I offered the title of this paper before I knew how long I had to speak. Half an hour is too short a time to cover the whole history of the demarcation between philosophy and other disciplines, except at a level of generality which would hardly provoke an interesting discussion. I shall therefore limit my scope in two ways. Chronologically, I shall lay the main emphasis on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the relevant background. Thematically, I shall concentrate on the distinction between philosophy and science. Unfortunately I shall have to omit any reference to the intriguingly difficult question of the demarcation between philosophy and metaphysics, which I discuss in a chapter in the forthcoming Festschrift to Gerd Buchdahl, on the Demarcation between Philosophy and Metaphysics in Leibniz. I shall begin with some remarks on the etymology of the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’.

Originally, ‘science’, or scientia in Latin, simply meant ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’, as opposed to mere belief or practical skill. It was used to translate the Platonic episteme, or highest grade of knowledge combined with understanding; but beyond that it had none of the connotations of the modern term ‘science’. Indeed, in a Platonic context it would be the philosopher rather than the empirical investigator of nature who was possessed of episteme or scientia.

‘Philosophy’, or philosophia is more problematic. In Greek it meant ‘love of sophia’, and it was often equated with sophia itself. The Romans adopted the term as equivalent to studium sapientiae, or the pursuit of sapientia, and they also often equated it with sapientia itself. But how did sophia/sapientia differ from episteme/scientia? Conventionally, the distinction is that between wisdom and knowledge. And for us there is indeed a considerable difference between the two concepts: a person can be wise without being a polymath, or knowledgeable but foolish. However, this distinction used not to be so sharply drawn. At least until the seventeenth century it was generally assumed that worldly wisdom (or sophia or sapientia) went hand in hand with superior knowledge.

As an example of how these terms have changed their meanings, consider the following passage from Hobbes’s Leviathan, chapter 5:

Hobbes equates scientia and sapientia, and distinguishes them both from prudentia. His ‘prudence’, as the capacity to predict the future on the basis of experience, is roughly what we would call ‘science’; and yet we might now be inclined to say that prudence is precisely what distinguishes wisdom from mere knowledge, or philosophy from science.

No doubt the concept of a philosopher generally had all sorts of overtones — at his best he was the learned sage possessed of supreme rationality, esoteric insight, and practical wisdom. But there was no such person as a scientist with whom he could be contrasted — any seeker after knowledge could be called a philosopher. Indeed, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the word ‘scientist’ was first coined. The old equation of the two terms still survives in the use of the term ‘natural philosophy’ for physics in Scottish universities, in the title PhD (as distinct from the DD, MD, and LLD of the old ‘higher’ faculties), and until recently in the name ‘moral sciences’ for philosophy at Cambridge.

So far the discussion has turned on the etymology of the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’. But the fact that these particular terms fail to mark our modern distinction does not prove that the distinction was not made. If we look more closely at the sub-divisions made within the all-embracing science/philosophy, we will find something closer to, but by no means identical with the modern distinction. The crucial concept here is that of nature (physis, natura). But again we have to beware of importing modern concepts. Aristotle wrote about physica, and Newton wrote about philosophia naturalis; the scope of their respective studies was broadly similar in intention; but neither corresponded either to ‘physics’ or to ‘philosophy of nature’ in their modern senses. ‘Physics’ has been narrowed, so as to exclude mechanics, chemistry, geology, etc.; and the term ‘philosophy of nature’ has been hi-jacked (via the German Naturphilosophie) to mean metaphysical speculation about the nature of the physical world, as contrasted with science, or Naturwissenschaft. In practice, physica or philosophia naturalis came somewhere between the two: it was broader than physics, in that it covered the whole of terrestrial inanimate nature; but it certainly did not exclude what we would now call metaphysics or ontology.

Discounting the metaphysical element, philosophia naturalis would correspond roughly to the modern ‘natural science’ — though there would still be differences as to whether it included astronomy (as supra-terrestrial), or botany, zoology, and the ‘human sciences’. Thus, for example, we now quite happily distinguish ethics from the scientific study of human behaviour; but it is far from obvious which would be meant by the expression ‘moral philosophy’ in the seventeenth century. It may be that the commonly felt disquiet at classing human studies as sciences derives from the way in which the modern English word ‘science’ evolved from the older distinction between the natural and the human. In German, by contrast, the term Wissenschaft corresponds more closely to the epistemological concept of scientia or philosophia, denoting a methodology rather than an area of study.

In short, the fact that we still use the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’, but in senses which are very remote from earlier usages, is a hindrance rather than a help in trying to understand how the world of the intellect was mapped during the early modern period. Instead, we need to look at the actual division of labour within the academic curriculum.

