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Philosophy of science

Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose and meaning of science as a human endeavour. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of scientific practice, and overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and the concept of truth. Philosophy of science is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorising as well as meta-studies of scientific practice. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.

Many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science lack contemporary consensus, including whether science can infer truth about unobservable entities and whether inductive reasoning can be justified as yielding definite scientific knowledge. Philosophers of science also consider philosophical problems within particular sciences (such as biology, physics and social sciences such as economics and psychology). Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

While philosophical thought pertaining to science dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, general philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline only in the 20th century following the logical positivist movement, which aimed to formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical statements' meaningfulness and objectively assessing them. Karl Popper criticized logical positivism and helped establish a modern set of standards for scientific methodology. Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative, challenging the view of scientific progress as the steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed method of systematic experimentation and instead of arguing that any progress is relative to a "paradigm", the set of questions, concepts, and practices that define a scientific discipline in a particular historical period.

Subsequently, the coherentist approach to science, in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole, became prominent due to W. V. Quine and others. Some thinkers such as Stephen Jay Gould seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of nature. A vocal minority of philosophers, and Paul Feyerabend in particular, argue against the existence of the "scientific method", so all approaches to science should be allowed, including explicitly supernatural ones. Another approach to thinking about science involves studying how knowledge is created from a sociological perspective, an approach represented by scholars like David Bloor and Barry Barnes. Finally, a tradition in continental philosophy approaches science from the perspective of a rigorous analysis of human experience.

Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the nature of time raised by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of economics for public policy. A central theme is whether the terms of one scientific theory can be intra- or intertheoretically reduced to the terms of another. Can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology? The general questions of philosophy of science also arise with greater specificity in some particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics. The question of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, psychology, and the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or are inevitably shaped by values and by social relations.

Defining science
Distinguishing between science and non-science is referred to as the demarcation problem. For example, should psychoanalysis, creation science, and historical materialism be considered pseudosciences? Karl Popper called this the central question in the philosophy of science. However, no unified account of the problem has won acceptance among philosophers, and some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting. Martin Gardner has argued for the use of a Potter Stewart standard ("I know it when I see it") for recognizing pseudoscience.

Early attempts by the logical positivists grounded science in observation while non-science was non-observational and hence meaningless. Popper argued that the central property of science is falsifiability. That is, every genuinely scientific claim is capable of being proven false, at least in principle.

An area of study or speculation that masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy that it would not otherwise be able to achieve is referred to as pseudoscience, fringe science, or junk science. Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term "cargo cult science" for cases in which researchers believe they are doing science because their activities have the outward appearance of it but actually lack the "kind of utter honesty" that allows their results to be rigorously evaluated.

Scientific explanation
A closely related question is what counts as a good scientific explanation. In addition to providing predictions about future events, society often takes scientific theories to provide explanations for events that occur regularly or have already occurred. Philosophers have investigated the criteria by which a scientific theory can be said to have successfully explained a phenomenon, as well as what it means to say a scientific theory has explanatory power.

One early and influential account of scientific explanation is the deductive-nomological model. It says that a successful scientific explanation must deduce the occurrence of the phenomena in question from a scientific law. This view has been subjected to substantial criticism, resulting in several widely acknowledged counterexamples to the theory. It is especially challenging to characterize what is meant by an explanation when the thing to be explained cannot be deduced from any law because it is a matter of chance, or otherwise cannot be perfectly predicted from what is known. Wesley Salmon developed a model in which a good scientific explanation must be statistically relevant to the outcome to be explained. Others have argued that the key to a good explanation is unifying disparate phenomena or providing a causal mechanism.

Justifying science
Although it is often taken for granted, it is not at all clear how one can infer the validity of a general statement from a number of specific instances or infer the truth of a theory from a series of successful tests. For example, a chicken observes that each morning the farmer comes and gives it food, for hundreds of days in a row. The chicken may therefore use inductive reasoning to infer that the farmer will bring food every morning. However, one morning, the farmer comes and kills the chicken. How is scientific reasoning more trustworthy than the chicken's reasoning?

One approach is to acknowledge that induction cannot achieve certainty, but observing more instances of a general statement can at least make the general statement more probable. So the chicken would be right to conclude from all those mornings that it is likely the farmer will come with food again the next morning, even if it cannot be certain. However, there remain difficult questions about the process of interpreting any given evidence into a probability that the general statement is true. One way out of these particular difficulties is to declare that all beliefs about scientific theories are subjective, or personal, and correct reasoning is merely about how evidence should change one's subjective beliefs over time.

Some argue that what scientists do is not inductive reasoning at all but rather abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation. In this account, science is not about generalizing specific instances but rather about hypothesizing explanations for what is observed. As discussed in the previous section, it is not always clear what is meant by the "best explanation". Ockham's razor, which counsels choosing the simplest available explanation, thus plays an important role in some versions of this approach. To return to the example of the chicken, would it be simpler to suppose that the farmer cares about it and will continue taking care of it indefinitely or that the farmer is fattening it up for slaughter? Philosophers have tried to make this heuristic principle more precise in terms of theoretical parsimony or other measures. Yet, although various measures of simplicity have been brought forward as potential candidates, it is generally accepted that there is no such thing as a theory-independent measure of simplicity. In other words, there appear to be as many different measures of simplicity as there are theories themselves, and the task of choosing between measures of simplicity appears to be every bit as problematic as the job of choosing between theories. Nicholas Maxwell has argued for some decades that unity rather than simplicity is the key non-empirical factor in influencing choice of theory in science, persistent preference for unified theories in effect committing science to the acceptance of a metaphysical thesis concerning unity in nature. In order to improve this problematic thesis, it needs to be represented in the form of a hierarchy of theses, each thesis becoming more insubstantial as one goes up the hierarchy.

Observation inseparable from theory
When making observations, scientists look through telescopes, study images on electronic screens, record meter readings, and so on. Generally, on a basic level, they can agree on what they see, e.g., the thermometer shows 37.9 degrees C. But, if these scientists have different ideas about the theories that have been developed to explain these basic observations, they may disagree about what they are observing. For example, before Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, observers would have likely interpreted an image of the Einstein cross as five different objects in space. In light of that theory, however, astronomers will tell you that there are actually only two objects, one in the center and four different images of a second object around the sides. Alternatively, if other scientists suspect that something is wrong with the telescope and only one object is actually being observed, they are operating under yet another theory. Observations that cannot be separated from theoretical interpretation are said to be theory-laden.

All observation involves both perception and cognition. That is, one does not make an observation passively, but rather is actively engaged in distinguishing the phenomenon being observed from surrounding sensory data. Therefore, observations are affected by one's underlying understanding of the way in which the world functions, and that understanding may influence what is perceived, noticed, or deemed worthy of consideration. In this sense, it can be argued that all observation is theory-laden.

The purpose of science
Should science aim to determine ultimate truth, or are there questions that science cannot answer? Scientific realists claim that science aims at truth and that one ought to regard scientific theories as true, approximately true, or likely true. Conversely, scientific anti-realists argue that science does not aim (or at least does not succeed) at truth, especially truth about unobservables like electrons or other universes. Instrumentalists argue that scientific theories should only be evaluated on whether they are useful. In their view, whether theories are true or not is beside the point, because the purpose of science is to make predictions and enable effective technology.

Realists often point to the success of recent scientific theories as evidence for the truth (or near truth) of current theories. Antirealists point to either the many false theories in the history of science, epistemic morals, the success of false modeling assumptions, or widely termed postmodern criticisms of objectivity as evidence against scientific realism. Antirealists attempt to explain the success of scientific theories without reference to truth. Some antirealists claim that scientific theories aim at being accurate only about observable objects and argue that their success is primarily judged by that criterion.

Real Patterns
The notion of real patterns has been propounded, notably by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, as an intermediate position between strong realism and eliminative materialism. This concept delves into the investigation of patterns observed in scientific phenomena to ascertain whether they signify underlying truths or are mere constructs of human interpretation. Dennett provides a unique ontological account concerning real patterns, examining the extent to which these recognized patterns have predictive utility and allow for efficient compression of information.

