Apart from the above post -
As well as that link to an article in Scientific American by Carlo Rovelli, there is in fact a fairly recent public lecture at LSE (London School of Economics) by Rovelli, on precisely the same material that I think was contained in that article in Sci.Am (probably a great deal more, because it is a very long filmed talk/lecture). Here's a link to that -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0uPkG-pr4
But when introducing Rovelli to the audience at LSE, the host also said that Rovelli had previously written a complete book on this idea of how philosophy has contributed to fundamental science. The closest I could find is the book called “Anaximander” (link below), ie just the name of a famous philosopher from the Greco-Roman period 2400 years ago … but I presume that is the book they are talking about -
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anaximande...thors_browse-bin:Carlo+Rovelli&s=books&sr=1-4
Anyway, that book aside for a moment – in the lecture at about 22 mins, Rovelli talks about Galileo and Newton and he says they would not have got their initial ideas about gravity and space etc., were it not for the fact that they already knew what had been said by Plato and Democtitus (and others) 2000 years earlier. IOW, Rovelli is simply saying that of course people such as Plato and Socrates and countless others had tried to propose answers to many of these questions as early 500BC (or even earlier) … ie questions of what I have called “core fundamental” science, ie the nature of matter, space, time, the origin of the universe and the origin of human life etc.
Well, we all know that ancient philosophers pondered such questions. Nobody is disputing that. And we know that they proposed all sorts of explanations. All of them actually wrong … or at the very least merely “right” only in the sense of being a rough simple idea of something (such as an “atom”).
None of that is the issue here. The issue here is whether philosophers today have contributed discoveries and explanations for what we know broadly as “reality” as described in terms of atomic structure (ie QM), relativity (as explanations of space and time), or the Big Bang (as an explanation of how and why our universe exists), and Evolution (as the explanation of why any of us, ie humans, even exist all) … but what have modern day, or any ancient, philosophers actually discovered and explained themselves in any of that? … where are the research papers from philosophers showing how THEY (and not any scientists) first discovered and explained QM, Relativity, Big Bang, Evolution etc., ie the overall description that we now have for “reality”??
Although I did not read Rovelli's article in the link to Sci.Am., I did listen to his YouTube lecture on what I think is exactly all the same ideas but in much greater detail. And I did not hear anything from him to claim or show that philosophers (past or present) should be credited with discovering any of the above. What I think Rovelli is concerned with, what he is impressed by and what he thinks is important as the contribution from philosophy, is the historical fact that from ancient times various philosophers had ideas about how to answer or explain the nature of "matter", space & the stars, etc. And he says that later scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr & Heisenberg and many others were of course aware of what those much earlier philosophers had proposed as explanations ... and he says that was a vital influence in their thinking … eg to say that Einstein or Heisenberg would ponder what the earlier philosophical explanations were, and that would be an inspiration for their own thoughts etc.
Well, that may indeed be the case. But what their own thoughts lead them to (in fact their own "research", because it was vastly more than merely "their own thoughts"), and also what was by that date (eg c.1900) their knowledge of many new experimental results, became very different from what those earlier philosophers had ever imagined. It may have been in that sense a progression from earlier philosophical ideas, but by that stage (and even more so today) what people like Einstein, Heisenberg or any of them were doing had moved far beyond what had been previously practiced as “philosophy”, and moved well into what by then (and certainly now) had become a new way of study that we call “science”. There's a historical connection of course, because all of it is just a matter of anyone trying to investigate and explain all sorts of things in the world around us … and that had been going on since even long before those famous Greek-Roman period philosophers … and it's still going on today, on a vastly greater and more complex level … but that level is now what we call “science” (it's no longer what we once called “philosophy”).
All that said – I think Rovelli is an engaging and likable charachter, and no doubt a very capable theoretical physcist. And on that basis I will probably buy a copy of his book (“Anaximander”), where I see from the contents that he includes chapters on the relevence to modern day science. So I hope that shows I am not stubbornly refusing to consider the contribution of philosophy. But, so far, I am closer to the position of Weinberg and Hawking, rather than that of Rovelli … but I will see what more Rovelli has to say in his book.
