Doing Science: In The Light Of Philosophy

Book excerpt: 'The originality of this book is that it reverses the tables on all current schools of philosophy, where philosophy and metaphysics are separated and isolated from the sciences. The punch line for Bunge is that practitioners in all intellectual fields need to adopt the appropriate form of metaphysics. Only then will they be enabled to create scientistic research projects.'Marx & Philosophy Review of BooksNearly all philosophers have dealt with the outcomes of scientific research, and have overlooked its philosophical presuppositions, such as those of rationality and realism. Although these presuppositions are mostly tacit and thus easily overlooked, actually they are supremely important, since some of them favor research whereas others hamper it. For instance, whereas subjectivism leads to navel gazing and uncontrolled fantasy, realism encourages us to explore the world and check our conjectures.This book examines science in the making, a process it illustrates with many examples from the natural, social, and biosocial sciences. Therefore it centers on the research process and its philosophical presuppositions. It claims that the latter constitutes a sort of matrix for conceiving and nurturing scientific projects.