The discourse on real patterns extends beyond philosophical circles, finding relevance in various scientific domains. For example, in biology, inquiries into real patterns seek to elucidate the nature of biological explanations, exploring how recognized patterns contribute to a comprehensive understanding of biological phenomena. Similarly, in chemistry, debates around the reality of chemical bonds as real patterns continue.

Evaluation of real patterns also holds significance in broader scientific inquiries. Researchers, like Tyler Millhouse, propose criteria for evaluating the realness of a pattern, particularly in the context of universal patterns and the human propensity to perceive patterns, even where there might be none. This evaluation is pivotal in advancing research in diverse fields, from climate change to machine learning, where recognition and validation of real patterns in scientific models play a crucial role.

Values and science
Values intersect with science in different ways. There are epistemic values that mainly guide the scientific research. The scientific enterprise is embedded in particular culture and values through individual practitioners. Values emerge from science, both as product and process and can be distributed among several cultures in the society. When it comes to the justification of science in the sense of general public participation by single practitioners, science plays the role of a mediator between evaluating the standards and policies of society and its participating individuals, wherefore science indeed falls victim to vandalism and sabotage adapting the means to the end. If it is unclear what counts as science, how the process of confirming theories works, and what the purpose of science is, there is considerable scope for values and other social influences to shape science. Indeed, values can play a role ranging from determining which research gets funded to influencing which theories achieve scientific consensus. For example, in the 19th century, cultural values held by scientists about race shaped research on evolution, and values concerning social class influenced debates on phrenology (considered scientific at the time). Feminist philosophers of science, sociologists of science, and others explore how social values affect science.

Pre-modern
The origins of philosophy of science trace back to Plato and Aristotle, who distinguished the forms of approximate and exact reasoning, set out the threefold scheme of abductive, deductive, and inductive inference, and also analyzed reasoning by analogy. The eleventh century Arab polymath Ibn al-Haytham (known in Latin as Alhazen) conducted his research in optics by way of controlled experimental testing and applied geometry, especially in his investigations into the images resulting from the reflection and refraction of light. Roger Bacon (1214–1294), an English thinker and experimenter heavily influenced by al-Haytham, is recognized by many to be the father of modern scientific method. His view that mathematics was essential to a correct understanding of natural philosophy is considered to have been 400 years ahead of its time.

Modern
Francis Bacon (no direct relation to Roger Bacon, who lived 300 years earlier) was a seminal figure in philosophy of science at the time of the Scientific Revolution. In his work Novum Organum (1620)—an allusion to Aristotle's Organon—Bacon outlined a new system of logic to improve upon the old philosophical process of syllogism. Bacon's method relied on experimental histories to eliminate alternative theories. In 1637, René Descartes established a new framework for grounding scientific knowledge in his treatise, Discourse on Method, advocating the central role of reason as opposed to sensory experience. By contrast, in 1713, the 2nd edition of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica argued that "... hypotheses ... have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy[,] propositions are deduced from the phenomena and rendered general by induction." This passage influenced a "later generation of philosophically-inclined readers to pronounce a ban on causal hypotheses in natural philosophy". In particular, later in the 18th century, David Hume would famously articulate skepticism about the ability of science to determine causality and gave a definitive formulation of the problem of induction, though both theses would be contested by the end of the 18th century by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. In 19th century Auguste Comte made a major contribution to the theory of science. The 19th century writings of John Stuart Mill are also considered important in the formation of current conceptions of the scientific method, as well as anticipating later accounts of scientific explanation.

Logical positivism
Instrumentalism became popular among physicists around the turn of the 20th century, after which logical positivism defined the field for several decades. Logical positivism accepts only testable statements as meaningful, rejects metaphysical interpretations, and embraces verificationism (a set of theories of knowledge that combines logicism, empiricism, and linguistics to ground philosophy on a basis consistent with examples from the empirical sciences). Seeking to overhaul all of philosophy and convert it to a new scientific philosophy, the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle propounded logical positivism in the late 1920s.

Interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language, logical positivists identified a verifiability principle or criterion of cognitive meaningfulness. From Bertrand Russell's logicism they sought reduction of mathematics to logic. They also embraced Russell's logical atomism, Ernst Mach's phenomenalism—whereby the mind knows only actual or potential sensory experience, which is the content of all sciences, whether physics or psychology—and Percy Bridgman's operationalism. Thereby, only the verifiable was scientific and cognitively meaningful, whereas the unverifiable was unscientific, cognitively meaningless "pseudostatements"—metaphysical, emotive, or such—not worthy of further review by philosophers, who were newly tasked to organize knowledge rather than develop new knowledge.

Logical positivism is commonly portrayed as taking the extreme position that scientific language should never refer to anything unobservable—even the seemingly core notions of causality, mechanism, and principles—but that is an exaggeration. Talk of such unobservables could be allowed as metaphorical—direct observations viewed in the abstract—or at worst metaphysical or emotional. Theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws, while theoretical terms would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules. Mathematics in physics would reduce to symbolic logic via logicism, while rational reconstruction would convert ordinary language into standardized equivalents, all networked and united by a logical syntax. A scientific theory would be stated with its method of verification, whereby a logical calculus or empirical operation could verify its falsity or truth.

In the late 1930s, logical positivists fled Germany and Austria for Britain and America. By then, many had replaced Mach's phenomenalism with Otto Neurath's physicalism, and Rudolf Carnap had sought to replace verification with simply confirmation. With World War II's close in 1945, logical positivism became milder, logical empiricism, led largely by Carl Hempel, in America, who expounded the covering law model of scientific explanation as a way of identifying the logical form of explanations without any reference to the suspect notion of "causation". The logical positivist movement became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy, and dominated Anglosphere philosophy, including philosophy of science, while influencing sciences, into the 1960s. Yet the movement failed to resolve its central problems, and its doctrines were increasingly assaulted. Nevertheless, it brought about the establishment of philosophy of science as a distinct subdiscipline of philosophy, with Carl Hempel playing a key role.

Thomas Kuhn
In the 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the process of observation and evaluation takes place within a paradigm, a logically consistent "portrait" of the world that is consistent with observations made from its framing. A paradigm also encompasses the set of questions and practices that define a scientific discipline. He characterized normal science as the process of observation and "puzzle solving" which takes place within a paradigm, whereas revolutionary science occurs when one paradigm overtakes another in a paradigm shift.

Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the hypothesis being tested from the influence of the theory in which the observations are grounded, and he argued that it is not possible to evaluate competing paradigms independently. More than one logically consistent construct can paint a usable likeness of the world, but there is no common ground from which to pit two against each other, theory against theory. Each paradigm has its own distinct questions, aims, and interpretations. Neither provides a standard by which the other can be judged, so there is no clear way to measure scientific progress across paradigms.

For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by rational processes, but not ultimately determined by them. The choice between paradigms involves setting two or more "portraits" against the world and deciding which likeness is most promising. For Kuhn, acceptance or rejection of a paradigm is a social process as much as a logical process. Kuhn's position, however, is not one of relativism. According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift occurs when a significant number of observational anomalies arise in the old paradigm and a new paradigm makes sense of them. That is, the choice of a new paradigm is based on observations, even though those observations are made against the background of the old paradigm.

Coherentism

In contrast to the view that science rests on foundational assumptions, coherentism asserts that statements are justified by being a part of a coherent system. Or, rather, individual statements cannot be validated on their own: only coherent systems can be justified. A prediction of a transit of Venus is justified by its being coherent with broader beliefs about celestial mechanics and earlier observations. As explained above, observation is a cognitive act. That is, it relies on a pre-existing understanding, a systematic set of beliefs. An observation of a transit of Venus requires a huge range of auxiliary beliefs, such as those that describe the optics of telescopes, the mechanics of the telescope mount, and an understanding of celestial mechanics. If the prediction fails and a transit is not observed, that is likely to occasion an adjustment in the system, a change in some auxiliary assumption, rather than a rejection of the theoretical system.

In fact, according to the Duhem–Quine thesis, after Pierre Duhem and W.V. Quine, it is impossible to test a theory in isolation. One must always add auxiliary hypotheses in order to make testable predictions. For example, to test Newton's Law of Gravitation in the solar system, one needs information about the masses and positions of the Sun and all the planets. Famously, the failure to predict the orbit of Uranus in the 19th century led not to the rejection of Newton's Law but rather to the rejection of the hypothesis that the solar system comprises only seven planets. The investigations that followed led to the discovery of an eighth planet, Neptune. If a test fails, something is wrong. But there is a problem in figuring out what that something is: a missing planet, badly calibrated test equipment, an unsuspected curvature of space, or something else.

