Abstract
What is the proper place of formal methods in philosophy of natural science, or in philosophy more broadly speaking? The idea that philosophy should proceed formally (“more geometrico”, as in the title of Spinoza’s Ethica) has been around for some time, but both the attitude towards formal methods and the understanding of formal methods itself has changed. Mathematical logic has succeeded geometrical demonstration as the paradigm of formal precision, and in technical areas such as foundations of mathematics and logic, Frege’s and Russell’s logicist programmes indicate early peaks of the application of these methods. The idea of employing such formal-logical methods in philosophy more generally was championed by the logical empiricism of the 1920s and 1930s. Wrestling with the methodological foundations of their discipline in an attempt to exclude what they perceived to be nonsense, some at the time even sought recourse in a purely formal-logical foundation for philosophy. Frege’s student Carnap in his programmatic paper on “the old and the new logic” (Carnap, 1930, 26) put the matter thus: “To pursue philosophy means nothing but: clarifying the concepts and sentences of science by logical analysis.”1
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the audience and my co-symposiasts at the ESF Conference The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, Vienna, 18 December 2008, for helpful discussions. This text also draws on material from a related paper given at the Workshop on Formal Methods in Philosophy, Kraków, 24 August 2008. Support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged.
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Müller, T. (2010). Formal Methods in the Philosophy of Natural Science. In: Stadler, F. (eds) The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9115-4_9
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