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Is Scientific Verification Possible in Philosophy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

C. J. Ducasse*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Brown University, Providence, R. I.

Abstract

I. The present state of philosophy contrasted with that of the sciences. Both philosophy and science seek not mere opinion but knowledge. The sciences, however, have by now won a vast body of knowledge, and daily make positive additions to it notwithstanding their theoretical controversies. In philosophy, on the contrary, the same great problems are discussed by generation after generation with rather meager results other than a multiplication of theories and schools of opinion. One is therefore moved to wonder whether philosophy is forever doomed to inconclusiveness, or whether on the contrary knowledge and definite progress are possible in its field in the same sense as in the sciences.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1935

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References

1 It is because philosophers have had only such intuitive knowledge of the meaning of many of the terms they employed, that the inferences they have drawn from the application of those terms have so often been loose and inconclusive.