One consequence of the Duhem–Quine thesis is that one can make any theory compatible with any empirical observation by the addition of a sufficient number of suitable ad hoc hypotheses. Karl Popper accepted this thesis, leading him to reject naïve falsification. Instead, he favored a "survival of the fittest" view in which the most falsifiable scientific theories are to be preferred.

Anything goes methodology

Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) argued that no description of scientific method could possibly be broad enough to include all the approaches and methods used by scientists, and that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science. He argued that "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes".

Feyerabend said that science started as a liberating movement, but that over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid and had some oppressive features, and thus had become increasingly an ideology. Because of this, he said it was impossible to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology. He saw the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society as authoritarian and ungrounded. Promulgation of this epistemological anarchism earned Feyerabend the title of "the worst enemy of science" from his detractors.

Sociology of scientific knowledge methodology
According to Kuhn, science is an inherently communal activity which can only be done as part of a community. For him, the fundamental difference between science and other disciplines is the way in which the communities function. Others, especially Feyerabend and some post-modernist thinkers, have argued that there is insufficient difference between social practices in science and other disciplines to maintain this distinction. For them, social factors play an important and direct role in scientific method, but they do not serve to differentiate science from other disciplines. On this account, science is socially constructed, though this does not necessarily imply the more radical notion that reality itself is a social construct.

Michel Foucault sought to analyze and uncover how disciplines within the social sciences developed and adopted the methodologies used by their practitioners. In works like The Archaeology of Knowledge, he used the term human sciences. The human sciences do not comprise mainstream academic disciplines; they are rather an interdisciplinary space for the reflection on man who is the subject of more mainstream scientific knowledge, taken now as an object, sitting between these more conventional areas, and of course associating with disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and even history. Rejecting the realist view of scientific inquiry, Foucault argued throughout his work that scientific discourse is not simply an objective study of phenomena, as both natural and social scientists like to believe, but is rather the product of systems of power relations struggling to construct scientific disciplines and knowledge within given societies. With the advances of scientific disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology, the need to separate, categorize, normalize and institutionalize populations into constructed social identities became a staple of the sciences. Constructions of what were considered "normal" and "abnormal" stigmatized and ostracized groups of people, like the mentally ill and sexual and gender minorities.

However, some (such as Quine) do maintain that scientific reality is a social construct: Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer ... For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits. The public backlash of scientists against such views, particularly in the 1990s, became known as the science wars.

A major development in recent decades has been the study of the formation, structure, and evolution of scientific communities by sociologists and anthropologists – including David Bloor, Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Ian Hacking and Anselm Strauss. Concepts and methods (such as rational choice, social choice or game theory) from economics have also been applied for understanding the efficiency of scientific communities in the production of knowledge. This interdisciplinary field has come to be known as science and technology studies. Here the approach to the philosophy of science is to study how scientific communities actually operate.

Continental philosophy
Philosophers in the continental philosophical tradition are not traditionally categorized as philosophers of science. However, they have much to say about science, some of which has anticipated themes in the analytical tradition. For example, in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Friedrich Nietzsche advanced the thesis that the motive for the search for truth in sciences is a kind of ascetic ideal.

In general, continental philosophy views science from a world-historical perspective. Philosophers such as Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) wrote their works with this world-historical approach to science, predating Kuhn's 1962 work by a generation or more. All of these approaches involve a historical and sociological turn to science, with a priority on lived experience (a kind of Husserlian "life-world"), rather than a progress-based or anti-historical approach as emphasised in the analytic tradition. One can trace this continental strand of thought through the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the late works of Merleau-Ponty (Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1956–1960), and the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).

The largest effect on the continental tradition with respect to science came from Martin Heidegger's critique of the theoretical attitude in general, which of course includes the scientific attitude. For this reason, the continental tradition has remained much more skeptical of the importance of science in human life and in philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, there have been a number of important works: especially those of a Kuhnian precursor, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964). Another important development was that of Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and scientific thought in The Order of Things (1966) and his study of power and corruption within the "science" of madness. Post-Heideggerian authors contributing to continental philosophy of science in the second half of the 20th century include Jürgen Habermas (e.g., Truth and Justification, 1998), Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (The Unity of Nature, 1980; Die Einheit der Natur (1971)), and Wolfgang Stegmüller (Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und Analytischen Philosophie, 1973–1986).

Reductionism
Analysis involves breaking an observation or theory down into simpler concepts in order to understand it. Reductionism can refer to one of several philosophical positions related to this approach. One type of reductionism suggests that phenomena are amenable to scientific explanation at lower levels of analysis and inquiry. Perhaps a historical event might be explained in sociological and psychological terms, which in turn might be described in terms of human physiology, which in turn might be described in terms of chemistry and physics. Daniel Dennett distinguishes legitimate reductionism from what he calls greedy reductionism, which denies real complexities and leaps too quickly to sweeping generalizations.

Social accountability
A broad issue affecting the neutrality of science concerns the areas which science chooses to explore—that is, what part of the world and of humankind are studied by science. Philip Kitcher in his Science, Truth, and Democracy argues that scientific studies that attempt to show one segment of the population as being less intelligent, less successful, or emotionally backward compared to others have a political feedback effect which further excludes such groups from access to science. Thus such studies undermine the broad consensus required for good science by excluding certain people, and so proving themselves in the end to be unscientific.

Philosophy of particular sciences
"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination." In addition to addressing the general questions regarding science and induction, many philosophers of science are occupied by investigating foundational problems in particular sciences. They also examine the implications of particular sciences for broader philosophical questions. The late 20th and early 21st century has seen a rise in the number of practitioners of philosophy of a particular science.

Philosophy of statistics
The problem of induction discussed above is seen in another form in debates over the foundations of statistics. The standard approach to statistical hypothesis testing avoids claims about whether evidence supports a hypothesis or makes it more probable. Instead, the typical test yields a p-value, which is the probability of the evidence being such as it is, under the assumption that the hypothesis being tested is true. If the p-value is too low, the hypothesis is rejected, in a way analogous to falsification. In contrast, Bayesian inference seeks to assign probabilities to hypotheses. Related topics in philosophy of statistics include probability interpretations, overfitting, and the difference between correlation and causation.

Philosophy of mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics is concerned with the philosophical foundations and implications of mathematics. The central questions are whether numbers, triangles, and other mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind and what is the nature of mathematical propositions. Is asking whether "1+1=2" is true fundamentally different from asking whether a ball is red? Was calculus invented or discovered? A related question is whether learning mathematics requires experience or reason alone. What does it mean to prove a mathematical theorem and how does one know whether a mathematical proof is correct? Philosophers of mathematics also aim to clarify the relationships between mathematics and logic, human capabilities such as intuition, and the material universe.

Philosophy of physics
Philosophy of physics is the study of the fundamental, philosophical questions underlying modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The main questions concern the nature of space and time, atoms and atomism. Also included are the predictions of cosmology, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the foundations of statistical mechanics, causality, determinism, and the nature of physical laws. Classically, several of these questions were studied as part of metaphysics (for example, those about causality, determinism, and space and time).

Philosophy of chemistry
Philosophy of chemistry is the philosophical study of the methodology and content of the science of chemistry. It is explored by philosophers, chemists, and philosopher-chemist teams. It includes research on general philosophy of science issues as applied to chemistry. For example, can all chemical phenomena be explained by quantum mechanics or is it not possible to reduce chemistry to physics? For another example, chemists have discussed the philosophy of how theories are confirmed in the context of confirming reaction mechanisms. Determining reaction mechanisms is difficult because they cannot be observed directly. Chemists can use a number of indirect measures as evidence to rule out certain mechanisms, but they are often unsure if the remaining mechanism is correct because there are many other possible mechanisms that they have not tested or even thought of. Philosophers have also sought to clarify the meaning of chemical concepts which do not refer to specific physical entities, such as chemical bonds.

