Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30
In Aphorism I:80 of the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon argues that the sciences lose depth and vitality when they become detached from natural philosophy, which he regarded as their common source. The following remarks do not attempt to restate Bacon’s hierarchical conception. Rather, they propose a contemporary model of reciprocal interaction between philosophy and the sciences, inspired by the broader concern that neither can flourish in complete isolation from the other.
Before scientific investigation begins, philosophical reflection may explore the range of intelligible possibilities regarding a phenomenon, mapping alternative hypotheses, causal patterns, and explanatory options. From this survey, it supplies the most coherent or promising candidates to the empirical sciences for testing.
Scientific inquiry, in turn, reshapes philosophical reflection by confirming, refining, or eliminating some of those possibilities. Once scientific inquiry has narrowed or transformed the field of possibilities, philosophy also performs a post-scientific function, responsible for revising, reorganizing, or abandoning prior conceptual structures in light of the new evidence.
The interaction between philosophy and science thus forms a continuous cycle: pre-scientific philosophy → science → post-scientific philosophy → new science, and so on. No stage is final, and each turn of the cycle refines both conceptual understanding and empirical insight.
Philosophy explores and enlarges the conceptual landscape; science progressively delimits it through empirical discrimination. The former explores the space of what could be the case; the latter determines what is in fact the case.
This reciprocity presupposes that philosophers remain informed about current scientific developments, and that scientists attend to the philosophical structures that shape inquiry. Only through mutual awareness can the sciences remain anchored in coherent conceptual foundations, and philosophy remain responsive to the actual operations of nature.
Philosophy and science should therefore not be regarded as competing enterprises but as complementary stages within a single recursive process of inquiry. The former enlarges the space of intelligible possibilities; the latter progressively discriminates among them through disciplined observation and experiment. Philosophy then reconstructs the conceptual landscape in light of those results, preparing the ground for further scientific investigation.
Bacon, F. (1620) Novum Organum, Aphorism I-LXXX (1:80)
It must also be added that natural philosophy, even among those who have pursued it, has rarely—especially in recent times—found a person wholly free and devoted to it; unless perhaps one counts a monk working late in his cell, or a nobleman studying at leisure in his villa. Natural philosophy has instead been reduced to a kind of passageway or footbridge to other ends. And so this great mother of the sciences has, with remarkable indignity, been cast down into the role of a servant: assisting the works of medicine or mathematics, or alternatively serving to wash and dye the unformed minds of youth with a kind of initial tint, to prepare them more easily and suitably to receive another later. Meanwhile, let no one expect substantial progress in the sciences—especially in their operative aspect—unless natural philosophy is extended into the particular sciences, and those particular sciences in turn are drawn back to natural philosophy. For it is precisely because this has not been done that astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and even medicine itself—not to mention (more astonishingly) moral and political philosophy, and the sciences of logic—are almost entirely lacking in depth, merely skimming the surface and variety of things. Once these specialized disciplines were divided off and established, they ceased to be nourished by natural philosophy—although it alone could have provided them new vigor and growth from the true sources and contemplations of motion, rays, sounds, the texture and structure of bodies, the passions, and intellectual apprehensions. It is therefore no wonder that the sciences do not grow when they are cut off from their roots.
Hossein Jorjani 