INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Oakeshott's writings on science are neither as extensive nor as well known as those on politics and history. Throughout his life Oakeshott held a unitary position with regard to science. The Oakeshottian view of science may be called ‘dialectical constructivism’, whereby science constructs reality as its own domain by means of a dialectical interrelationship of method and content: 'science … must create its own subject matter'.

Oakeshott's principal writings on science are to be understood – as he himself insists in Experience and its Modes – from the vantage point of what he conceived to be philosophical inquiry. For him, philosophy stands or falls by its own self-assessment: it ‘must stand upon its own feet’. This is not the case with other, partial, forms of experience. But to approach these, one should first be clear about Oakeshott's distinctive conception of philosophy and about his depiction of the particular process by which human knowledge is formed.

1. Sought for its own sake, philosophy is, for Oakeshott, irrelevant to practical interests, or any other application or guidance, and is definitely not ‘“the fusion of the sciences”, “the synthesis of the sciences” or the scientia scientiarum’. It is wrong to hope that ‘philosophy has anything to learn from the methods of scientific thought or that the conclusions of philosophy “must be in harmony with the results of the special sciences”’. Philosophy is self-conscious and auto-reflective; science is neither.