Philosophy of astronomy
The philosophy of astronomy seeks to understand and analyze the methodologies and technologies used by experts in the discipline, focusing on how observations made about space and astrophysical phenomena can be studied. Given that astronomers rely and use theories and formulas from other scientific disciplines, such as chemistry and physics, the pursuit of understanding how knowledge can be obtained about the cosmos, as well as the relation in which our planet and Solar System have within our personal views of our place in the universe, philosophical insights into how facts about space can be scientifically analyzed and configure with other established knowledge is a main point of inquiry.

Philosophy of Earth sciences
The philosophy of Earth science is concerned with how humans obtain and verify knowledge of the workings of the Earth system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere (solid earth). Earth scientists' ways of knowing and habits of mind share important commonalities with other sciences, but also have distinctive attributes that emerge from the complex, heterogeneous, unique, long-lived, and non-manipulatable nature of the Earth system.

Philosophy of biology
Philosophy of biology deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and even Kant), philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. Philosophers of science began to pay increasing attention to developments in biology, from the rise of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key ideas such as the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions as well as the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience are also addressed. Research in current philosophy of biology includes investigation of the foundations of evolutionary theory (such as Peter Godfrey-Smith's work), and the role of viruses as persistent symbionts in host genomes. As a consequence, the evolution of genetic content order is seen as the result of competent genome editors in contrast to former narratives in which error replication events (mutations) dominated.

Philosophy of medicine
Beyond medical ethics and bioethics, the philosophy of medicine is a branch of philosophy that includes the epistemology and ontology/metaphysics of medicine. Within the epistemology of medicine, evidence-based medicine (EBM) (or evidence-based practice (EBP)) has attracted attention, most notably the roles of randomisation,  blinding and placebo controls. Related to these areas of investigation, ontologies of specific interest to the philosophy of medicine include Cartesian dualism, the monogenetic conception of disease and the conceptualization of 'placebos' and 'placebo effects'. There is also a growing interest in the metaphysics of medicine, particularly the idea of causation. Philosophers of medicine might not only be interested in how medical knowledge is generated, but also in the nature of such phenomena. Causation is of interest because the purpose of much medical research is to establish causal relationships, e.g. what causes disease, or what causes people to get better.

Philosophy of psychiatry
Philosophy of psychiatry explores philosophical questions relating to psychiatry and mental illness. The philosopher of science and medicine Dominic Murphy identifies three areas of exploration in the philosophy of psychiatry. The first concerns the examination of psychiatry as a science, using the tools of the philosophy of science more broadly. The second entails the examination of the concepts employed in discussion of mental illness, including the experience of mental illness, and the normative questions it raises. The third area concerns the links and discontinuities between the philosophy of mind and psychopathology.

Philosophy of psychology
Philosophy of psychology refers to issues at the theoretical foundations of modern psychology. Some of these issues are epistemological concerns about the methodology of psychological investigation. For example, is the best method for studying psychology to focus only on the response of behavior to external stimuli or should psychologists focus on mental perception and thought processes? If the latter, an important question is how the internal experiences of others can be measured. Self-reports of feelings and beliefs may not be reliable because, even in cases in which there is no apparent incentive for subjects to intentionally deceive in their answers, self-deception or selective memory may affect their responses. Then even in the case of accurate self-reports, how can responses be compared across individuals? Even if two individuals respond with the same answer on a Likert scale, they may be experiencing very different things.

Other issues in philosophy of psychology are philosophical questions about the nature of mind, brain, and cognition, and are perhaps more commonly thought of as part of cognitive science, or philosophy of mind. For example, are humans rational creatures? Is there any sense in which they have free will, and how does that relate to the experience of making choices? Philosophy of psychology also closely monitors contemporary work conducted in cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence, questioning what they can and cannot explain in psychology.

Philosophy of psychology is a relatively young field, because psychology only became a discipline of its own in the late 1800s. In particular, neurophilosophy has just recently become its own field with the works of Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland. Philosophy of mind, by contrast, has been a well-established discipline since before psychology was a field of study at all. It is concerned with questions about the very nature of mind, the qualities of experience, and particular issues like the debate between dualism and monism.

Philosophy of social science
The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic and method of the social sciences, such as sociology and cultural anthropology. Philosophers of social science are concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences, causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and the ontological significance of structure and agency.

The French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), established the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positivist Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the natural sciences already in existence (geoscience, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of social science: "sociologie". For Comte, the natural sciences had to necessarily arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. Comte offers an evolutionary system proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. These are (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.

Comte's positivism established the initial philosophical foundations for formal sociology and social research. Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are more typically cited as the fathers of contemporary social science. In psychology, a positivistic approach has historically been favoured in behaviourism. Positivism has also been espoused by 'technocrats' who believe in the inevitability of social progress through science and technology.

The positivist perspective has been associated with 'scientism'; the view that the methods of the natural sciences may be applied to all areas of investigation, be it philosophical, social scientific, or otherwise. Among most social scientists and historians, orthodox positivism has long since lost popular support. Today, practitioners of both social and physical sciences instead take into account the distorting effect of observer bias and structural limitations. This scepticism has been facilitated by a general weakening of deductivist accounts of science by philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn, and new philosophical movements such as critical realism and neopragmatism. The philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas has critiqued pure instrumental rationality as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes something akin to ideology itself.

Philosophy of technology
The philosophy of technology is a sub-field of philosophy that studies the nature of technology. Specific research topics include study of the role of tacit and explicit knowledge in creating and using technology, the nature of functions in technological artifacts, the role of values in design, and ethics related to technology. Technology and engineering can both involve the application of scientific knowledge. The philosophy of engineering is an emerging sub-field of the broader philosophy of technology.

title: Philosophy of science


text:
Talk:Empedocles

Untitled
Doesn't he deserve credit for formulating the principle of empiricism, too? -- April

Though it can be disputed, most of modern sources credit Empedocles as the first to formulate the theory of four elements (Classical_element actually links here), which stayed the most popular (al)chemical theory for more than a thousand years. His fame as miracle worker and doctor was somewhat connected to the story of his successful action against the plague in Selinuntos, and an epidemic in Acragas (where he let a break be cut into the mountains, so that north winds could drive away unhealthy miasms from nearby marshes); he also established the Italian school of medicine, comparable to the schools of Kos and Knidos. As a note of minor interest, Empedocles theorized that the speed of light may be finite, though still too fast for us to notice the delay in its movement. He was exiled from Acragas after an aristocratic coup, and Diogenes Laertius relates two possible versions of his death: either he threw himself into Etna's crater (possibly to leave an impression of his ascent to heavens), or he died in Peloponnesos, as a refugee. (Diogenes Laertius's biography of Empedocles in Peitho's Web: ) -- Oop

Aristotle endorsed Empedocles?
The article states that "He maintained that all matter is made up of four Elements...water, earth, air and fire. In addition to these, he postulated something called Love (philia) to explain the attraction of different forms of matter, and of something called Strife (neikos) to account for their separation. This theory was endorsed and developed by Aristotle and remained in place until the Renaissance."

What is the basis for the claim that Aristotle endorsed this view? This seems patently false to me. In Metaphysics Book I (Chapter 4), Aristotle does give a sort-of compliment to Empedocles for having grasped (to an extent) two of the causes in nature: "matter and the source of movement" (i.e., the material and efficient causes). He also gives Empedocles credit for being the first to posit TWO (rather than just one) sources of movement. But he adds that Empedocles grasped these causes only "vaguely...and with no clearness," comparing him to a drunken brawler who goes about his fighting in an imprecise (unscientific) way. He says that Empedocles and "these thinkers do not seem to know what they say." This is not only because Empedocles has altogether failed to recognize the other causes in nature (i.e., the formal and the final causes), but also because even his use of the recognized causes is both insufficient and inconsistent.

The claim seems to be based on a gross misunderstanding of Aristotle, so I am removing it from the article.

