Dynanesh asked:

Is the term and the discipline of Philosophy really relevant now with the advancement of Science?
Pure science seems to be working in a better way in finding the truth. it seems the science has
advanced too far for a student of philosophy. i sometimes feel frustrated because of the lack of
up-to-date knowledge of the scientific discoveries. and feel that I may be lagging behind the world.
the questions and the answers to some of them that I have formulated may not even be relevant, this
is what I feel.

Now something personal.. I am an architect and I try to analyse architecture from the philosophical
point of view. The word philosophy may not be correct. It may just be a study of human psychology
and study of human behavour. But that is precisely the problem. I want to know where I stand.

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Auguste Comte put forward the view,
known as 'Positivism', which held that philosophical or metaphysical thinking is merely the stage that
human inquiry goes through before it becomes scientific. In the first part of the twentieth century
Carnap and Ayer developed the theory of 'logical positivism'. The philosopher was now seen as
having the task of analysing concepts and revealing the logical structure of language. The only facts
that could be stated were empirical facts, or the facts of science. The meaning of a statement
consisted, according to Carnap and Ayer in its 'mode of verification'. The statements of metaphysics
were rejected as meaningless, because they could not be verified.

At the present day, positivism and logical positivism have relatively few adherents. Philosophy is
recognised both within and outside the academic world as a fully legitimate enterprise, capable of
adding to the storehouse of human knowledge. Metaphysics has regained a considerable portion of
the ground that it lost under the attacks of the logical positivists.

You speak of 'analysing architecture from a philosophical point of view'. Today, aesthetics is a
flourishing branch of philosophy. Architecture is just one of many arts that are investigated in
aesthetics. One influential book that you should try to have a look at is Roger Scruton Art and
Imagination(Methuen London 1974). Scruton pays particular attention to architecture.

Geoffrey Klempner