The campaign against the ‘old’ conception of philosophy began in earnest four hundred years ago. At that time Francis Bacon made a radical proposal for altering the meaning of ‘philosophy’. What Bacon proposed was that the Greek word ‘philosophy’, which literally means ‘love of wisdom’, should no longer be understood as having anything to do with wisdom. Instead, philosophy should henceforth mean a system of learning, especially scientific learning. As for wisdom, Bacon maintained that this belonged not in philosophy but in religion. In other words, Bacon’s thought was that wisdom was not capable of intellectual support, not capable of support through reason, nor could wisdom be identified with reason. Wisdom was simply ‘faith’, which for Bacon meant the Christian faith, in fact the Protestant Christian faith based on the Bible. In the seventeenth century people doing purely scientific work came to be called ‘philosophers’. The Royal Society published its scientific papers in a periodical entitled ‘Philosophical Transactions’. There were some difficulties in this usage however. For while the spirit of the time very much approved of people giving up on the old philosophy and turning to science, there was nothing in science itself which sanctioned this attitude. There was, evidently, still a need for philosophy of a kind, namely for a philosophy which would license the rejection of the ‘old’ philosophy. The fact that science came suddenly on the scene and made such rapid strides in diverse areas was not itself enough to banish old ideas. Some people believed that you could embrace the new sciences of the day while still holding to the old philosophy. They did not see that the two were incompatible. So that this could be seen, John Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century, wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This book attempted to demonstrate that apart from what is known in science there is nothing else to know. This is so, according to Locke, because all knowledge comes from the senses, and it is science and nothing but science that is competent to deal with sensory materials. Philosophy henceforth would have to be, as Locke put it, the ‘underlabourer of science’, content to clear away the obstructions to understanding which would otherwise inhibit the development of science. With Locke philosophy became the ‘theory of knowledge’, ‘knowledge’ being understood exclusively as scientific knowledge. Philosophy as a discipline became the study of why the previous tradition of philosophy was no longer credible.
