“The Bittersweet Symphony between Science and Philosophy: A Never-Ending Dialogue”

This course aims to retrace the fundamental stages of the history of scientific and philosophical thought to answer some research questions: what is science? What is philosophy? What does it mean “research” in both fields? In which way and under what conditions the communication between them is possible? According to a very general common sense, philosophers and scientists have always analysed phenomena and problems of our world from different points of view, the former by interpreting and sometimes questioning reality, the latter by providing in most cases the mathematical and physical description of it through formula. Only in the last fifty years, a considerable number of studies tried to show how the continuous specialisation of knowledge conceals the extreme closeness between science and philosophy on certain neuralgic topics: for example, the foundations of the scientific method and the nature of physical laws, the study of change in physical phenomena, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the nature of space and time, our perception of them and the study of consciousness. Despite this improvement, many fields of science and philosophy are still struggling to make this communication fruitful, giving credit to common-sense beliefs. Hence, the debate on the nature of science and philosophy and how they are related is still open. The issues related to this debate will be investigated within the framework of this Q-Team, which will be conducted by reading the texts considered pivotal in the history of thought and that have somehow opened this debate, from Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution, until modern and contemporary times.