Summary |
For the purposes of Philpapers.org, we understand Plato's "philosophy of science" to be basically what scholars sometimes call "natural philosophy" and "the philosophy of nature." Accordingly, Plato's philosophy of science is not centered around the sorts of topics that are researched by philosophers of science today: e.g., theory choice, scientific realism, and so on. (This is not the claim that Plato is entirely uninterested in these topics or that they are excluded from his natural philosophy altogether.) Instead, we understand Plato's philosophy of science as his research into, among other topics, biology, cosmology, medicine, teleology, and so on. His arguments on these topics can be found throughout the corpus but most of all in the Timaeus. |