2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

N ON-PHILOSOPHY
new fields of inquiry, but it will have to turn over the newly discovered terrains to the spe-
cialized, empirical sciences if there has to be any hope of gaining real knowledge. Philos-
ophy’s task is to play an avant-garde, exploratory role until the heavy troops of science
arrive to consolidate the conquest. This interpretation has become a common sense of sort
in the discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences. Parti-
sans of this interpretation like to point out the progressive detachment of empirical disci-
plines from the main body of philosophical inquiry as a proof of their views. In the English-
speaking world, this interpretation is perhaps best known through the words of William
James, who called philosophy “the residuum of questions still unanswered. “The opposi-
tion between philosophy and the sciences — he wrote at the end of his career in Some prob-
lems of Philosophy— is unjustly founded, for the sciences are themselves branches of the
tree of philosophy. As fast as questions got accurately answered, the answered were called
‘scientific,’ and what men call ‘philosophy’ is but the residuum of questions still unan-
swered.” 4 Thus, the coming of age of physics from a branch of “natural philosophy” to a
fully-fledged, mathematized scientific discipline represents the paradigmatic example of a
development that sees in the progressive (and still incomplete) maturation of psychology
its last instance. Critics of the Western philosophical tradition on both sides of the Atlantic
share this view 5 .
In a somewhat similar vein, someone might accept the Hegelian distinction as the in-
dication that philosophy, if viable at all, needs a radical reform that will give it a badly need-
ed object of inquiry. Thus, for example, one might propose that philosophy can (or has to)
become “applied” in order to survive. In a sense, the “linguistic turn” in analytic philoso-
phy, as well as Wittgenstein’s ruminations about philosophical problems dissolving them-
selves, can be traced back to such an issue.
4. See William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) (Orig
ed. 1911) 12. James, however, is careful not to dismiss, indeed, to defend, metaphysics, e.g. the narrower
meaning of philosophy stripped down of its scientific branches. His “Radical Empiricism” aspire
to be a fully fledged metaphysical system where such issues as the question of being find, if not a
final answer, at least a proper treatment.
5. This view may be pushed as far as claiming that philosophy has actually reached its self-effacing goal
since “all” possible fields have been turned over to the sciences. Jürgen Habermas has suggested this
view over and over again, most notably in The Discourse of Modernity .
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