Purpose of this article is to examine philosophical implication of the “qunatitative revolution”. The paper is divided into three sections. ; first, the philoso-methodological implications of “qunatitative revolution” are identified. ; second, the traditional dicho-tomism of nomothetic-idiographic approaches is rejected because of obsolescence of the uniqueness thesis ; third as a substitution of the dichotomy, the paired concepts, “universal, abstract individual, concrete”, which show the two different geographer's concerns are introduced, and the philosophical implications of “revolution” are examined in terms of each of those concerns.
Main points of arguments addressed in the paper are as follows;
1) The so-called “qunatitative revolution” provided us various useful mathematical-quantitative techniques, it aimed, however, essentially to reformulate our discipline with introduction of the so-called scientific method.
2) So that, the “qunatitative revolution” should be considered not only from the techni-cal viewpoint, but also from the methodological one.
3) The attempt of reformulation started from Schaefer (1953) who criticized the Het-tner-Hartshorne type of idiographic approach and completed by Harvey (1969) via Bunge (1962).
4) The “classical” geographers considered as Wrigley (1965) pointed it out, that the ultimate goal of the discipline was to find a set of laws which governed geographical phe-nomena, and they had conviction that there was no difference methodologically between what would now be called the social and the physical sciences. Thus, the recent attempt by Schaefer, Punge and Harvey can be considered a revival of the “classical” paradigm of the discipline.
5) The trend was often expressed as the change from the nomothetic to the idiographic approach, but the traditional dichotomy of “nomothetic idiographic” is not adequate for describing the present situation. Because those concepts are already obsolete by rejection of the so-called uniqueness thesis and are not suitable to express the alternative concerns of the present geographers.
6) Therefore, the paired concepts, “uiversal, abstract individual, concrete” would be suggested to adopt for describing the present geographer's concerns.
7) we should keep it in our mind that we can not make any reasonable statement on our experiences without generalization, and that we are always seeking some kind of the regularity in our experiences. In terms of generalization and seeking the regularity, there-fore, there is no difference between the universal, abstract and the individual, concrete approaches.
8) There is, however, a definite difference between the universal statement (it should be abstract) and the individual one (it should be concrete). The geographers who have interest in the former are necessarily oriented to build “theory” and those who are concer-ned with the latter become “facts” oriented. Orientations toward theory and facts, often sited as though, they are complimentary are essentially contradicted with each other as like as figure and background.
9) Harvey (1969) wrote that his book concerned with methodology rather than with philosophy, but in his arguments on the methodology of science, the author seems to impli-citly assume that geographers are solely concerning with the universal, abstract statements. But we can not neglect that good many geographers are actually concerning the individual and concrete cases at least under the present circumstance. In this sense, Harvey (1969) raised the important philosophical issues which involve the arguments on the purpose or aimes of the geography.