--CHuRL

Fact tags
It seems to me there are way too many Fact tags here; are there really doubts about all these things? Why were they put there? Is someone pressing for any old source that backs them up (e.g. Internet Encyclopedia of Phil, which has several of these claims) or should we be looking for where these claims were first made? The latter could be an interesting and valuable project, but not central enough to Wikipedia's mission to justify all these Fact tags. I'm not sure what is gained by simply including links to other internet encyclopedias to "verify" that Empedocles actually wore purple, was said to have invented rhetoric, or was said to have jumped into a volcano. As you can see from the google searches, those claims are ubiquitous enough that they are generally accurate (or at least represent long-repeated inaccurate information); what is really gained from a link to another encyclopedia making the same assertion? On the other hand, a link to whoever first said that Aristotle said that Empedocles invented rhetoric on perseus would be great, but I don't think it is "needed." It's my understanding that the Fact tag should be used when a claim is suspect, or simply not that common. But not for every single fact that isn't linked to source material -- should I put a Fact tag on this page because there is no source cited for the claim that the sun is the nearest star to earth? Now, if someone has a reason to suspect these claims are inaccurate, then by all means let's hear about it.--csloat 03:16, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * Please see Verifiability and Citing sources where these questions are thoroughly discussed. Jkelly 04:30, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * This sort of situation is not addressed there, to my knowledge. I don't see anything requiring citations be provided in the text of an article for well known and widely accepted facts.  I don't see the point of citing other encyclopedias to "prove" that Empedocles wore purple, for example, when every encyclopedia contains that information (and the claim may be equally verifiable or unverifiable).  The pages you link to indicate that when questions of verifiability are raised, published sources should be brought to settle such disputes, but I don't see such questions raised here.  The above google links take you to plenty of sources to verify these claims; can we now remove the Fact tags?  Or do you really insist that we cite other encyclopedias for every sentence here, most of which is easily verified in any such sources?  And where do we draw the line - can you explain why there is no reason to put a Fact tag next to a sentence like "The first scientific description of fish occurs in Aristotle, who mentions various facts about 118 species." on this page?  While it would be great to have a link to Aristotle on perseus there, or even just a citation, would you advocate putting Fact tags there, and would you want to see a link to another encyclopedia making the same claim?--csloat 06:06, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * Some of your Google results are mirrors of Wikipedia. We do prefer to reference secondary sources over "tertiary" ones such as other encyclopedias. It would be nice to WP:CITE that Aristophanes reference, yes.  The Template:fact tags are useful pointers to places where references would be appropriate.  A reference to Perseus, as you suggested, would be an aid to both the reader and future editors.  Why not simply add it? Jkelly 06:16, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * If I had such links I would add them; and I definitely encourage anyone to do so. Perhaps it is from hanging around the current events pages, but to me the "fact" tags suggest that a given claim is doubted and should not be trusted until a cite is provided.  I could easily add cites for other encyclopedias (true there are some wikipedia mirrors there but there are also other encyclopedia sources) but does that really improve Wikipedia in any measurable way?  I'd rather see the claims cited with original (or secondary) sources than nothing, but I think I'd rather see nothing than a bunch of links to other encyclopedias that repeat information but don't really verify it.--csloat 07:00, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * We have come across a point of agreement. In our "wore purple" example, we might pay lip-service to WP:V by referencing some random university webpage that mentions the fact, but would fall far short of the improvement that actually tracking down where that bit of trivia originated and referencing that.   "Empedoclephobos wrote that Empedocles was arrogant and wore purple clothes, whereas Empedoclephilos wrote that the philosopher was humble and had quite good fashion sense.", for instance.  Jkelly 17:24, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

 * On the subject of "citation needed" tags, I was the one who originally put into the article that "there is some evidence that he actually died in Greece." I did so because that's what it said at the article on Mount Etna (though it no longer does, and I don't know who it was that put it there) and I thought the articles should be consistant. I don't know what evidence there is that he actually died in Greece. Should the statement even remain in the article?

Patricia Curd's A Presocratics Reader includes most, if not all, of the challenged facts. Someone with more skill than I could definitely feel free to put in that source and end this silly debate. 72.144.198.53 20:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Empedocles demonstrated the material nature of air using a clepsydra ("water thief"). This was an extremely important early experiment and deserves mention. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.142.97.91 (talk) 00:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

 * Aristotle refers to such an experiment in his Physics, but he doesn't mention Empedocles. The only reason to connect this experiment to Empedocles seems to be because he talks about clepsydras in Fragment 100 when explaining respiration. The evidence that Empedocles was the one who performed the clepsydra experiment is very weak. Singinglemon (talk) 18:35, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

i have read 2 books that talk about his theories of evolution.
i read in 2 books that empedocles had a theory of evolution also that needs to be discussed. in will durant's book he says it was primitive for today but very advanced for 2,500 yo. it included survival of the most fit or maybe survival of the most properly adapted. i am not an authority but i would love it if someone could get that stuff in here.

and philosophy is NOT the Love of Wisdom. Philo does not mean love and it did not mean love in ancient greek either. Philo means and meant Friend. so philosophy means friend of wisdom. the entire internet has it wrong. i have no idea how to use this so i hope my comments get saved. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.74.40.184 (talk) 17:42, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

 * This article does already mention his "evolution" theory in the "Cosmogony" section. It can't really be equated with the modern theory of evolution, Empedocles was writing mythology not science, but he does describe what can be called "natural selection".

 * philos can be perhaps better defined as a loving friend. :) Singinglemon (talk) 22:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Pausanias and Empedocles
Can we just pin things down as to whether Empedocles and Pausanias were lovers. I've had to revert edits on this three times now, I think. The line from Diogenes Laërtius, viii. 60 reads:
 * ἦν δ' ὁ Παυσανίας, ὥς φησιν Ἀρίστιππος καὶ Σάτυρος, ἐρώμενος αὐτοῦ

which apparently translates as:
 * Pausanias, according to Aristippus and Satyrus, was his eromenos.

Have I made a mistake? Naturally one would not expect Victorian translations of Diogenes Laërtius to state this explicitly. I should add that I've no particular interest in Ancient Greek homosexuality, but as I understand it, it was quite common. Singinglemon (talk) 22:27, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

 * You're understanding this properly. There is, I suppose, room to doubt whether Aristippus and Satyrus had good information about Empedocles' relationship, but the erastes-eromenos relationship was common in classical Greece, and what Diogenes Laertius says seems plausible. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:57, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Clepsydra
I will quote the previous discussion on this:

 * Empedocles demonstrated the material nature of air using a clepsydra ("water thief"). This was an extremely important early experiment and deserves mention. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.142.97.91 (talk) 00:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

 * Aristotle refers to such an experiment in his Physics, but he doesn't mention Empedocles. The only reason to connect this experiment to Empedocles seems to be because he talks about clepsydras in Fragment 100 when explaining respiration. The evidence that Empedocles was the one who performed the clepsydra experiment is very weak. Singinglemon (talk) 18:35, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

I first heard the clepsydra story from Carl Sagan, so I don't think it's a fringe theory. It was in an episode of his science series on TV. Also check out: http://www.jstor.org/pss/628630 Simanos (talk) 13:04, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

 * Unlike a jstor article, Segan is not a reliable source on anything apart from astronomy, particularly not ancient philosophers or philosophy.—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 22:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

