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Nicholas Maxwell [1] makes an excellent point in his book In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life, which I am happy to support with some reservations. The separation of natural philosophy into the various disciplines of science and philosophy has provided both a service and a disservice. The service is that specializing and narrowing the scope of study in the sciences has led to a better understanding of nature. It also has led to the extension of the methodology of science to the study of the social interactions of humans, known as the social sciences. The specialization of philosophy has led to a better understanding of the various disciplines of science and social science, as well many of the topics that natural philosophy has dealt with such as ethics and values. The disservice of the separation of natural philosophy into science and philosophy and the narrowing of the scope of study involves the problems of specialization and the loss of context. “Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing”. This quote, ascribed to Konrad Lorenz, in a certain sense captures some of the concerns of Nicholas Maxwell. There is another dimension to the concerns of Maxwell that stems from the way that science is practiced, namely, that science is value-free and objective for it to be universal and solely evidence-based. An historic example of why this is important is the objections that the Roman Catholic Church had to the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system, which in some way slowed the progress of the Scientific Revolution. The Church had no objections to the practice of science up to the publication of Copernicus’s revolutionary theory of helio-centricism. In fact, many of the earliest scientists were priests and churchmen, as the following lists indicates. Robert Grosseteste (1175–1273), Bishop of Lincoln, England, who studied optics and geometry, introduced the idea of controlled experiments and suggested that the laws of physics pertained to both matter on Earth and in the heavens. Roger Bacon (1219/20–1292), Franciscan Friar, father of the scientific method, mathematician and astronomer who researched optics, alchemy (discovered gun powder), and agronomy; he was also a reformer of the calendar that was the forerunner of the Gregorian calendar. William of Ockham (1287–1347), an English Franciscan monk, was a logician, a physicist, and a theologian; he was most famous for his argument for logical simplicity (parsimony) known as Ockham’s Razor.

In Praise of and a Critique of Nicholas Maxwell’s In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life