Historical and methodological analysis of the evolution of representations on the relationship of philosophy and science

The article is devoted to the problem of the correlation of philosophy and science, considered in the historical and methodological aspect. Based on the comparative analysis of the views of outstanding Western European thinkers - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Wittgenstein - who developed influential projects for understanding the nature and purpose of philosophy, the specifics of philosophical thinking are discussed. Despite the undoubted achievements in the field of philosophical methodology, the question of whether philosophy has its own method of cognition remains relevant. The main thesis of the article is the assertion that there exists a philosophical method of investigation. In the work, the "philosophical method" is a specific way of reasoning aimed at solving certain cognitive tasks. According to the author, the nature of philosophy can be adequately defined with the help of the phrase "descriptive discipline". Philosophy, unlike private sciences, does not engage in a fragmentary description of reality, it provides a person with a holistic synoptic vision. If Plato, Aristotle, Descartes viewed philosophy as a specific form of theoretical knowledge, Wittgenstein defined philosophy as an activity aimed at identifying the necessary conditions for a rational description of reality in the form of grammatical norms of our everyday language. All these thinkers are united in their conviction that philosophy as a rational way of cognition helps to overcome prevalent prejudices in society, nourished by the spirit of the cultural epoch, it provides a clear view of the world to man. For philosophical reasoning, the main thing is not the aggregate of empirical data and their interpretation, but the explanatory power of concepts. The notions of philosophy "synoptic vision" (Plato), "search for the first principles" (Aristotle), "method of discovery of truth" (Descartes), "language criticism" (Wittgenstein) signal the originality of philosophical practice inseparable from the conceptual nature of the things studied. Any attempt to confine the philosophical method to the strict rules of formal logic leads to an aberration of the meaning of the philosophical utterance. Scientific reasoning, based on the methods of formal logic and verifiable observation, is a continuation of the technique of philosophical argumentation used to solve certain problems. Philosophy, in turn, is influenced by scientific procedures and uses certain cases of a scientific way of solving problems as examples. Identifying the foundations of human thinking and being, philosophy determines the necessary conditions for systematic (scientific) knowledge of the world. The author's position, aimed at substantiating positive conclusions about the existence of a specific philosophical way of mastering the world and the need for interaction between philosophy and science, is based on the analytical tradition of philosophizing.

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