2.15 What Distinguishes Philosophy from the Natural Sciences
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.15 Was die Philosophie von den Naturwissenschaften unterscheidet
At this point a further misunderstanding suggests itself: if philosophy seeks to know reality, what then distinguishes it from the natural sciences? Do the natural sciences not do the same?
Yes and no. The natural sciences do come to know reality, but they do so in a particular way: through observation and experiment. They measure, they count, they analyze. In this way they gain knowledge of regularities in nature: if one does this and that, then such-and-such will very probably happen.
Philosophy, by contrast, asks about something else. It does not ask what happens regularly, but rather: what must necessarily be so? What belongs to the essence of a thing? What cannot be otherwise?
The natural sciences can tell us how matter behaves under certain conditions. But they cannot tell us what matter is by its essence. They can explain the chemical composition of the human body to us. But they cannot tell us what the human being is. For the essence of the human being cannot be seen with a microscope — it must be grasped by the intellect.
This does not mean that philosophy stands opposed to the natural sciences. The two complement each other. The natural sciences investigate the empirical facts. Philosophy asks about the essential laws that underlie these facts.
One could put it this way: the natural sciences tell us how things behave. Philosophy asks why they must be so — and what they are by their essence.
Incidentally, the natural sciences themselves cannot do without philosophical presuppositions. Every natural science presupposes that there is an ordered reality that can be known. But this presupposition is not itself a piece of natural-scientific knowledge — it is a philosophical one. Whoever declares philosophy superfluous is thus sawing away at the very branch on which the natural sciences, too, are sitting.