Alfred North Whitehead on Philosophy of science

“All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts': all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is the union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society. Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet. The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to generation.”

“To expect to reorganise our ideas of Time, Space, and Measurement without some discussion which must be ranked as philosophical is to neglect the teaching of history... it is well to understand the limitations to the meaning of philosophy in this connection. It has nothing to do with ethics or theology or the theory of aesthetics. It is solely engaged in determining the most general conceptions which apply to things observed by the senses. Accordingly it is not even metaphysics: it should be called pan-physics. Its task is to formulate those principles of science which are employed equally in every branch of natural science. ...The philosophy of science is the endeavour to formulate the most general characters of things observed. ...in human thought the particular precedes the general. Accordingly the philosophy will not advance until the branches of science have made independent progress. Philosophy then appears as a criticism and a corrective, and what is now to the purpose as an additional source of evidence in times of fundamental reorganisation.”

“This assignment of the role of philosophy is borne out by history. It is not true that science has advanced in disregard of any general discussion of the character of the universe. The scientists of the Renaissance and their immediate successors of the seventeenth century, to whom we owe our traditional concepts, inherited from Plato, Aristotle and the medieval scholastics. It is true that the New Learning reacted violently against the schoolmen who were their immediate predecessors; but... they borrowed... certain root-presuppositions respecting space, time, matter, predicate and subject, and logic in general. It is legitimate (as a practical counsel in the management of a short life) to abstain from the criticism of scientific foundations so long as the superstructure works. But to neglect philosophy when engaged in the re-formation of ideas is to assume the absolute correctness of the chance philosophic prejudices imbibed from a nurse or a schoolmaster or current modes of expression. It is to enact the part of those who thank Providence that they have been saved from the perplexities of religious enquiry by the happiness of birth in the true faith. The truth is that your available concepts depend upon your philosophy.”