Why don't scientists respect philosophers?

Mario Bunge

pp. 3-12

in: Nimrod Bar Am, Stefano Gattei (eds), Encouraging openness, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

An opinion poll published in 2013 showed that David Hume is nowadays the philosophers' favorite philosopher of all times. Hume himself would be surprised, since only one of his many books, namely his Enquiry (1748), was properly philosophical. Moreover, that work was neither successful nor very original, since it only elaborated in great detail the scholastic principle Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. Science, from physics to biology to historiography, has bypassed this principle, and Hume realized this, as he had the nerve to attack Newtonian mechanics despite lacking the mathematics required to understand it.

Cited authors

Hume David