Chemistry and Physics offer more than mere equations to the serious student. Even philosophical concepts can be derived from the thermodynamic laws. Can you believe it?
Let’s read, for example, a Statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics;

It is impossible for an engine to perform work by cooling a portion of matter to a temperature below that of the coldest part of the surroundings.

OK, maybe this is not exactly what you and I had in mind when speaking of philosophy, but this law is powerful indeed, and has an incredible predictive potential!
Let me try and rephrase the statement in a ‘less scientific’ way: if the whole universe spontaneously goes from state A to state B, it WON’T be able to go back from state B to state A. Is the philosophical concept clearer now?
The Second Law thus states (and it has been demonstrated, something that philosophers cannot easily do) that some kinds of phenomena cannot possibly happen, no matter how ingenious the way to achieve them appears!!!
Every now and then, the myth of perpetual motion machines and other examples of pathological science (to use the words of I. Langmuir, Chemistry Nobel Prize-winner) come back. These are probably the only exceptions to the Second Law of thermodynamics, since these fake statements usually resurface more or less, in their exact previous versions!
So, why is the perpetual motion machine impossible? After all, we ‘produce’ energy in engines, or do we? Well, we effectively don’t… we simply transfer energy from a source (usually, hotter) to another source (usually, colder). And during this transfer, we use the energy transferred to produce some kind of work, while the remaining part is  ‘wasted’ as heat.
Since it is impossible to completely avoid producing heat (see Figure 3.5 on page 3-23 of the Physical chemistry textbook, where ‘reversible’ means ‘practically impossible’), we can COMPLETELY transform only work into heat, but we cannot do the opposite.

Spontaneous processes DO produce heat, we cannot avoid ‘losing work’ during each and every operational step of our machine. It is not possibile to ‘gather heat’ in some reservoir and hope to use all of it to produce an equal amount of work again. Thus, the wonderful opportunity to obtain a perpetual motion machine goes (irreversibly, of course!) into the dumpster.
Obviously, what I’ve just said works only if I’m able to demonstrate it; Pages 3-24 and 3-25 give a tremendously easy way to understand the inequality of Clausius, who first proposed this interpretation of spontaneity.
Now: I promised you philosophical concepts, and here I am to fulfill my promise… can TIME be reversed? Basically, the answer is negative: the Second Law tells us that no DeLorean will take us back in time to collect a pet dinosaur, since all the spontaneous processes cannot be reversed (their entropy wouldn’t obey the Law). Right?
Well, modern physicists believe this Law to be statistically valid, but not absolutely. What should this mean? Only time will tell…