As is known, before the 19th century there were no sharp distinctions among sciences and the study of natural
phenomena was then called philosophia naturalis. Isaac Newton entitled his work as Philosophiæ Naturalis
Principia Mathematica that comes to mean The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. But after the 19th
century there appeared a division into compartments in sciences. And now compartmentalization is in its heyday so
that each individual science has dozens of branches. This situation obstructs us from seeing the interrelations of
sciences. In this context it is important to remember the warnings of the scholars of the Romantic period.
But to call attention to a philosophically oriented physics courses, we have reasons other than an emphasis on
interdisciplinary studies. First of all as Bunge (1970) put it in an elegant way, there is no physicist philosophically
neutral. That physicists believe that physical theories are not created but discovered is a belief of a philosophical
nature. So is the physicist’s faith in observation. Similarly the belief, which many renowned physicists share today,
that there is no reality other than the set of human experiences is a pure philosophical thought. Bunge (1970) lists the
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ten dogmas of physicists in his paper but three of them I think are sufficient for our purpose.
So, physics asks some crucial questions about the structure of space, time, motion, matter, energy and about the
nature of the universe in general. In so doing, it shares somewhat common problems with philosophy. I do not claim
that philosophers can do as well as physicists do on studying the natural phenomena but I do only emphasize the fact
that, when looked over the history of philosophy, some problems with which the current physicists deal today also
called philosophers’ attention some time. Therefore the ontological and epistemological aspects of science are of
philosophical concern. And as Romantic scientists declared, there are no sharp distinctions between the two.
Again, in many books about scientific research methods, one can easily find some perplexing sentences
describing the scientific activity as it starts with observation, proceeds to quantifying the data attained from those
observations and finally results in a theory. But things are not that simple. Karl Popper showed that this is not what
actually happens in science. When he asked, in the classroom, his students to observe, they responded, naturally,
“Observe what?” Therefore, Popper in this way had noted that the observation is always an observation of
something. A scientist does not look into the world blankly without having prior beliefs. He knows at the very
beginning what to observe and what to search for. Therefore in any case theory precedes observation. The task of the
instructors, then, must be to teach that proceeding from observation to theory is not the case in scientific activity and
they must consider the philosophical-historical-sociological aspect of science.
A different issue is about the involvement of physicists in philosophy. A survey conducted by Shipman (2000) to
determine the familiarity of the astronomical community with Thomas Kuhn put that only a minority of
representative sample had a familiarity with him and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So these
astronomers are not possibly aware of the philosophical implications of scientific activity. Science teaching therefore
must not be just to give the students some cumulative knowledge or a repository of information. First of all it must
be highlighted by the teachers that science is a vivid activity of the scientists in a scientific community. The reason
for that that, unlike many others suppose, science is not a linear process. To be informed about debates in scientific
community would stress the sociological aspect of science.
Thirdly, physics cannot be reduced only to the mathematical formalism as mentioned above. And each symbol
used in a formula represents a physical concept and has a certain meaning. It is not only enough to define those
concepts but the teacher must show the physical meaning underlies these concepts. The students need learn the
physical concepts apart from their occurrence in purely mathematical formulations. I, on the one hand, admit that
these concepts have an intimate connection to mathematics but on the other hand challenge the idea that the teaching
of physical concepts is possible only through pure mathematical manipulations. Therefore physics education must
improve students’ conceptual understandings of physical terms. Instead of giving students only the content of
physics, the instructors must focus on the logic of scientific discovery, in other words, on the way that science
works. Put it differently they need to undergo a process of scientific enculturation by means of which only a
philosophical look can provide. As