Until the reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the universities broadly retained their medieval structure. They normally consisted of the lower faculty of Arts or Philosophy (these names were interchangeable), and the higher faculties of Theology, Medicine, and Law. All students had to graduate in Arts before proceeding to one of the higher faculties, and there were no facilities for advanced study in Arts subjects. The age at which students normally followed the Arts course was roughly equivalent to modern secondary school age. Consequently Arts subjects tended to be held in relatively low esteem.

The Arts curriculum varied in balance and content during different periods and at different universities; but the general pattern preserved the ancient division into the seven Liberal Arts. These were grouped into three foundation subjects (the trivium, or ‘three ways’): Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric; and four more advanced subjects (the quadrivium, or ‘four ways’): Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy.

Grammar originally meant the study of Latin language and literature (including historical and other texts), but during the Renaissance it was often widened to include Greek, and even Hebrew or Arabic. Dialectic and Rhetoric covered formal and informal reasoning, and were greatly expanded to include Aristotle’s major works in philosophy and physics. The quadrivium was largely mathematical, given that Music was concerned with harmonic ratios in abstract, and Astronomy with the calculation of the positions of heavenly bodies. On the other hand, Geometry often amounted to geography, and Astronomy to astrology.

If we now ask where science and philosophy are to be found, the answer is that, with the exception of medicine and the more philosophical aspects of theology and law, they were both scattered through the curriculum of the Faculty of Arts/Philosophy, and neither had any clearly marked identity. Certain individuals might have a proclivity towards metaphysics, logic, language, literature, mathematics, astronomy, physics, or biology; but there was no hint of the modern idea of specialists being qualified only in their own sphere, still less of the modern Arts/Science divide. There was no such person as a professional philosopher any more than there was a professional scientist. Indeed, despite the fact that we tend to think of the medieval universities as obsessed with philosophy, philosophy as a specialism took longer to emerge than science. In both cases, however, the modern concepts evolved mainly outside the university system.

With very few exceptions, the proponents of the new science and of modern philosophy had either a non-academic profession, or none at all. They therefore had no need to concern themselves with academic distinctions between one subject and another. Apart from a general reluctance to become embroiled in dangerous theological controversy, they were happy to enter any field of inquiry to which their interests and aptitudes led them, and they were not especially concerned with the question of precisely when they were crossing disciplinary borderlines.

However, the seeds of demarcation were already being sown. The seventeenth century saw the foundation of a number of societies and journals, a few of which were from the start effectively ‘scientific’ in the modern sense — in particular the Paris Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and its associated journal. But the majority of academies, whether actualised or merely planned, embraced the whole of human knowledge. Similarly the newly established learned journals, such as the Journal des Scavants, the Acta Eruditorum, and the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, were, as their names imply, by no means limited to the results of scientific research, but covered the whole world of learning.

The distinction between the new institutions and the old was not primarily a difference in the subjects studied, but a difference of approach. Initially the difference is describable in terms of a humanist reaction against the universities. Whereas the universities prided themselves on having developed a new form of Latin relevant to their needs, the humanists castigated their language as ‘barbarous’, and promoted a return to classical forms and vocabulary in Latin, and also encouraged the use of the vernacular for serious writing. Again, the university syllabus was centred on the Aristotelian corpus, whereas the humanists paid much more equal respect to all Classical thinkers. Plato in particular tended to be adopted as a counterweight to Aristotle — hence the popularity of the title ‘Academy’ among the new institutions.

The Platonic element was important for fostering one idea which was to contribute towards the ultimate separation of ‘science’ from other disciplines, namely its emphasis on mathematics. By the end of the seventeenth century, no-one could hope to participate in physical science without a knowledge of mathematics far beyond the scope of the normal university graduate. Another, complementary idea, also developed in reaction to university practice, was a growing belief in the value of experience as contrasted with mere book-learning. As we shall see in the next section, this approach was dominant from the start in institutions such as the Royal Society.

The universities were not wholly insulated from these new developments; but when they took up the new ideas they incorporated them within their existing structures. This had the effect of delaying the institutionalisation of the emergent distinction between science, philosophy, and other disciplines. Thus, the new Cartesian science was taught in a number of French and Dutch universities — but within the Arts curriculum, and only as part of the total Cartesian ‘philosophy’. Similarly, at Cambridge the new mathematics and science came to dominate the curriculum — but they were still only part of the general Arts curriculum. Again, the Scottish universities came to be at the forefront of mathematical and scientific development, but without ever divorcing science from the philosophical principles in which it was seen as rooted.