An opinion on the posit "Nothing comes from Nothing"
It is noted that there was an Important idea in ancient Greek philosophy which is "Nothing comes from Nothing" and an explicit statement of this along with the further principle that nothing can pass away into nothing was found in Empedocles (490 BC - 430 BC). It is said that the third theorem of Sir Issac Newton, a great scientist explains the same idea that was expressed by Empedocles. As for the period of these two stalwarts are concerned, Sir Issac Newton belongs to 18th Century,whereas Empedocles belongs to very early century namely 490 -430 BC. It may be astonishing to note that what was advanced by a scientist in 18th century was very easily pronounced by a great Greek thinker, Empedocles in 430 BC i.e. about 2200 years ago without any sceintific instruments for his support. It is in the same breath, I am to add, the declaration of this scientific fact dates back still earlier to Empedocles. In India there was a school of thought namely "Saankya" advocated by a sage called "Kapila Munivar". He announced to the world among other Philosophical ideas that no matter can be destroyed nor be created, the very same idea as Empedocle broke to the world. A deep scrutiny of the annals of Kapila Munivar reveals that he hailed from Tamilnadu, deep South of India and in his later period went North to preach a school of thought known as "Saankya". This is very much corroborated by the name Kapila which means stark black, by the by, you may note that Tamilians are black. Hence this idea was originally permeated in Tamilnadu and a great saying still found in Tamil Saiva Siddhantha literature which goes tersly as, "Illadhu thondradhu(Nothing comes from Nothing); ulladhu sidhaiyadhu (No matter can be destroyed)" testifies to the fact. It may be deciphered, rightly therefore, that the scientific fact said above originated in the minds of Tamil sages, travelled to the teritory of Greece as a result of great deluge in the wake of upheavel of sea, along with those travelled in boats to various parts of the world from Tamilnadu and therefrom to Sir Issac Newton in the 18th century. Therefore the seed of the idea is Tamilian. Opinions by M.P.Sathiyavel Murugan, http://dheivathamizh.org/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.242.186.106 (talk) 15:56, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Purifications
If we compare the extended quote in this section with this text, p.81, there seems to be a significant difference, viz "in your eyes". Any comment, please? Spicemix (talk) 21:39, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Applause! Great page!
Thank you each and every one, for giving me a clear summary of what is known. Clear writing I find! Praises and praises! I love and appreciate greatly the links to the secondary sources-- I applaud your tracking to sources like Aelian and Simplicius-- and thanks for taking out the NotVeryUseful notes to "enclyclopedias". Great job, everybody! --Rednblu (talk) 14:09, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Wasn't he born in Akragas not Agrigentum?
That is the Latin name vs Greek name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paolorausch (talk • contribs) 09:30, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Revelation
Russell's so-called humorous quote manifests the lanky logician's superficiality. He misses the enormous importance of Empedocles' attribution of the world's formation as due to love/strife, instead of to mind/intelligence.173.71.86.124 (talk) 19:48, 8 July 2017 (UTC)WalterShandy

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=Is Empedocles's surviving work the bulkiest?=

The article introduction contains the statement: "Some of his work survives, more than is the case for any other pre-Socratic philosopher." It goes back to this edit. There's no cite. Now, I haven't counted how many words from Parmenides survive, but unless somebody knows the statement is verifiable, I'll remove it. Objections? Peter Gulutzan (talk) 16:58, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * In my copy of Patricia Curd's A Presocratics Reader (ISBN 978-1-60384-305-8), Empedocles has the largest section by page count alone, going from page 75 to 99 (that's 25 pages worth). The next most after that is Heraclitus, from 40 to 53 (14 pages). (Leucippus and Democritus are jointly considered from 110 to 125, or 16 pages worth). So by this metric alone, it looks like Empedocles does have the most extant writing of any Pre-Socratic. Still though, I haven't found anywhere that explicitly says, "Empedocles has the most." I'll let you know if I find anything.  Tkbrett  (✉) 17:27, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You inspired me to do a similar count. You're right. And I guess WP:CALC applies. So I will not remove the statement. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 18:24, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

= Tendentious nonsense =

Lede currently contains (after ref. to Pythagoras): "(so he may have been a vegetarian at some stage of his life)". This is equivalent to: "It is unknown whether he was a vegetarian at any point in his life," which is true of most biographical subjects, and hence does not merit mentioning. I will delete the parenthesis. Wegesrand (talk) 13:12, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Empedocles


text:
Pope Gregory VII

Pope Gregory VII (Gregorius VII; c. 1015 – 25 May 1085), born Hildebrand of Sovana (Ildebrando di Soana), was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 22 April 1073 to his death in 1085. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church.

One of the great reforming popes, he is perhaps best known for the part he played in the Investiture Controversy, his dispute with Emperor Henry IV to establish the primacy of papal authority and the new canon law governing the election of the pope by the College of Cardinals. He was also at the forefront of developments in the relationship between the emperor and the papacy during the years before he became pope. He was the first pope to introduce a policy of obligatory celibacy for the clergy, which had until then commonly married,   and also attacked the practice of simony.

During the power struggles between the papacy and the Empire, Gregory excommunicated Henry IV three times, and Henry appointed Antipope Clement III to oppose him. Though Gregory was hailed as one of the greatest of the Roman pontiffs after his reforms proved successful, during his own reign he was denounced by some for his autocratic use of papal powers.

In later times, Gregory VII became an exemplar of papal supremacy, and his memory was invoked both positively and negatively, reflecting later writers' attitude to the Catholic Church and the papacy. Beno of Santi Martino e Silvestro, who opposed Gregory VII in the Investiture Controversy, accused him of necromancy, cruelty, tyranny, and blasphemy. This was eagerly repeated by later opponents of the Catholic Church, such as the English Protestant John Foxe. In contrast, the modern historian and Anglican priest H. E. J. Cowdrey writes, "[Gregory VII] was surprisingly flexible, feeling his way and therefore perplexing both rigorous collaborators ... and cautious and steady-minded ones ... His zeal, moral force, and religious conviction, however, ensured that he should retain to a remarkable degree the loyalty and service of a wide variety of men and women."

Early life
Gregory was born Hildebrand (Ildebrando) in the town of Sovana, in the County of Grosseto, now southern Tuscany, the son of a blacksmith. As a youth he was sent to study in Rome at the monastery of St. Mary on the Aventine, where his uncle was reportedly abbot of a monastery on the Aventine Hill. Among his masters were the erudite Lawrence, archbishop of Amalfi, and Johannes Gratianus, the future Pope Gregory VI. When the latter was deposed at the Council of Sutri in December of 1046, with approval of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III and exiled to Germany, Hildebrand followed him to Cologne. According to some chroniclers, Hildebrand moved to Cluny after Gregory VI's death, which occurred in 1048; though his declaration to have become a monk at Cluny is disputed.

He then accompanied Cluny's Abbot Bruno of Toul to Rome; there, Bruno was elected pope, choosing the name Leo IX, and named Hildebrand as deacon and papal administrator. In 1054 Leo sent Hildebrand as his legate to Tours in France in the wake of the controversy created by Berengar of Tours. At Leo's death, the new pope, Victor II, confirmed him as legate, while Victor's successor Stephen IX sent him and Anselm of Lucca to Germany to obtain recognition from Empress Agnes. Stephen died before being able to return to Rome, but Hildebrand was successful; he was then instrumental in overcoming the crisis caused by the Roman aristocracy's election of an antipope, Benedict X, who, thanks also to Agnes's support, was replaced by the Bishop of Florence, Nicholas II. With the help of 300 Norman knights sent by Richard of Aversa, Hildebrand personally led the conquest of the castle of Galeria Antica where Benedict had taken refuge. Between 1058 and 1059, he was made archdeacon of the Roman church, becoming the most important figure in the papal administration.

He was again the most powerful figure behind the election of Anselm of Lucca the Elder as Pope Alexander II in the papal election of October 1061. The new pope put forward the reform program devised by Hildebrand and his followers. In his years as papal advisor, Hildebrand had an important role in the reconciliation with the Norman kingdom of southern Italy, in the anti-German alliance with the Pataria movement in northern Italy and, above all, in the introduction of an ecclesiastic law which gave the cardinals exclusive rights concerning the election of a new pope.

Election to the papacy
Pope Gregory VII was one of the few popes elected by acclamation. On the death of Alexander II on 21 April 1073, as the obsequies were being performed in the Lateran Basilica, there arose a loud outcry from the clergy and people: "Let Hildebrand be pope!", "Blessed Peter has chosen Hildebrand the Archdeacon!" Hildebrand immediately fled, and hid himself for some time, thereby making it clear that he had refused the uncanonical election in the Liberian Basilica. He was finally found at the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, to which a famous monastery was attached, and elected pope by the assembled cardinals, with the due consent of the Roman clergy, amid the repeated acclamations of the people.

It was debated, at the time and since, whether this extraordinary outburst in favour of Hildebrand by clergy and people was wholly spontaneous, or could have been pre-arranged. According to Benizo, Bishop of Sutri, a supporter of Hildebrand, the outcry was begun by Cardinal Ugo Candidus, Cardinal Priest of S. Clemente, who rushed into a pulpit and began to declaim to the people. Certainly, the mode of his election was highly criticized by his opponents. Many of the accusations against him may have been expressions of personal dislike, liable to suspicion from the very fact that they were not raised to attack his promotion until several years later. But it is clear from Gregory's own account of the circumstances of his election, in his Epistle 1 and Epistle 2, that it was conducted in a very irregular fashion, contrary to the Constitution of the Pope of 607. This ecclesiastical statute forbade a papal election to begin until the third day after a pope's burial. Cardinal Ugo's intervention was contrary to the Constitution of Nicholas II, which affirmed the exclusive right to name candidates to Cardinal Bishops; finally, it ignored the Constitution's requirement that the Holy Roman Emperor be consulted. However, Gregory was then confirmed by a second election at S. Pietro in Vincoli.

