Department of Microbiology, Ramón y Cajal University Hospital, and Microbial Biology and Evolution Area of the Ramón y Cajal Institute for Health Research (IRYCIS), Madrid, Spain.
Int Microbiol. 2023 Aug;26(3):445-457. doi: 10.1007/s10123-022-00315-z. Epub 2022 Dec 23.
In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of "natural philosophy." We should understand the nature of Microbiology as Science, and we should educate microbiology scientists in the process of thinking. The critical process of thinking "knowing what we can know" is entirely based on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. However, this book is extremely difficult to read (even for Kant himself) and almost inaccessible to modern experimental natural scientists. Professional philosophers might have been able to explain Kant to scientists; unfortunately, however, they do not get involved this type of education for science. The intention of this review is to introduce natural scientists, particularly microbiologists and evolutionary biologists, to the main rigorous processes (aesthetics, analytics, dialectics) that Kant identified to gain access to knowledge, always a partial knowledge, given that the correspondence between truth and reality is necessarily incomplete. This goal is attempted by producing a number of "images" (figures) to help the non-expert reader grasp the essential of Kant's message and by making final observations paralleling the theory of scientific knowledge with biological evolutionary processes and the role of evolutionary epistemology in science education. Finally, the influence of Kant's postulates in key-fields of microbiology, from taxonomy to systems biology is discussed.
在观察和实验自然科学领域（就像微生物学一样），近几十年来受到了压倒性技术进步的过度影响，抽象空间经常被忽视。然而，生物科学可预见的未来应该必然恢复“自然哲学”的综合维度。我们应该将微生物学理解为科学，并在思考过程中教育微生物学科学家。批判性思考“知道我们能知道什么”的过程完全基于康德的《纯粹理性批判》。然而，这本书极难阅读（即使对康德本人来说也是如此），几乎无法为现代实验自然科学家所理解。专业哲学家本可以向科学家解释康德；然而，不幸的是，他们并没有参与这种类型的科学教育。本综述的目的是向自然科学家，特别是微生物学家和进化生物学家，介绍康德确定的主要严谨过程（美学、分析、辩证），以获得知识，这始终是一种局部知识，因为真理与现实之间的对应必然是不完整的。这一目标通过产生一些“图像”（图形）来帮助非专业读者掌握康德信息的本质，以及通过将科学知识理论与生物进化过程和进化认识论在科学教育中的作用进行最终观察来实现。最后，讨论了康德假设在微生物学的关键领域（从分类学到系统生物学）中的影响。
