Editor-in-Chief Lecture

Author

• Mehdi Golshani

Professor, Department of Philosophy of Sciences, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

    Before the advent of modern science philosophy contained all sciences. The part related to natural and mathematical sciences was called natural philosophy. Another part was metaphysics which death with the most fundamental concepts of existence, like matter, space, time, causality, etc.
     A century after the advent of modern science, metaphysics lost its status in science and was replaced by an empiricistic philosophy.  There were several causes for this:

The relation of metaphysics with religion.
The growth of the attachment of scientists to espcialties .
The lack of involvement of later philosophers with scientific problems.
The great success of science in explaining natural phenomena.
The popularity of the standard empiricism-the view that science is based exclusively on evidence
The advent of the standard quantum mechanics

Thus, most of the scientists left philosophical discussions, and limited themselves to comparing their empirical results with the standard quantum theory.
But, during the last three decades of the twentieth century the situation changed in favor of philosophy, as it turned out that:

Keywords

• science
• philosophy
• natural philosophy
• metaphysics
• quantum