Cosmology + Philosophy (?)

madphysics

Why haven't cosmology and philosophy been formerly combined? They both deal with the beginning of the universe and what it happened, at least one certain field of philosophy.




So why not?

Moridin

Physical cosmology is science, philosophy is not.

Hurkyl

Cosmology is a subfield science. Science is a subfield philosophy. Ergo, Cosmology is a subfield of philosophy.

Moridin

The philosophy of science is a subset of philosophy, but science is no such thing. Philosophy deals with metaphysics, ethics, epistemology etc. Science does not.

Hurkyl

And with the study of nature and the universe. Scientific methods proved to be very effective in the study of nature and the universe; that's why science has become its own subfield of philosophy. That philosophers are also interested in these other topics simply means that philosophy cannot be considered a subfield of science.

JoeDawg

Agreed.

Historically philosophy was the pursuit of knowledge in general.
Science grew out of that, as the empirical study of the world.
Science is a way of studying knowledge.

Distinguishing between them, as universities do, is somewhat arbitrary, but mainly reflects the way they are taught. 'Philosophy' today is mainly taught as the 'history of ideas', thus it gets lumped in with other kinds of 'History' as one of the humanities.

To imply that they are separate in some real way, is to imply that scientists don't use reason and logic, and aren't interested in gaining knowledge. Something that is obviously false.