How Far Science Replaced Philosophy, or Descartes vs. Hobbes

Abstract

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Seventeenth-century science became the generally recognized judge on the reality question, just as ancient Greek philosophers had hoped. But modern science explained nature by laws that unlike Aristotelian physics forbad any exception from them, leaving no place for explanation by free will, although it seems that by our will we can falsify any prediction made about our actions if we know the prediction. Philosophers split over defining the scope of science. The majority followed Descartes declaring that science can explain only the movement of bodies, not what is ruled by thought, will, and judgment, dividing the one substance Aristotle assumed into the two substances of matter and mind. A minority, the materialists or physicalists, today the overwhelming majority, followed Hobbes, declaring mental phenomena must be explained by the same laws that explain the movements of bodies, implying that thinking, judgment, and will are “epiphenomena” that lack the causal force to have an effect on the world.

Although there are philosophical arguments for and against free will, and philosophy can check scientific claims and propose questions that science should find an empirical way to answer, it is science rather than philosophy that has become the judge on what there is and must decide whether there is free will by experiment and looking for new empirical data.