In the last four centuries, the history of ideas has been characterized by a progressive separation from philosophy of disciplines that before were regarded as its object. Logic, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, medicine, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and sociology are just some examples of disciplines that, in the more or less recent past, have become independent of philosophy as it had been systematized, for instance, by Aristotle.
Even though, in its axiomatic form, mathematics was fully developed since the time of Euclid, it is not an exception to this rule, since at that time it was not detached from philosophy, in the sense that ancient philosophers gave to their object of study. The role that geometry played in Plato’s philosophy (think of the regular solids in Plato’s Timaeus as the basic components of the universe) is just an example of this fact. Also, disciplines that are not primarily concerned with the descriptive and explanatory tasks of the natural and social sciences but rather with values (aesthetics, ethics), have undergone…
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