When it is question of the report/ratio of the Philosophie with the sciences, philosophy is usually described as “ mother of all sciences ”. This optics concerns a consideration as for the Histoire of the ideas, where philosophy to some extent seems a place of emulation, suitable for the emergence of disciplines called to acquire their autonomy.

But it is noticed that whereas Newton still indicated its work under the name of philosophy (its Master works 1687 carrying the title of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ), the developments in this field belong now to the field of the Physique. In the same way, to evoke only some additional examples, they is work and research in philosophy which are resulting, at the end of the 19th century, disciplines like the Sociologie and the Psychologie; just like the Gérontologie, as for it, was forged as a discipline (being attached now partly to psychology) only in second half of the 20th century, under the impulse of work and research in philosophy.

During a long part of history of philosophy and science, it was thus possible with a man to embrace the whole of knowledge (scientific and/or different). Certain philosophers were then also of large scientists, or conversely (Thalès, Aristote, for example). Science was for certain philosophers, such Plato, the condition of wisdom.

This idea of a union between wisdom and science lasted of the centuries. To the 17th century, Spinoza will still present its thought in a deductive form near to the Mathématiques. But this idea seems to never have to succeed.

Interactions between sciences and philosophy

Does that mean in so far as philosophy would be only the stammering of sciences? What it would be to some extent only one manner of indicating the disciplines “not having succeeded yet”? There exist several theoretical positions of course in this respect, but before being even delayed there, it should be noted that an attention in the mediums of the basic research reveals that if it is allowed to say that philosophy is the mother of sciences, it is on the other hand as true as sciences are likely to generate, or at the very least to nourish, philosophy. Thus, one can notice that fundamental work in science implies, very often, of the questions and the researches of properly philosophical nature, mainly in what raises of conceptual equipment necessary to the articulation and the evolution of the discipline. To the XXe century for example, the development of the cognitive Sciences and Neurosciences contributed to the rise of the contemporary philosophy of the spirit and to the revival of research in Philosophie of the action. Also, the related questions with the neuraux corrélats of the conscience, which prove to be vital in the field of the Neurosciences, require the conceptual resources specific to philosophical sectors such as the analytical philosophy of the spirit - and to a certain extent Philosophie of the language -, as of the Phénoménologie (which one thinks for example of the revaluations of the concepts husserliennes of image, of conscience of image and phantasia ; or with the treatment of the problems of the corporeity in phenomenology).

Statute of philosophical and scientific knowledge

One would be wrong to believe that, in the contemporary world, knowledge would concern only the science, whereas philosophy would be reduced only with the sphere of the values - sphere which it in addition occupies admittedly in the fields of the ethical , of the Bioéthique and the political Philosophie, for example. Philosophy also lays out - although it is not limited to it - conceptual resources which can sometimes prove to be tools essential with sciences.

Which is thus, in this case, the statute of the knowledge and knowledge? And which is thus, more precisely, the difference in nature - if there is one of them - between philosophical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is it about the same kind of knowledge, or is there a knowledge specific to philosophy, or science it prohibits that philosophy can claim to be it also a knowledge? These questions are themselves of philosophical type and recover various aspects. To know some more on this subject, one will consult the articles detailed according to:

• Epistemology: i.e., the philosophical discipline exerting a reflection on the bases and presupposed of science, but while more precisely being interested in the methods and explanatory models (causal model, model structural, model functional, etc) specific to various scientific disciplines.

• Philosophy of sciences: i.e., discipline philosophical exerting reflection on bases and presupposed of sciences (natural, human and social), but of manner more including that epistemology - though it happens that these terms are employed, by certain authors, like synonyms. It recuts several of the questions of the philosophy of knowledge (see hereafter), while being usually located in its prolongation. It can, for example, to be interested in nature of the objectivations necessary for sciences and the type of report/ratio for the world that presupposes. By extension, there can also be an attention with presupposed philosophical of certain specific fields, such as it is the case for example with the Philosophie of mathematics or the Philosophie of the psychoanalysis.

• Gnoséologie : Philosophy of knowledge, or Theory of knowledge (what constitutes the equivalent of what one generally finds in English under the name of epistemology - name which is not equivalent to the French-speaking concept of epistemology): i.e., the philosophical discipline exerting a reflection on the conditions of possibility of general knowledge and its principles (limiting, contents, origins, means, etc) - let us note that, contrary to what is the case in epistemology, knowledge is not here necessarily of scientific type.

Some common elements

If the Science is a systematic acquisition of knowledge on nature, and that philosophy relates to principles more general, or more fundamental, then, one can release between them some common points and certain differences.

In first, science and philosophy characterize by rejection of Opinion (except as an object of study), since the opinion is a particular point of view, which neither is confirmed by the experiment, nor conceived like universally validates; the opinion, in this direction, constitutes neither a scientific knowledge, nor a philosophical knowledge;

Science and philosophy are essential rules on themselves; even by recognizing that nothing out of mathematics is never completely shown, and that demonstrations established in good faith within the framework of those contain sometimes errors, the observations of these rules imply that one puts between brackets what falls out of the method (the opinion, the prejudice, the dogmatic assertion, etc).

This use of rules of induction or deduction, it is there the use of the Raison, opposed to the arbitrary character of what is not shown or at least the object of attempts at demonstration.

Science and philosophy use definitions, concepts, starting from the experiment or of the thought to apply them to the experiment or the thought: they use abstractions of which it is preferable that they are controlled and defined.

• Research of the True , to start with an interrogation on the definition of truth.

• Speech without fence

Some elements of distinction

Science deals only with facts and significances, philosophy adds the question of the values to it: ethical, Moral.

Certain designs of the Connaissance would thus make science a basically quantitative knowledge, and philosophy a qualitative knowledge, which does not exclude of anything the interactions, on the contrary.

If the steps of science and philosophy are truly different, then it would be possible to distinguish from the types of beliefs in the Vérité: for example philosophical beliefs, rational methods of access to the scientific knowledge,…

The questions ethical S which touch with philosophy and sciences can also return to the question of God and the religions: there too it is necessary to be very vigilant as for the distinctions of competences and responsibilities, between the fields of philosophy, sciences, and the religions. On this point, a recent encyclical fixes a framework on the methods of philosophical speculation for the relations between faith and reason.

Problems specific to philosophy

• the problem of the ends of the Action
• the problem of the ends of knowledge
• the problem of the value and the standards

As a philosophy relates to values, one can still admit this design of Aristote, according to which the wise one prescribed, but does not receive regulation.

This position has a double edge: the philosopher tightens towards the free thought , and offers himself to be about it entirely responsible as for his own life. But one does not request a results usable from the philosophers. This position was criticized by certain thinkers, of which for example Karl Marx: “The philosophers did nothing but interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it”.

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