Peer Assessment

In what way can philosophy or philosophical thinking contribute to

the physical sciences?
“The man, being an animal, is surrounded by things. He is in a circumstance
that encircles him. However, different from the animal that surrendered to nature,
man learned to distinguish what causes him pain and terror from what is pleasing
and useful in his context. He learned to use objects to adapt himself to the
circumstance or to modify it according to his needs. (…) The man changes the setting,
gives it shapes and composition, transforms it into a world, a place where he can live
comfortably or not, for lot of things are no longer mysterious, but convenient or
inconvenient, attractive or repulsive.” (p. 21, HEGENBERG)1
According to the excerpt above, when man discovered the world around him, he
began to explore its applications and established the constitution of knowledge that
we would centuries later know as science. Although science, if understood as a
systematic method for building and organizing knowledge categorized in predictions
and explanations, is currently the best method to extract laws that guide nature’s
affairs, there is a frequent necessity to understand the implications these predictions
and explanations have in human understanding of the world and humanity itself.
Concerning this need, most scientists back their theories up with philosophic
ideologies and principles, for example underdetermination of theory by evidence and
the anthropic principle, arguing that there must be philosophic claims in order to not
only authenticate their discoveries but also present contemplations of these theories
in the scientific community and, therefore, in the history of knowledge.
Since philosophy became a relevant field to the progress of science, intellectuals
and scientists consider the study of philosophy of science to be of great importance to
the academic society. Therefore, to illustrate this condition, I will emphasize the field
of cosmology for the better understanding of the repercussions of philosophy of
science.
“Cosmology is the scientific study of the large scale properties of the universe as
a whole. It endeavours to use the scientific method to understand the origin,
evolution and ultimate fate of the entire Universe. Like any field of science,
cosmology involves the formation of theories or hypotheses about the universe, which
make specific predictions for phenomena that can be tested with observations.”2 Even
though at the beginning of its formulation, scholars considered cosmology a branch
of metaphysics, the revolution of sciences contributed to the new perspective about
the origin of Universe and its scientific studies. Besides this revolution, the
philosophical position helped estimate cosmology as a new understanding of our
place in the Universe’s history, and I believe that we must emphasize the anthropic
principle in order to provide greater significance to these revelations.
For anthropic principle, I understand that “The Universe (and hence the
fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation

1 HEGENBERG, Leônidas, Scientific explanation: introduction to philosophy of science, 2nd

Edition, São Paulo, EPU, Ed. Da Universidade de São Paulo, 1973
2 NASA’s Website: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/ - access in 10/18/2015
of observers within it at some stage.”3 Given this meaning, the anthropic principle
gives cosmology a fresh outlook about human role on the development of records of
Universe’s origins and provides additional inquiring concerning the interpretation of
scientific information, especially physics.
The Anthropic Principle is, therefore, an essential philosophical idea that “aims
to strike a balance between excessive anthropocentrism and excessive insistence on
typicality: the conditions that we observe may be typical for observers but atypical of
the universe as a whole”4, presenting a perfect illustration to the philosophical
implications of Cosmology to human apprehension.

3 p. 3 The Anthropic Principle, article by Victor J. Stenger, For The Encyclopedia of Nonbelief to
be published by Prometheus Books.
4
P. 2 Hand-out for philosophy and the sciences MOOC week 4, lecture 1: The Anthropic
Principle and Philosophy