Science and Plausible Stories: Is it possible to do Philosophy of Nature?

Abstract

In the face of the great discoveries of science, it seems that philosophy no longer has a relevant role to play in the question of what life is and what is the place of human beings in the cosmos. Science would be the one that, through objective knowledge based on empirical experience, reveals the secrets of life and the universe. In this article I try to show that science is a kind of story with a degree of plausibility restricted to a very specific field of application. Beyond the level of the descriptive-mechanical account, human beings need a deeper account of life and its role in the cosmos: this is where philosophy comes into play, as a different kind of account, with different criteria of plausibility. As a paradigm of the problem of overlapping narratives, I will try to show some of the problems raised by the synthetic theory of evolution, as a scientific stance, but one that has become philosophical at the same time.