to what extent can philosophy be considered as science?

answers1: Well I think that Yahoo Answers got it right when they put
this section under Arts & Humanities. Science looks more at hard
realities whereas the Humanities are more concered with the intangible
aspects of what it means to be human, just like philosophy looks at
the intangible parts of knowledge.
answers2: I would say that the two are linked as they both emphasize
reason and the search for truth. Philosophy is mroe on the
metaphysical level, while science deals with the physical realm. I
think they both use similar thoguht processes and ideals of truth to
arrive at thier conclussions.
answers3: Philosophy is actually a kind of science; it is a general
science which is interested in everything (mainly) and which pushes
minds to think in order to find answers to all the questions.
answers4: The rational counterpart or anti-thesis to Science is Art
and the Synthesis is Philosophy. Art is skill a certain knowing, while
science is mere love of understanding and philosophy is love of
wisdom. In essence Science is void of intuition and volition, art is
random and it is Philosophy that can explain the practical merits of
either in a neutral fashion. Hence given a argument Art and Science
take turns playing prosecutor and Defense but in the end Philosophy is
always the Judge! <br>
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Note how Plato asserts the highest Government role to Philosophers and
the second role to Artists not Science, but warns that the reason is
Artists are the most dangerous!
answers5: I consider myself a philosopher, and I have great respect
for science. Given this I would never try to argue that the two
intersect. There are a few reasons for this: <br>
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Philosophy doesn't use the scientific method. No hypothesis testing,
no experiments, etc. <br>
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Philosophy doesn't seek to discover or establish laws, it seeks to
discover or establish truth. <br>
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Philosophy isn't necessarily systematically arranged. It certainly can
be, but it doesn't have to be. You can have philosophy without
systematic arrangement. The same can't be said for science. Systematic
arrangment is a necessary condition for science, but not for
philosophy, thus the two can't be the same. <br>
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The closest it comes is if you use the "knowledge as facts or
principles" definition of science, but even this is problematic. You
can certainly discover principles with philosophy, but facts require a
level of objectiveness that philosophy just might not be capable of.
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If the places where science and philosophy differ, it's my opinion
that the lack of the use of the scientific method really draws the
line. Even the social sciences (political science, sociology, for
example) have seen the necessity of the scientific method, and have
started to use it. Philosophy has not. <br>
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I must qualify all of this: I'm not looking to make a value judgement.
The fact that philosophy is not a science has zero effect on its
usefulness, it simply means that science and philosophy are two
different things. Science doesn't intrinsically mean "good" and not
science doesn't intrinsically mean "bad." They're just different. <br>
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I would assert that philosophy is bigger than science. It can
encompass all things - morality, religion, ethics, even science itself
(there is a whole academic field on the philosophy of science). To me,
philosophy is the consideration of all things, science takes these
things and considers them individually and breaks them apart for
study.
answers6: Philosophy is the most rigorous of sciences - it is the
mathematics of knowledge. It examines the truth, the knowableness and
the means by which we can be certain of everything we think we know.
It is the height of science.
answers7: There's no unified philsophy nor unified science. The two
domains intersect and require each other. And even then its always
discontinuous philosophies meeting disparate sciences. There are no
robust reductions of one to the other or even one type to a glimmering
category. <br>
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Science doesn't always use the scientific method: for instance,
choosing which theory to use, given more than one theory which predict
the same data, there's often institutional disputes, but no empirical
testing. Some sciences can't even use the scientific method because we
cannot observe all the implications of the view, as in any theoretical
physics... <br>
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Philsophy, likewise, doesn't omit the scientific method. The use and
reliance on thought experiment demonstrates this. Instead of searching
the empirical world for actual data that conflicts with a thought
experiment, a philosopher looks for possible counterexamples.
Hypothesis, evidence (in the form of possibilia), conclusion. <br>
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Not to mention the amount of empirical studies that philosophy relies
on-- for example, look at the literature for personal identity.
Without brain bissection as an empirical fact, none of the wild
conclusions follow. Or look at Neural Plasticity as a scientifically
documented phenomenon, and then look at the discussions generated in
the philosophy of mind.
answers8: Everything starts with philosphy. People do things a
certain way based on their philosphy toward it. I would'nt call
philosophy a science more so than a way of life.
answers9: The be conscious technology means wisdom and records of
what's fairly real and conclusions that are based upon unquestionably
evidence and logical reasoning. To the quantity a philosophy adheres
to those concepts in its attention of actuality, it could rightfully
be seen a technology.
answers10: They both involve the systematic search for truth and
encourage a rigorous kind of thinking about the world. And they share
a common origin; instead of having philosophers and scientists, we
used to have mostly "philosophers" who were a combination of both
(like, say, Aritstotle). But philosophy and science today are clearly
separate disciplines. Science is based on physical experimentation;
if there isn't an experiment involved, then what you have probably
isn't science. There's some gray area about things like astronomy,
and other fields where rigorous sorts of observation are used instead
of experimentation, but for the most part, science is a discipline
defined by the process of inductively reasoning from experimental
data. Philosophy is not. <br>
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If you throw mathematics into the lot, this becomes still more
complicated. A lot of important math has been done by philosophers;
look at Leibniz, for example. In the last century, philosophers (like
Wittgenstein) basically created formal logic as we now know it.
Bertrand Russel worked on set theory. It should be noted, as well,
that mathematics is not an experimental discipline (except for the
naturally exceptional case of proof by exhaustion). <br>
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Linguistics, too, has significant overlap with some types of analytic
philosophy. And also to mathematics -- computational linguistics is
an interesting (if arbitrary and confounding) field. <br>
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Psychology and philosophy have also historically overlapped -- Freud,
Jung, and Lacan, all psychologists, are much more important to
critical theorists than they are to psychologists. With the advent of
behavioral psychology, which is a more explicitly scientifically
discipline, psychology and philosophy are drifting apart again. <br>
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At any rate, I've gone on long enough. Suffice it to say that
philosophy is an incredibly broad field which informs and is informed
by any number of other fields. When we can't or don't have
inductively-derived data in any field, philosophy is sometimes what
fills the gap. Are the brain and the mind the same thing? Ask a
philosopher, not a neuroscientist, because there is no experiment that
can tell you the answer. All we can do is think very clearly and
rationally about the question -- and that is what philosophers are
there for. It's not science, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.