Gregory VII's earliest pontifical letters clearly acknowledged these events, and thus helped defuse doubts about his election and popularity. On 22 May 1073, the Feast of Pentecost, he received ordination as a priest, and he was consecrated a bishop and enthroned as pope on 29 June, the Feast of St. Peter's Chair.

In the decree of election, his electors proclaimed Gregory VII:"'a devout man, a man mighty in human and divine knowledge, a distinguished lover of equity and justice, a man firm in adversity and temperate in prosperity, a man, according to the saying of the Apostle, of good behavior, blameless, modest, sober, chaste, given to hospitality, and one that ruleth well his own house; a man from his childhood generously brought up in the bosom of this Mother Church, and for the merit of his life already raised to the archidiaconal dignity. [...] We choose then our Archdeacon Hildebrand to be pope and successor to the Apostle, and to bear henceforward and forever the name of Gregory' (22 April 1073)."Gregory VII's first attempts in foreign policy were towards a reconciliation with the Normans of Robert Guiscard; in the end the two parties did not meet. After a failed call for a crusade to the princes of northern Europe, and after obtaining the support of other Norman princes such as Landulf VI of Benevento and Richard I of Capua, Gregory VII was able to excommunicate Robert in 1074.

In the same year Gregory VII summoned a council in the Lateran palace, which condemned simony and confirmed celibacy for the Church's clergy. These decrees were further stressed, under menace of excommunication, the next year (24–28 February). In particular, Gregory decreed that only the Pope could appoint or depose bishops or move them from see to see, an act which was later to cause the Investiture Controversy.

Start of conflict with the Emperor
Gregory VII main political project was his relationship with the Holy Roman Empire. Since the death of Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, the strength of the German monarchy had been seriously weakened, and his untried son Henry IV had to contend with great internal difficulties, presenting an opportunity for Gregory to strengthen the Church.

In the two years following Gregory's election, the Saxon rebellion fully occupied Henry and forced him to come to terms with the pope at any cost. In May 1074 Henry did penance at Nuremberg—in the presence of the papal legates—to atone for his continued friendship with the members of his council who had been banned by Gregory; he took an oath of obedience, and promised his support in the work of reforming the Church. However, as soon as Henry defeated the Saxons at the First Battle of Langensalza on 9 June 1075 (Battle of Homburg or Hohenburg), he tried to reassert his sovereign rights in northern Italy. Henry sent Count Eberhard to Lombardy to combat the Patarenes; nominated the cleric Tedald to the archbishopric of Milan, settling a prolonged and contentious question; and made overtures to the Norman duke Robert Guiscard.

Gregory VII replied with a harsh letter dated 8 December 1075, in which he accused Henry of breaching his word and of continuing to support excommunicated councillors. At the same time, the pope sent a verbal message threatening not only the ban of the Church against the emperor, but the deprivation of his crown. At the same time, Gregory was menaced by Cencio I Frangipane, who on Christmas night surprised him in church and kidnapped him, though he was released the following day.

Pope and emperor depose each other
The high-handed demands and threats of the pope infuriated Henry and his court, and their answer was the hastily convened national synod of Worms on 24 January 1076. In the higher ranks of the German clergy, Gregory had many enemies, and the Roman cardinal Hugo Candidus, once on intimate terms with Gregory but now his opponent, hurried to Germany for the occasion. Candidus declaimed a list of accusations against the pope before the assembly, which resolved that Gregory had forfeited the papacy. In one document full of accusations, the bishops renounced their allegiance to Gregory. In another, Henry pronounced him deposed, and required the Romans to choose a new pope.

The council sent two bishops to Italy, who then procured a similar act of deposition from the Lombard bishops at the synod of Piacenza. Roland of Parma faced the pope with these decisions before the synod which had just assembled in the Lateran Basilica. For the moment the members were frightened, but there soon arose such a storm of indignation that only the calming words of Gregory saved the envoy's life.

On the following day, 22 February 1076, Gregory solemnly pronounced a sentence of excommunication against Henry IV, divested him of his royal dignity, and absolved his subjects of their sworn allegiance. The effectiveness of this sentence depended entirely on Henry's subjects, above all on the German princes. Contemporary evidence suggests that the excommunication of Henry made a profound impression both in Germany and Italy.

Thirty years before, Henry III had deposed three unworthy claimants to the papacy, a service acknowledged by the Church and public opinion. When Henry IV again attempted this procedure he lacked support. In Germany there was a rapid and general feeling in favor of Gregory, strengthening the princes against their feudal lord Henry. When at Whitsun the emperor summoned a council of nobles to oppose the pope, only a few responded. Meanwhile, the Saxons snatched the opportunity to renew their rebellion, and the anti-royalist party grew in strength from month to month.

Walk to Canossa
Henry now faced ruin. As a result of the agitation, which was zealously fostered by the papal legate Bishop Altmann of Passau, the princes met in October at Trebur to elect a new German ruler. Henry, who was stationed at Oppenheim on the left bank of the Rhine, was only saved from the loss of his throne by the failure of the assembled princes to agree on his successor. Their dissension, however, merely postponed the verdict. Henry, they declared, must make reparation and obeisance to Gregory; and if he were still under the ban on the anniversary of his excommunication, his throne should be considered vacant. At the same time invited Gregory to Augsburg to decide the conflict.

Unable to oppose his princes and the pope together, Henry saw that he must secure absolution from Gregory before the period named. At first he attempted this through an embassy, but when Gregory rejected his overtures he went to Italy in person. The pope had already left Rome and had informed the German princes that he would expect their escort on 8 January 1077 to Mantua. This escort had not appeared when he received the news of Henry's arrival at Canossa, where Gregory had taken refuge under the protection of his close ally, Matilda of Tuscany. Henry had travelled through Burgundy, greeted with enthusiasm by the Lombards, but he resisted the temptation to employ force. In an astonishing turn, the emperor mortified his pride and abased himself in the snow to do penance before the pope. This immediately reversed the moral situation, forcing Gregory to grant Henry absolution. The Walk to Canossa soon became legendary.

The reconciliation was only effected after prolonged negotiations and definite pledges on the part of Henry, and it was with reluctance that Gregory VII at length gave way, considering the political implications. If Gregory VII granted absolution, the diet of princes in Augsburg, which had called on him as arbitrator, would be rendered impotent. It was impossible, however, to deny the penitent re-entrance into the Church, and Gregory VII's Christian duty overrode his political interests.

The removal of the ban did not imply a genuine settlement, as there was no mention of the main question between pope and emperor: that of investiture. A new conflict was inevitable.

Later excommunications of Henry IV
Obedience to the excommunication of Henry IV was only a pretext to legitimize the rebellion of the German nobles, which did not end with his absolution. To the contrary, at Forchheim in March 1077 they elected a rival ruler in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, with the papal legates declaring their neutrality. Pope Gregory sought to maintain this attitude during the following years, balancing the two parties of fairly equal strength, each trying to gain the upper hand by getting the pope on their side. In the end, his non-commitment largely lost the confidence of both parties. Finally he decided for Rudolf of Swabia after his victory at the Battle of Flarchheim on 27 January 1080. Under pressure from the Saxons, and misinformed as to the significance of this battle, Gregory abandoned his waiting policy and again pronounced the excommunication and deposition of Henry on 7 March 1080.

The papal censure now got a very different reception from the one four years before. It was widely felt to be unjustly pronounced on frivolous grounds, and its authority came in question. The emperor, now more experienced, vigorously denounced the ban as illegal. He summoned a council at Brixen, and on 25 June 1080 thirty bishops present pronounced Gregory deposed, electing archbishop Guibert (Wibert) of Ravenna as his successor. Gregory counter on 15 October, ordering the clergy and laity to elect a new archbishop in place of the "mad" and "tyrannical" schismatic Wibert. In 1081, Henry opened the conflict against Gregory in Italy. The emperor was now in the stronger position, as thirteen cardinals had deserted the pope, and the rival emperor Rudolf of Swabia died on 16 October. A new imperial claimant, Hermann of Luxembourg, was put forward in August 1081, but he was unable to rally the papal party in Germany, and the power of Henry IV was at its peak.

