Foresight and Knowledge

For Yves R. Simon philosophy has an affinity to science not in the sense that philosophy is a mere metascience a commentary on the sciences but rather because it shares the same aim as science: the search for explanation. The philosophy Simon espouses is philosophical realism which following Jacques Maritain he prefers to call critical realism. Against the prejudice that only some version of philosophical idealism be it critical or absolute is capable of understanding positive science. Simon in Foresight and Knowledge develops a philosophy of science form a realistic perspective. Philosophy of science or the critique of science as it was known in France is according to Simon metahphysics in the exercise of its critical function. Simon selects as the central focus of the treatise the problem of determinism causality and chance. Simon shows that the concept “determinism” must be understood in different conceptual systems such as a philosophy of nature and physics; in the latter determinism is conceived as a possibility of certain and exact prediction.