Philosophy of Science, Note;

ἡ Φυσικὴ Φιλοσοφία

What to call Philosophy of Science in Greek involves some problems. I have used Φυσικὴ Φιλοσοφία , but in origin this did not really mean Philosophy of Science: It was just what the earliest Greek philosophy was called in general, because the philosophers talked about nature, φύσις . What we see in Latin, Philosophia Naturalis, comes to mean what is now called "Physics" (which would have been Φυσικά , "Natural [Things]," in Greek).

The title of Newton's book on gravity was Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, the "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Thomas Jefferson was still using "Natural Philosophy" to obviously mean "Physics." I am not aware of when "Natural Philosophy" dropped out and "Physics" finally came in. The earliest citations for the modern use of "Physics" in the Oxford English Dictionary are for 1834 and 1860. Of course, the term had always existed as the title of Aristotle's Physics, τὰ Φυσικά .

But as "Physics" came in, or came back in from Aristotle, "Natural Philosophy" seems to have dropped entirely out of the universe of discourse. The "Natural Philosophers" are now just the Pre-Socratics. The older term is remembered but rarely used. The Pre-Socratics are just the Pre-Socratics.

At the same time, what "Philosophy of Science" would be in Greek or Latin itself involves a problem. In Latin we would get Philosophia Scientiae, or in Greek ἡ τῆς Ἐπιστήμης Φιλοσοφία . Both of these would simply mean "Philosophy of Knowledge," which sounds like what we already call "Epistemology." The meaning of "science" in English has narrowed from the "knowledge" meaning of scientia to the modern meaning of the natural or social, "hard" or "soft," sciences. This happened by the 1840's. In fact, I have just seen the claim that the modern meaning of "scientist" was coined by William Whewell, at Trinity College, Cambridge [Christoph Irmscher, "Inventing the Scientist," The Wall Street Journal, June 29-30, 2019, C7]. Wissenschaft in German retains a somewhat broader meaning and still gets used for things in philosophy that, in English, would not usually be regarded as sciences.

In Modern Greek, Επιστήμη (losing the breathing) has narrowed down to the English meaning of "science." For "knowledge," Modern Greek has γνώση (which would have been γνῶσις in Classical Greek). But if we used Επιστήμη for its Modern sense, then our term "Epistemology" would, by the same token, mean the "study of science" rather than of knowledge. We could use "Epistemology" itself for "Philosophy of Science." So I am not sure that the Modern meaning is going to be much help.

A possibility could be "Philosophy of Natural Philosophy"; but this is redundant (like the "Department of Redundancy Department"), so I have picked up Φυσικὴ Φιλοσοφία off of the cutting room floor and given it new life here. It may not much matter. English usage is not going to start using an expression in Greek, and Modern Greek can use its own words.

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