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Science

The Old and The New

Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci compares their values.

Open any issue of Philosophy Now and you will see articles devoted to one or more of the Old Masters of philosophy. Just in the latest issue I received in the mail there were discussions of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Spinoza, Lucretius and Malebranche. By contrast, open an issue of, say, Scientific American, and you will hardly find a reference to anything older than a few months. Philosophers are obsessed with the past of their discipline, while scientists generally could not care less about their intellectual ancestors, focused as they are on the latest and hottest findings.

In part, this contrast is rooted in the fundamentally different outlook of the two areas of inquiry.

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