PHILOSOPHERS AND GEOLOGY

Modern philosophy of science (POS) has tended to focus on physics as the exemplar for all science, though much attention is now being accorded to biology. Another impediment to understanding the philosophy of geology results from the general lack of experience that most POS scholars have with that science. As a result, much that can found in the conventional POS literature can be highly misleading in regard to geological methods, phenomenology, metaphysics, etc. Examples of this problem can be found in the otherwise enlightening POS writings of such prominent thinkers as David Hume, Thomas Kuhn, Willard V. O. Quine, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, Imre Lakatos, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, there are some important philosophers who convey appreciative and/or experienced perspectives that are relevant to geology. Among these philosophers (and their perspectives) are the following: Charles Sanders Peirce (pragmatism, fallibilism, and semiotics), William Whewell (methodology of the “inductive sciences”), Claude Levi-Strauss (structuralism), Friedrich von Schelling (Naturphilosophie and objective idealism), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (phenomenology, holism, “poetic science”), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (metaphysics and rationalism). In some cases, controversies engaged in by these figures serve to illuminate issues relevant to the philosophy of geology, as exemplified by the metaphysical debates of Leibniz with Isaac Newton, and the epistemological debates between Whewell and John Stuart Mill. Future scholarship in the philosophy of geology will need to carefully assess the writings of these and other POS luminaries.