Essays in Philosophy

Volume 12, Issue 2, July 2011

Philosophy's Future: Science or Something Else?

A Distinction between Science and Philosophy

Ever since Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, most philosophers have taken the distinction between science and philosophy to depend upon the existence of a class of truths especially amenable to philosophical investigation. In recent times, Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction have cast doubt over the existence of such a class of special philosophical truths and consequently many now doubt that there is a sharp distinction between science and philosophy. In this paper, I present a perfectly sharp distinction between science and philosophy that does not depend upon any distinction between philosophical and scientific truths.