Philosophy is the Unborn Child of Science: Looking for a Universal Common Language. Философия – это нерожденное дитя науки: в поисках универсального общеупотребительного языка - страница 3

And specifically-scientific comparative concepts, allow translating Humanities from the level of opinions to the level of specific scientific objective knowledge, as is the case in the Natural Sciences, while specifically-universal comparative concepts, incorporating similar specific scientific concepts of different types, raise philosophy to the level of cumulative objective science3.

As a result, we have a universal method of ascent from intellect to reason and wisdom, characterized by the ascent from the set of subjective opinions to unambiguous knowledge through the use in the thinking process not only of classification, but also of the specifically-scientific and specifically-universal comparative concepts. In one case, we have a variety of specific Sciences, including Humanities. In another case – metaphysics as «the science of the first causes and principles», as Aristotle understood philosophy4.

Figure 4. Three stages in the development of the mind

According to Aristotle, philosophy is meant to be engaged not just into the search for the elements and principles – all concrete sciences are engaged into this by searching for specifically-scientific comparative concepts of gradation type, such as heavy and easy for physics, long and short for geometry, rich and poor for the economy, healthy and sick for medicine, etc.

The mission of philosophy is the search for the most common principles in the form of specific-universal comparative concepts. The philosophy was created to reduce the diversity of specific scientific knowledge to similar, but extremely common primary causes-metaprocesses.

The philosophers did not succeed in this. Therefore, philosophy is not «the mother of all Sciences’, as it is commonly believed, but «their unborn child’.

None of the Sciences in their generalizations strive to go so far as philosophy, which can arise only when it learns to generalize the principles of the specific Sciences. Each of its concepts is a generalization of all specifically-scientific comparative concepts of a similar kind.

As an example, we can consider one of the simplest concrete-universal concepts of gradation type, namely, «correlated». And we see how this concept incorporates all the specifically-scientific comparative concepts of the same kind, such as hard and soft, rich and poor, as well as all the other concepts considered relative to each other. The same applies to all other specific universal concepts, which makes them scientific.