The forum, co-hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Management Company , convened experts to explore challenges and opportunities to transform the power grid, rethink renewable fuels, remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere, and address energy issues in tandem with other sustainability concerns.

The forum served as a powerful example of how Stanford leaders are educating changemakers in energy and facilitating connections that will help bring insights from scientific research to decisions that will affect global sustainability.

“Today, the energy transition will require us to forge new pathways, but we can’t just blindly strike out. That will lead us down too many dead ends, and time is of the essence. Instead, the paths we choose must be informed by science,” said Robert Wallace, the chief executive officer of Stanford Management Company.

Consider speed and scale from the get-go

Decarbonizing global energy production is a tall order. That’s before you consider the rising demand for energy as countries develop and look for opportunities to increase mobility, communication, security, and economic prosperity, multiple speakers said.

U.S. clean energy projects are on hold due to bottlenecks in the process for permitting new transmission lines and grid interconnections. The queue of projects waiting for approval by transmission operators would effectively triple the size of our generating resource, said Rajeev Ram , a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. Removing some of those logistical barriers through AI, modeling, and software tools can help accelerate the timeline for projects that could provide clean energy to the grid, said Ram.

Yi Cui , the director of Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator , is one of the leading experts developing batteries for renewable energy storage. Scholars in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability – which celebrated its first anniversary in September – have embraced a core philosophy of thinking about scale at the beginning of the design process, which is a good sign, Cui said.

For example, the relative scarcity of some elements – such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel – in current battery designs could limit their potential for large-scale production at low cost. Cui emphasized that scientists could focus on designing battery materials based on more widely available minerals, like zinc, manganese, and iron .

“We need to figure out for each of these technologies what is already going on at the gigaton-scale – like natural cycles, like agriculture – and see what we can do to tweak it in the right way so that you can create a market and use market mechanisms to scale it,” said Arun Majumdar , the inaugural dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Others highlighted the importance of driving down costs for companies and consumers. If innovators can eliminate the green premium – the cost of choosing a clean energy technology over a traditional source – for their products, they will be competitive in the market.

Meanwhile, incentives like subsidies for renewable energy will need to be supplemented with policies that actively discourage use of carbon-intensive resources. “If we’re serious about addressing climate change, we’ve got to have a price on carbon,” whether through direct pricing per ton or indirectly through regulation, said Majumdar.

Powered by electrons versus molecules

The grid is essentially a system of wires that transports electrons from power plants to consumers. However, grid electrification will only get us about halfway to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, noted Sally Benson , the Precourt Family Professor, who moderated one of the panels.

Eighty percent of global energy comes from fossil fuels. Much of this comes in the form of liquid fossil fuels for transportation – cars, planes, ships, and some trains. The challenges of developing batteries and grid storage capable of providing electricity without interruption could limit electrification of some parts of the transportation sector. Instead, renewable fuels like hydrogen, biofuels, and fuels made primarily from captured carbon dioxide may help reduce carbon emissions from heavy-duty transportation.

“Our challenge is to think that the future is electrification, but that doesn’t mean that electrons are going to do everything for us directly,” said Anthony Kovscek , the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Hydrogen could help bridge the gap to carbon neutrality, said Eric Toone , managing director and technical lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

“Hydrogen is pure, reactive chemical energy. If you have enough hydrogen, you can do anything,” he said.

Zara Summers is the chief science officer at LanzaTech. (Image credit: Saul Bromberger)

Zara Summers is the chief science officer at LanzaTech, a company that makes chemicals and fuels from carbon dioxide captured from factories and other industrial sources.

LanzaTech has been working to develop ethanol alternatives that make use of carbon from municipal waste or industrial emissions. These alternatives could serve as effective drop-in replacements for liquid fuels like gasoline, with the added benefit of easy adoption by the public and ability to tap into existing supply chains, but many current economic incentives specifically benefit corn-based ethanol.

“If you’re going to go big, you have to be at cost parity or better. But, you also have to fight against policy that’s written with a solution in mind, not an outcome,” said Summers. She highlighted how designing policies that are flexible and adaptable to new innovations will help bring solutions to scale.

Science as the bedrock

In addition to the challenge of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the forum also explored solutions for removing historic carbon emissions from the atmosphere. During a panel on greenhouse gas removal strategies , speakers turned the focus to more low-tech solutions: carbon cycles in nature. For example, Benson enthusiastically described enhanced weathering, which builds on a naturally occurring process where rain interacts with certain rocks to form a mild acid. This acid then reacts with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form solid compounds that permanently store carbon.

Chris Field , the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment , cited research published last month which found that adding crushed basalt rocks for enhanced weathering could increase productivity and soil health on croplands .

“It really highlights where you can potentially accomplish these big co-benefits that can make something that’s a real challenge logistically or financially come into the realm of possibility,” said Field.

The energy transition touches all of the major social-environmental systems. A final panel brought together experts on freshwater, oceans and aquatic foods, and agricultural technology to explore cultivating resilience amid climate pressures. “Agriculture sits at the very center of many of the pressures that we’re putting on Earth’s systems,” said Jim Leape , co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions .

