Philosophy, like most academic disciplines, has become increasingly specialised. While this might have proved fruitful in the sciences, it has been holding progress in philosophy back. If philosophers are going to have a role to play in tackling some of the biggest questions of the future, they need to become Renaissance thinkers, transcending their discipline into neuroscience, technology, and beyond, argues Louise R. Chapman. 

It is arguably part of the very fabric of philosophy that its precise relation to other human and natural sciences will always be contested. Indeed, we may go as far as to say that philosophy is an essentially contested concept, in the sense outlined by the twentieth-century Scottish theorist W.B. Gallie, according to whom the proper use of the very concept of philosophy inevitably involves endless disputes about its use on the part of the users. But if, as Gallie’s American contemporary, Wilfrid Sellars, famously stated, ‘the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’, then philosophy and the natural sciences must at the very least be united in their desire to make sense of the world. Accordingly, progress in­ either domain must inevitably be of interest to the other.