A striking example of the context in which experimental science was introduced into the seventeenth-century university system is provided by a letter of 3rd June 1699 from Johann Bernoulli to Leibniz. At the time, Bernoulli was teaching in the Arts Faculty of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and he was one of the first Northern Europeans to give a course on experimental physics. His letter provides a graphic instance of the way in which experimental science was perceived as an integral part of humanist philosophy, and as antagonistic mainly to traditional theology.

He then recounts a quarrel with some theologians in the university, and continues:

In fact, the modern distinction between science and other disciplines, as also the modern conception of philosophy as a distinct academic subject, became generally institutionalised only during the nineteenth century. However, this is not to say that no-one ever conceived of the separability of science from the humanities in general, and from philosophy in particular. In the next section I shall consider some of the more important attempts at a sharp demarcation.

The most influential early attempt at a demarcation was that of Francis Bacon, who championed the experimental method against the more or less unquestioning Aristotelianism of the universities. But despite his reputation as the ‘father of experimental philosophy’, he failed to free his own view of nature from Aristotelian assumptions. Moreover, his notion of an experiment had little to do with the modern notion. Although we might be tempted to translate experimentum as ‘experiment’, and experientia as ‘experience’, there was as yet no terminological distinction between a controlled experiment, and any experiential datum. For Bacon, the experimental method meant no more than assembling a large mass of one’s own or reported experiences, and then classifying them for the purpose of extracting empirical generalisations.

Bacon was indeed an empiricist, but only in the traditional sense still retained in the word ‘empiric’. The ancient ‘empirical’ school of medicine (and the sceptical school of philosophy which derived from it) held that all theories were unsound, and that the physician should rely solely on remedies that had been found to work, without worrying about their theoretical justification. It is understandable that ‘empiric’ should have become a pejorative term, implying reliance on hearsay and tradition rather than on scientific knowledge. Even as late as 1755, Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary could define EMPIRICISM as ‘Dependence on experience without knowledge or art; quackery.’ During the modern period, many philosophers saw empiricism in the same light; and even the most ardent admirer of Baconian method would have to concede that works such as his Sylva Sylvarum were in practice little more than a farrago of old wives’ tales, not significantly different from the Magia naturalis of his contemporary della Porta (though della Porta, too, has been hailed as a forerunner of modern experimentalism).

However, Bacon’s theoretic stance sparked the imagination of subsequent thinkers. In particular, the ideology of the Royal Society was grounded in the ideal of the ‘plain historical method’, where ‘historical’ simply meant ‘empirical’, but without the latter term’s contemporary overtones of charlatanry. Now it is certainly true that much of the Society’s activities consisted in the detailed observation of natural phenomena. It is also consistent with this approach that Newton should have claimed not to fabricate hypotheses — hypotheses were the stock-in-trade of the scholastics and the natural magicians, whereas the moderns had to do with actual phenomena. Yet Newton’s principal achievement was the discovery of the mathematical principles of natural philosophy, to which he contributed no new empirical evidence. Apart from his optics, his experimental work was mainly in the sphere of chemistry, and carried out in a way which hardly distinguishes him from the medieval alchemists.

Again, although the Royal Society was opposed to the philosopher Aristotle, it was not necessarily opposed to philosophy as such. There was a general recognition that the new scientific methodology required a philosophical formulation, such as Locke attempted to provide. Yet in attempting to provide this formulation, Locke defined a crucial shift in the balance of power between philosophy and science, at least within the Anglo-Saxon tradition. In place of the traditional idea that the study of nature was subservient to a general philosophy, he made the philosopher the ‘underlabourer’ for the scientist. But even here we must be careful to avoid anachronism. What Locke saw himself as the underlabourer for included both the empirical study of nature and theoretical hypotheses of the sort officially spurned by Newton, such as corpuscularian explanations of the cause of vision or of the chemical properties of matter. On the other hand, he often supported his own theses with empirical arguments, and much of what he did might now be classed as psychology or linguistics. Although his Essay is currently treated as a canonical philosophical text, much of its contents are glossed over as ‘not really philosophy’. It is far from clear that he would have been more insulted at having part of his work dismissed as non-philosophical, than at having the rest classified as philosophical in the modern sense.

Hume has shared a similar fate; but he left no room for doubt as to his position. He set out to do for the mind what Newton had done for matter. However much we might wish to make Hume an archetypal philosopher as contrasted with a scientist such as Newton, Hume himself accepted no such contrast:

It is clear that Hume saw no half-way house between the sophistical metaphysics of university philosophy, and the new empiricism of which he believed his own work was a part. Where we would draw a line between philosophy and science, he perceived only a single enterprise. Yet it is obvious to any modern critic that only a small proportion of Hume’s own reasoning can properly be described as ‘experimental’. Despite his ideology, Hume was in fact doing what we would now describe as philosophy.

