Revisiting the beginning of philosophical-scientific rationality

Abstract

This article analyses pre-socratic physics as a common origin for science and philosophy, highlighting that overlooking this common origin may impair both philosophy and science. Pre-socratic physics involves, in one single pursuit, what we have accustomed ourselves to consider as inherent to philosophical thinking, which has an essentially metaphysical dimension, and the empirical investigation which characterizes scientific knowledge. But the singularity of original physics consists in the inseparable bonding of these two dimensions: before philosophical thinking became philosophy and empirical investigation became science, both were, at their moment of birth, an "investigation about physis". The emergence of philosophical-scientific rationality in ancient Greece is usually considered as a passage (a) from mythos to logos, (b) from somewhat fanciful conjecture to observation of reality and (c) from a religious view to a profane and secular view of world and life. The article critically analyzes these three questions in order to detect constitutive traces of the genetic code which is common to philosophy and science.