Arun Majumdar and Steven Chu discussed energy efficiency, nuclear fusion, national security, and more during a fireside chat. (Image credit: Saul Bromberger)

During a fireside chat, Majumdar discussed emerging trends in clean energy with Steven Chu , the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences . They mentioned the “low-hanging fruit” of energy efficiency, the future of nuclear fusion, and balancing the energy transition with national and economic security. Nevertheless, Chu brought the conversation back to the critical role of new inventions.

“As a physicist, when I stand back and look at things: What really changed the world? New materials are actually what changed the world,” said Chu, a former U.S. Secretary of Energy who embodies the impact of science-based decision-making in energy systems as the first scientist to hold a Cabinet position.

From the steam engine and the agricultural revolution to semiconductors and nuclear fission, leaps forward in technology have enabled global-scale changes and development. Highlighting the vision for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Majumdar noted that when research institutions like Stanford collaborate with public and private entities, they can serve as a place where scholars can serve as incubators for translating novel ideas into impact.

Yi Cui is also the Fortinet Founders Professor and a professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering . He is a professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, a professor, by courtesy, of chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a professor in the Photon Science Directorate. Cui is also a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy , and the institute’s immediate past director, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Arun Majumdar is the Chester Naramore Dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor, and a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. He is also a professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering, and a professor in the Photon Science Directorate. He is a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution.

Sally Benson is the Precourt Family Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, where she is a professor of energy science and engineering; a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy; and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute.

Anthony Kovcsek is a professor of energy science and engineering, and a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Chris Field is also the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor in Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences; the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Woods Institute; a professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability; and a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Jim Leape is the William and Eva Price Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute and a professor, by courtesy, of oceans.

Steven Chu is a Nobel laureate and a professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is also a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford Medicine and of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Guidance on energy and macronutrients across the lifespan

In the long history of recommendations for nutritional intake, current research is trending toward the concept of "food as medicine" -- a philosophy in which food and nutrition are positioned within interventions to support health and wellness. In the paper -- "Guidance on Energy and Macronutrients Across the Lifespan" -- by Pennington Biomedical Research Center's Dr. Steven Heymsfield, he shares the latest clarity and recommendations in the rich and storied history of energy and macronutrient intake.

The research paper by Dr. Heymsfield and colleague Dr. Sue Shapses, Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University and Director of the Next Center at the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine , showcasing recommendations with increased clarity for protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber and water intake at various stages in the human lifespan.

"Couple with the amount and pattern of the foods people eat, the primary macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fat can shape the major determinates of health throughout the lifespan," said Dr. Heymsfield, who is a professor of Metabolism & Body Composition at Pennington Biomedical. "Even considering the incredible diversity of traits and nutritional needs across the global population, we can potentially provide effective care for all patients, including the growing number of patients with diet-related diseases, so long as we recognize the subtle effects of the key macronutrients."

Throughout the research document, the authors frequently reference the original, historic research for which they are providing the latest incarnation and related knowledge. Focusing primarily on energy and three macronutrients -- protein, carbohydrates and fat, and their subsequent substrates -- amino acids, glucose and free fatty acids, the paper shows how these can fuel growth and maintenance throughout life. For optimal health, the study provides dietary reference intakes for the three micronutrients at various stages: 0 to 6 months, 7 months to slightly less than a year old, one year to three, four to eight years, nine to 13 years, 14 to 18 years, over 19 years, and then additional recommendations for pregnancy and lactation.

The research goes on to provide recommendations to patients and caregivers on healthy eating patterns consistent with the energy and macronutrient guidelines and includes an online calculator. While the energy requirements and variable needs for the three main macronutrients and multiple micronutrients vary across the nine life stage groups, there are overarching nutritional goals for patients when choosing healthy food patterns. A variety of healthy meal pattern examples are available, but reoccurring components feature the inclusion of vegetables of all types, whole fruits, fat-free or low-fat dairy, lean meats, seafood, eggs, beans, and nuts, plant- and seafood-based oils, and grains, with at least half of those being whole grains.

The need to incorporate the three main macronutrient groups and micronutrients into the diets of the various life stage groups is a matrix that is further complicated as varying financial resources, personal preferences, cultural backgrounds and ethnic food traditions are accounted for. The paper structures a priority framework, offering better insights into those diets that can be tailored for specific diet-related chronic conditions, such as obesity or type 2 diabetes.

"The legacy of research into dietary nutrition continues to refine what we know about our bodies and the capacity for a tailored diet, featuring key macronutrients to support our long-term health," said Dr. John Kirwan, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center. "Dr. Heymsfield's recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine is the latest contribution to this research history of contributing to the knowledge base, and further promotes the notion of 'food as medicine' -- delivering the potential to improve health across the lifespan with bespoke, nutrient-rich diets."

• Diet and Weight Loss
• Staying Healthy
• Agriculture and Food
• Food and Agriculture
• Healthy diet
• Epidemiology
• Chinese food therapy
• Food groups

Story Source:

Materials provided by Pennington Biomedical Research Center . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Steven B. Heymsfield, Sue A. Shapses. Guidance on Energy and Macronutrients across the Life Span . New England Journal of Medicine , 2024; 390 (14): 1299 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMra2214275

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