Despite the crudity of the traditional contrast between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, it is useful for marking two sharply distinct approaches to the relation between science and philosophy. Whatever their ambiguities and disagreements as to the scope and role of a priori reasoning, so-called ‘empiricists’ have agreed on the primacy of experiential knowledge in a major area of human intellectual activity, whether or not it is appropriate to describe this area as ‘science’; and they have tended to reduce philosophy to at best a service role. The ‘rationalists’, on the other hand, have always emphasised the importance of a priori reasoning, both mathematical and logical, in the construction of natural science, and have seen empirical enquiry as in some sense subordinate to more general and abstract concepts and principles.

Modern rationalism drew much of its inspiration from Plato. For Plato, true knowledge had to do only with the eternal, underlying Forms, which were the objects of pure intellect, or nous. Sense experience yielded only belief, and was concerned with the semi-real, material world of change. As such, sense experience was at best a stimulator to enquiry, and a hindrance rather than a help in the search for genuine knowledge.

Descartes’ position was broadly in the same tradition: the intrinsic properties of matter are size, shape, and motion; physical science must therefore be reducible to a sort of temporalised geometry, which will be the proper object of reason rather than of experience. Any non-geometrical properties of things in the world as we experience it are mere affectations of the mind, and belong to the dream-like world of experience rather than to reality itself. On the other hand, the world of experience does derive from reality itself, and provided that we can subsume experimental data under the correct concepts, it provides valuable, if incomplete information about it. In practice, Descartes was no less reliant on empirical research than, say, Einstein in our own century. But the priority of philosophy is clear; and in his Principles of Philosophy, intended as a university text-book, Descartes starts out from epistemology and metaphysics, as the essential precondition of a conceptually correct description of nature. To start from experience would mean confining oneself to the description of human experiences, rather than of the real world.

Despite the continuity between philosophy and science in Descartes’ approach, he at least implicitly recognised a distinction between ‘first philosophy’, or metaphysics (the topic of the Meditations on First Philosophy), and ‘philosophy’, or mostly physics (the topic of the Principles of Philosophy). Leibniz, while sharing Descartes’ belief in continuity, was more conscious of the difference between the two levels of activity. His major contributions to scientific theory (e.g. his development of the infinitesimal calculus, his critique of Newton’s concepts of space and of gravitation, his development of the concept of energy, his rejection of atomism, and his concept of organism) depended heavily on his metaphysical ideas; yet, presumably because of an increasingly anti-metaphysical climate of opinion, he often deliberately divorced his arguments from their metaphysical backing. It is a pity that his diplomatic cast of mind prevented him from forcing a more explicit dialogue with empiricist contemporaries on the relation between philosophy and science.

But again there is the problem of the very concepts of ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’. Even a century later, it is difficult to apply modern categories to a philosopher such as Kant. In one sense, Kant was the demarcator par excellence; and the subsequent history of the division of the sciences in Germany, and then in the rest of the world, cannot be fully understood without reference to his work. He did as much as anyone to lay the foundation for the idea of philosophy as a distinct discipline in its own right — but mainly through his example in writing the Critique of Pure Reason, rather than as a result of his theoretical pronouncements. He himself saw his own work as lying outside the future division of the sciences, and preparatory both to a ‘scientifically’ worked out metaphysics (concerned with God, immortality, and freedom), and a securely based natural science. What we would regard as the archetypally philosophical part of his work could eventually be discarded, as a mere means to an end.

As far as natural science was concerned, he made frequent genuflexions to empiricism (for example, his famous dictum that ‘All knowledge begins with experience’, and his repeated insistence that we can have no knowledge of anything which transcends experience); yet his approach to scientific knowledge was dominated by epistemological considerations, and he made Newtonian science subservient to general principles of reason.

Despite the clear presence of what we now recognise as philosophy and science respectively, it appears that even by the end of the eighteenth century neither term had acquired its modern sense. The modern concepts of science and of the professional scientist gradually crystallised during the course of the nineteenth century; but the concept of philosophy as a distinct discipline remained much less well defined. Unfortunately, limitations of time prevent me from bringing the story up to date, and showing how the current contrast between the nature and role of philosophy as practised in the English-speaking world and on the continent of Europe is rooted in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century division between those who saw science as ultimately dependent on general philosophical principles, and those who saw philosophy as at best the handmaiden of science, and at worst as either trivial or superstitious.

Return to index