Abstract
IN a, Friday evening discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on December 2, the Right Hon. Viscount Samuel discussed the importance of obtaining closer co-operation between science and philosophy than there has been in the past. The scientific worker, intent on special problems, has tended to ignore the need to examine the general principles on which his studies rest. Separation has come from the other side too. Nineteenth century philosophy of the idealist tradition went on its way regardless of science, with disastrous consequences. The question is not a purely academic one. At the present time, he said, “every land resounds with the tramp of armies, and the air throbs with the droning of their aircraft. Behind the armies are the dictators or the parliaments. Behind them are the political creeds— Communism,National-Socialism, Fascism, Democracy. And behind the creeds are the philosophers—Marx and Engels; Hegel, Nietzsche, Spengler, Sorel and Croce; Mill and the other protagonists of liberty. Some of the creeds, it is true, are anti-intellectual; but irrationalism also is a philosophy of a kind”.
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Science and Philosophy. Nature 143, 210 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143210a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143210a0