Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy, philosophy of nature, or experimental philosophy, until the late modern period, was the systematic and research-based study of nature and the physical universe, while ignoring any supernatural influence. Used since at least Aristotle until the 19th century, the term natural philosophy referred to a branch of philosophy—a broader term then, meaning all rational fields of study and contemplation—that explored topics now considered to fall under the purview of science, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy. Thus, natural philosophy served as the precursor to, and has been mostly supplanted by, modern science.
The 19th century established the term science as distinct from philosophy in its rigorously empirical and experimental approach, along with its many modern sub-disciplines, plus the founding of various institutions and communities devoted to them. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century. Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy, authored by Lord Kelvin and Tait.
In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie persisted into the 18th and 19th centuries as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit, after rejecting the scholastic tradition and replacing Aristotelian metaphysics, along with those of the dogmatic churchmen, with Kantian rationalism. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. Naturphilosophie was associated with Romanticism and a view that regarded the natural world as a kind of giant organism, as opposed to the philosophical approach of figures such as John Locke and others espousing a more mechanical philosophy of the world, regarding it as being like a machine.
Origin and evolution of the term
The term natural philosophy preceded current usage of natural science. Empirical science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was distinguished from the other precursor of modern science, natural history, in that natural philosophy involved reasoning and explanations about nature, whereas natural history was essentially qualitative and descriptive.Greek philosophers defined natural philosophy as the combination of beings living in the universe, ignoring things made by humans. The other definition refers to human nature.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, natural philosophy was one of many branches of philosophy, but was not a specialized field of study. The first person appointed as a specialist in Natural Philosophy per se was Jacopo Zabarella, at the University of Padua in 1577.
Modern meanings of the terms science and scientists date only to the 19th century. Before that, science was a synonym for knowledge or study, in keeping with its Latin origin. The term gained its modern meaning when experimental science and the scientific method became a specialized branch of study apart from natural philosophy, especially since William Whewell, a natural philosopher from the University of Cambridge, proposed the term "scientist" in 1834 to replace such terms as "cultivators of science" and "natural philosopher".
From the mid-19th century, when it became increasingly unusual for scientists to contribute to both physics and chemistry, "natural philosophy" came to mean just physics, and the word is still used in that sense in degree titles at the University of Oxford and University of Aberdeen. In general, chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy.
Scope
's earliest known dialogue, Charmides, distinguishes between science or bodies of knowledge that produce a physical result, and those that do not. Natural philosophy has been categorized as a theoretical rather than a practical branch of philosophy. Sciences that guide arts and draw on the philosophical knowledge of nature may produce practical results, but these subsidiary sciences go beyond natural philosophy.The study of natural philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Some ideas presuppose that change is a reality. Although this may seem obvious, there have been some philosophers who have denied the concept of metamorphosis, such as Plato's predecessor Parmenides and later Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, and perhaps some Eastern philosophers. George Santayana, in his Scepticism and Animal Faith, attempted to show that the reality of change cannot be proven. If his reasoning is sound, it follows that to be a physicist, one must restrain one's skepticism enough to trust one's senses, or else rely on anti-realism.
René Descartes' metaphysical system of mind–body dualism describes two kinds of substance: matter and mind. According to this system, everything that is "matter" is deterministic and natural—and so belongs to natural philosophy—and everything that is "mind" is volitional and non-natural, and falls outside the domain of philosophy of nature.
Branches and subject matter
Major branches of natural philosophy include astronomy and cosmology, the study of nature on the grand scale; etiology, the study of causes; the study of chance, probability and randomness; the study of elements; the study of the infinite and the unlimited ; the study of matter; mechanics, the study of translation of motion and change; the study of nature or the various sources of actions; the study of natural qualities; the study of physical quantities; the study of relations between physical entities; and the philosophy of space and time.History
Humankind's mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history. Philosophical, and specifically non-religious, thought about the natural world goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, or in other words, political philosophy. The thought of early philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus centered on the natural world. In addition, three Presocratic philosophers who lived in the Ionian town of Miletus, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to creation myths involving the Greek gods. They were called the physikoi or, as Aristotle referred to them, the physiologoi. Plato followed Socrates in concentrating on man. It was Plato's student, Aristotle, who, in basing his thought on the natural world, returned empiricism to its primary place, while leaving room in the world for man. Martin Heidegger observes that Aristotle was the originator of conception of nature that prevailed in the Middle Ages into the modern era:Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.
"The world we inhabit is an orderly one, in which things generally behave in predictable ways, Aristotle argued, because every natural object has a "nature"—an attribute that makes the object behave in its customary fashion..." Aristotle recommended four causes as appropriate for the business of the natural philosopher, or physicist, "and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the 'why' in the way proper to his science—the matter, the form, the mover, 'that for the sake of which. While the vagaries of the material cause are subject to circumstance, the formal, efficient and final cause often coincide because in natural kinds, the mature form and final cause are one and the same. The capacity to mature into a specimen of one's kind is directly acquired from "the primary source of motion", i.e., from one's father, whose seed conveys the essential nature, as a hypothetical ratio.
; Material cause : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on the from which it is made.
; Formal cause : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on its material arrangement.
; Efficient cause : That which caused the object to come into being; an "agent of change" or an "agent of movement".
; Final cause : The reason that caused the object to be brought into existence.
From the late Middle Ages into the modern era, the tendency has been to narrow "science" to the consideration of efficient or agency-based causes of a particular kind: