"Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences."
"Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, " lost souls swimming in a fishbowl. " We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion."
Philosophy and science share a common intellectual lineage that split as empirical methods and instruments developed, producing specialized sciences. Astronomy displaced divine explanations with gravity, geography revealed Earth's shape, geology dated planetary history through strata and isotopes, and physics unified space and time, framing humans as material continuations of energy and mass. Advances in biophotonics and neuroimaging are producing increasingly material accounts of the mind, but empirical progress has reopened classical philosophical problems. Classical determinism, exemplified by Laplace’s demon, poses challenges to notions of freedom when mental events are understood as brain processes. Neuroscience is thus confronting questions about free will and agency.
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