Are the two fields mutually exclusive, or do they have some overlap?
"It is the personal intimacy with nature, the penetration into all her delicate peculiarities, which characterises the true philosopher, and gives him that fine feeling by which he is enabled to get at the very foundation of natural laws."
Wilhelm His, 'on Animal Morphology' (1888)
scientists have a tendency to be a touch too empirical and not enough 'but why not?'. empirical validation can come from being wrong, not always trying to be 'right'. My kid told her science fair judge 'my Daddy told me the scientific method had some flaws because it limits my creativity sometimes'.
A true natural philosopher sprouting.
Science and philosophy are supposed to be different: science is based on maths, numbers, measurements, evidence, experiments; if something cannot be measured, repeated, proven with experiments, it is not science.
Philosophy doesn’t need these things: if you say that the world, or being, or life, has a certain meaning, or has no meaning, you can be considered a philosopher, because you are dealing with some of the greatest questions we can imagine, but you don’t need to provide evidence, measurement, experiments for what you say.
However, today philosophy is still suffering a kind of separation between “continental philosophy”, based on reasoning, intuition, exploration of human ideas, and “analytical philosophy”, that wants to be an exact analysis showing how our ideas are strictly based and dependent on structures and mechanisms of language. In this sense, analytical philosophy has a tendency to become a kind of science of language, aimed at explaining how our thoughts work.
In short, today is quite easy to say what science is, but it is not so easy to say what philosophy is.
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