The Future of Philosophy Part Three: Science and Religion

Abstract

In his Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell famously claimed that philosophy consists in the “residue” remaining after science has answered the philosophical questions of the past.  By contrast, Franz Brentano claimed that religion is a “surrogate” for philosophy, offering inadequate answers to questions that philosophy answers more completely.  I shall argue that neither of these claims is correct.  On the one hand, there is more to philosophy than what natural science can provide.  And on the other hand, there is something offered by religion that philosophy can assess, perhaps, but not replace.  It is true that in ancient times, what was called philosophy included what we would now call natural science as well as what we now call religion; the pre-Socratics raised all kinds of natural science questions and offered answers to them, while the Pythagoreans among them engaged in practices and disciplines that were clearly religious.  One of the tasks for the philosophy of the future, it seems to me, is to delimit its scope in such a way that philosophy appears distinct both from natural science and from religion, regarding the former because it raises and answers questions that natural science cannot address, and regarding the latter because it leaves us with a further transcendental aim, namely wisdom. There has to be a mean between the humility of a Russell and the audacity of a Brentano.