The pope's chief military supporter, Matilda of Tuscany, blocked Henry's armies from the western passages over the Apennines, so he had to approach Rome from Ravenna. Rome surrendered to the German king in 1084, and Gregory thereupon retired into the exile of the Castel Sant'Angelo. Gregory refused to entertain Henry's overtures, although the latter promised to hand over Guibert as a prisoner, if the sovereign pontiff would only consent to crown him emperor. Gregory, however, insisted that Henry appear before a council and do penance. The emperor, while pretending to submit to these terms, tried hard to prevent the meeting of the council. A small number of bishops assembled nonetheless, and Gregory again excommunicated Henry.

Henry, upon receipt of this news, again entered Rome on 21 March to see that his supporter, Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna, was enthroned as Pope Clement III on 24 March 1084, who in turn crowned Henry as emperor. In the meantime Gregory had formed an alliance with Robert Guiscard, who marched on the city and compelled Henry to flee towards Civita Castellana.

Exile from Rome
The pope was liberated, but after the Roman people became incensed by the excesses of his Norman allies, again withdrew to Monte Cassino, and later to the castle of Salerno by the sea, where he died on 25 May 1085. Three days before his death, he withdrew all the censures of excommunication that he had pronounced, except those against the two chief offenders—Henry and Guibert.

England
In 1076, Gregory appointed Dol Euen, a monk of Saint-Melaine of Rennes, as bishop of Dol, rejecting both the incumbent, Iuthael, who had the support of William the Conqueror, who had recently been conducting military operations in north-eastern Brittany, and Gilduin, the candidate of the nobles in Dol opposing William. Gregory rejected Iuthael because he was notorious for simony and Guilden as too young. Gregory also bestowed on Dol Euen the pallium of a metropolitan archbishop, on the condition that he would submit to the judgment of the Holy See when the long-standing case of the right of Dol to be a metropolitan and use the pallium was finally decided.

King William felt himself so safe that he interfered autocratically with the management of the church, forbade the bishops to visit Rome, made appointments to bishoprics and abbeys, and showed little anxiety when the pope lectured him on the different principles which he had as to the relationship of spiritual and temporal powers, or when he prohibited him from commerce or commanded him to acknowledge himself a vassal of the apostolic chair. William was particularly annoyed at Gregory's insistence on dividing ecclesiastical England into two provinces, in opposition to William's need to emphasize the unity of his newly acquired kingdom. Gregory's increasing insistence on church independence from secular authority in the matter of clerical appointments became a more and more contentious issue. He sought as well to compel the episcopacy to look to Rome for validation and direction, demanding the regular attendance of prelates in Rome. Gregory had no power to compel the English king to an alteration in his ecclesiastical policy, so he was compelled to ignore what he could not approve, and even considered it advisable to assure King William of his particular affection. On the whole, William's policy was of great benefit to the Church.

Normans in the Kingdom of Sicily
The relationship of Gregory VII to other European states was strongly influenced by his German policy, since the Holy Roman Empire, by taking up most of his energies, often forced him to show to other rulers the very moderation which he withheld from the German king. The attitude of the Normans brought him a rude awakening. The great concessions made to them under Nicholas II were not only powerless to stem their advance into central Italy, but failed to secure even the expected protection for the papacy. When Gregory VII was hard pressed by Henry IV, Robert Guiscard left him to his fate, and only intervened when he himself was threatened with German arms. Then, on the capture of Rome, he abandoned the city to his troops, and the popular indignation evoked by his act brought about Gregory's exile.

Claims of Papal sovereignty
In the case of several countries, Gregory VII tried to establish a claim of sovereignty on the part of the Papacy, and to secure the recognition of its self-asserted rights of possession. On the ground of "immemorial usage", Corsica and Sardinia were assumed to belong to the Roman Church. Spain, Hungary and Croatia were also claimed as her property, and an attempt was made to induce the king of Denmark to hold his realm as a fief from the pope.

In his treatment of ecclesiastical policy and ecclesiastical reform, Gregory did not stand alone, but found powerful support: in England Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury stood closest to him; in France his champion was Bishop Hugh de Dié, who afterwards became Archbishop of Lyon.

France
Philip I of France, by his practice of simony and the violence of his proceedings against the Church, provoked a threat of summary measures. Excommunication, deposition and the interdict appeared to be imminent in 1074. Gregory, however, refrained from translating his threats into actions, although the attitude of the king showed no change, for he wished to avoid a dispersion of his strength in the conflict soon to break out in Germany.

Pope Gregory attempted to organize a crusade into Al-Andalus, led by Count Ebles II of Roucy.

Distant Christian countries
Gregory, in fact, established some sort of relations with every country in Christendom; though these relations did not invariably realize the ecclesiastico-political hopes connected with them. His correspondence extended to Poland, Kievan Rus' and Bohemia. He unsuccessfully tried to bring Armenia into closer contact with Rome.

Byzantine Empire
Gregory was particularly concerned with the East. The schism between Rome and the Byzantine Empire was a severe blow to him, and he worked hard to restore the former amicable relationship. Gregory successfully tried to get in touch with the emperor Michael VII. When the news of the Muslim attacks on the Christians in the East filtered through to Rome, and the political embarrassments of the Byzantine emperor increased, he conceived the project of a great military expedition and exhorted the faithful to participate in recovering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre —foreshadowing the First Crusade. In his efforts to recruit for the expedition, he emphasized the suffering of eastern Christians, arguing western Christians had a moral obligation to go to their aid.

Internal policy and reforms
His lifework was based on his conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in its capacity as a divine institution, it is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity. But any attempt to interpret this in terms of action would have bound the Church to annihilate not merely a single state, but all states.

Thus Gregory VII, as a politician wanting to achieve some result, was driven in practice to adopt a different standpoint. He acknowledged the existence of the state as a dispensation of providence, described the coexistence of church and state as a divine ordinance, and emphasized the necessity of union between the sacerdotium and the imperium. But at no period would he have dreamed of putting the two powers on an equal footing; the superiority of church to state was to him a fact which admitted of no discussion and which he had never doubted.

He wished to see all important matters of dispute referred to Rome; appeals were to be addressed to himself; the centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome naturally involved a curtailment of the powers of bishops. Since these refused to submit voluntarily and tried to assert their traditional independence, his papacy is full of struggles against the higher ranks of the clergy. Pope Gregory VII was critical in promoting and regulating the concept of modern university as his 1079 Papal Decree ordered the regulated establishment of cathedral schools that transformed themselves into the first European universities.

This battle for the foundation of papal supremacy is connected with his championship of compulsory celibacy among the clergy and his attack on simony. Gregory VII did not introduce the celibacy of the priesthood into the Church, but he took up the struggle with greater energy than his predecessors. In 1074, he published an encyclical, absolving the people from their obedience to bishops who allowed married priests. The next year he enjoined them to take action against married priests, and deprived these clerics of their revenues. Both the campaign against priestly marriage and that against simony provoked widespread resistance.

His writings treat mainly of the principles and practice of Church government. They may be found in Mansi's collection under the title "Gregorii VII registri sive epistolarum libri". Most of his surviving letters are preserved in his Register, which is now stored in the Vatican Archives.

Doctrine of the Eucharist
Gregory VII was seen by Pope Paul VI as instrumental in affirming the tenet that Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. Gregory's demand that Berengarius perform a confession of this belief was quoted in Pope Paul VI's historic 1965 encyclical Mysterium fidei:

"I believe in my heart and openly profess that the bread and wine that are placed on the altar are, through the mystery of the sacred prayer and the words of the Redeemer, substantially changed into the true and proper and lifegiving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, and that after the consecration they are the true body of Christ."

This profession of faith began a "Eucharistic Renaissance" in the churches of Europe as of the 12th century.

Death
Pope Gregory VII died in exile in Salerno; the epitaph on his sarcophagus in the city's Cathedral says: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore, I die in exile."

Legacy
Gregory VII was beatified by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584 and canonized on 24 May 1728 by Pope Benedict XIII.

title: Pope Gregory VII


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