Breaking down the sciences hierarchy
In a philosophy class I took as a student we were asked how we would break down the relationships of the sciences hierarchically. The class came up with the typical breakdown of in the order: Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology…
This breakdown is typical when considering the relationship between the sciences. Mathematics is pure and requires no input from any of the others. Physics requires mathematics, chemistry requires physics and mathematics and so on. It was widely agreed that as you go down the list the amount of objectivity decreased as subjectivity increased.
The subject of History fell somewhere in the range with Sociology and Psychology. And since we were in a Philosophy class there was obvious sympathies toward the subject but its placement in the pecking order was problematic.
Then I had an idea: since History is the study of the past then every topic other than Mathematics, and maybe Theoretical Physics, becomes a subset of History because they are all things that happened in the past.
What then of Philosophy? To be sure a lot of Philosophy is mixed up with History but strictly speaking much of Philosophy is not temporal. Such as Logic, Epistemology, Ontology – maybe/sorta. Then there are topics such as Ethics that is pretty obviously mixed up with History.
Based on this new pattern we concluded that all of human thought is really a child of the two parents Mathematics and Philosophy.
It’s an interesting and compelling argument to be sure. And it turns the typical breakdown of disciplines on its head.
