Philosophy of Science: An Introduction

"knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge

in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3500 to 3000 BCE.
Their contributions

to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes.

History of science

which study abstract concepts.
Major branches of Modern Science
natural sciences

(e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics), which study nature in the broadest sense;

the social sciences (e.g., economics, psychology, and sociology), which study individuals and societies;

knowledge;

the subject – the available empirical and theoretical information to

help solve scientific problems;

the resources – methods of analysis and communication available to the researcher that help achieve acceptable to the scientific community solution to a problem.

of the XX-th century in response to the need to

understand the socio-cultural function of science in the scientific and technological revolution. Its subjects are the general patterns and trends of the scientific cognition as a special activity for the production of the scientific knowledge taken in its historical development and considered in the changing social and cultural context

According to the researcher T. Leshkevich, in creating the image of the philosophy of science one should distinguish between the two meanings of this term:

1) as a direction of the philosophy presented by a variety of concepts that offer one or another model of the development of the science which originated in the second half of the XIX-th century;

2) gnosiological, epistemological, and methodological studies;
3) theoretical approaches, models

and concepts developed in the framework of the philosophy of science as a branch of the modern philosophy.

The formation and development of the philosophy of science as a discipline was influenced by:

science is quite wide:
the scientific criteria and the differences

between the scientific knowledge and the unscientific one;
logic of the scientific research; structure of the scientific knowledge;
mechanisms for generating new knowledge;
scientific rationality; patterns of the history of science; interaction of science and culture;
science base; value of science; ethos of science, etc. All of them are derived from the central problem of the philosophy of science – the problem of growth (development) of the scientific knowledge.

Conclusion