Single Review on past events

Julien Bernard decided not to prepare a “classical” talk about the content of his research, but a methodological talk about philosophy in its relationship with sciences. “The reason is that I want to take advantage of the fact that the Zukunftskolleg Jour Fixe is an interdisciplinary meeting”, he explained. He wanted to show that the issues involved by interdisciplinarity are closely related to the methodological issues internal to philosophy. “Interdisciplinarity, for a philosopher, is more than just an interesting source of inspiration, or a new horizon of possible topics of research. More than this, interdisciplinarity is a necessity for a philosopher who lives after the eighteenth century, at the epoch when the research of a universal knowledge, as foundation of the particular sciences, seems to have definitively become a dream”.

The classical vision of the nature of philosophy can be presented, thanks to a famous text, extracted from René Descartes’ “Letter-Preface to the Principles of Philosophy” (1647) that says:” Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Morals. By Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom”.

Philosophy, as understood in the eighteenth century and before, encompasses all theoretical knowledge and, according to that, the philosopher is first characterized by potentially having a universal knowledge, having a global understanding about nature, about living beings, about cosmos, about humans and society. “But we all know that, from the eighteenth century (epoch of the Enlightenment), this classical organization of knowledge has exploded. In the eighteen century, it was still possible to dream about a universal knowledge accessible to one man. And Leibniz is one of the last universal scholars, able to substantially contribute to mathematics, physics, ethics, law…”, states Julien Bernard.

The increasing growth of human knowledge, even more accelerating in the twentieth century, made it impossible to pretend having a global vision of human knowledge as a whole. In addition to it, an increasing number of sectors of human knowledge became confident in their own methodologies, and claimed for independence towards philosophy, the mother of other sciences. According to Descartes’ tree, this autonomy of peculiar sciences means to emancipate from the necessity to be linked with the root, namely with metaphysics and theory of knowledge.

How could a philosopher reestablish, as much as possible, the lost relationships between the different sectors of individual sciences, and the core of philosophy? Julien Bernard presented the main different positions a philosopher can adopt today to react to the collapsing of the traditional vision of philosophy. Concerning the tree of knowledge, the two extreme positions consist in accepting the separation of the root from the branches. This can be understood in two opposite ways: “If we keep only the root of the tree, and leave the branches aside, we come to Autonomous Metaphysics, as a general knowledge about the Nature of Truth or the Nature of Being, supposedly independent of all the peculiar sciences. The core of philosophy, and the “big” questions of metaphysics, would still have a meaning, even if they are entirely disconnected from the development of the peculiar sciences. If we keep only the branches, and leave the root of the tree, we come to Positivism. According to Positivism, the autonomy of the branches of knowledge from metaphysics is not seen as a problem, but on the contrary has a sign of maturity of science. This autonomization must be a goal, and is irreversible.

In opposition to the two extreme positions, the medium position is defended by the philosophers who refuse to accept, as an irremediable fact, the collapsing of the classical vision of knowledge. Contrary to the positivists, they continue to accept that philosophy possesses its own specific domain of investigation (metaphysics and theory of knowledge), and its own methodology. But, contrary to autonomous metaphysicians, they posit that philosophy can become substantial and pertinent only by reestablishing in some sense the links between the root and the branches of the tree. In other words, according to the medium position, philosophy can survive only by communicating with the particular sciences. “We can see here that there is a very important issue, which is linked to the question of interdisciplinarity”.

He concluded: “Certainly, it is not possible anymore, for a philosopher, to acquire a universal knowledge about all the particular sciences. But a philosopher can however try to understand enough of several peculiar branches in the tree, to be able to connect them with the general questions of metaphysics and of theory of knowledge. This means, we replace an encompassing universality, by a weaker kind of universality. It consists in establishing links between different peculiar sciences; metaphysics and theory of knowledge trying to furnish a general framework to understand the unity of knowledge, and the specificity of each branch, and try to construct a global vision of the world (Weltanschauung). Communication between philosophy and the other disciplines then becomes the natural way to establish these links.”