Abstract

Contemporary Western philosophy of science is formed via the multifarious interconnections and interactions between logical positivism and the various schools of thought represented by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, P. Feyerabend, and so on. It is a philosophical rethinking of contemporary natural science symbolized by Non-Euclidean geometry, the quantum theory of physics and mechanics, and the theory of relativity. In historical terms, one can trace the steps of their philosophy of science back to the eighteenth century. The relationship of the thought of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, for example, to classical natural science is similar to the relationship that exists between the various philosophical schools of thought that we have just mentioned and contemporary natural science. In these terms, we may very well consider Kant's and Hume's philosophy as "classical philosophies of science." In fact, Kant's "philosophy of criticism" was, in its entirety, a philosophical examination of classical natural science