Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Natural philosophy
For the current in the 19th-century German idealism, see Naturphilosophie.. Natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) was the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science. It is considered to be the precursor of natural sciences such as physics. Natural science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. At older universities, long-established Chairs of Natural Philosophy are nowadays occupied mainly by physics A celestial map from the 17th century, by the Dutch cartographer Frederik De professors. Modern meanings of the terms Wit science and scientists date only to the 19th century. The naturalist-theologian William Whewell was the one who coined the term "scientist". The Oxford English Dictionary dates the origin of the word to 1834. Before then, the word "science" meant any kind of well-established knowledge and the label of scientist did not exist. Some examples of the application of the term "natural philosophy" to what we today would call "natural science" are Isaac Newton's 1687 scientific treatise, which is known as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait's 1867 treatise called Treatise on Natural Philosophy which helped define much of modern physics.
Natural philosophy
See History of physics, History of chemistry and History of astronomy for the history of natural philosophy prior to the 17th century. Man's mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history. Philosophical, specifically non-religious thought about the natural world goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began
Natural philosophy before Socrates, who turned from his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, viz., political philosophy. The thought of early philosophers such Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus centered on the natural world. 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.[1] Martin Heidegger observes that Aristotle was the originator of conception of nature that prevailed in the Middle Ages into the modern era: The Physics is a lecture in which he seeks to determine beings that arise on their own, , with regard to their being. Aristotelian "physics" is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle's "physics" is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy.... This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo.[2] Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.[3] Plato's world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent This debate was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle when still a young acolyte of Plato, saw matters. Cicero preserves Aristotle's own cave-image: if troglodytes were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. But Aristotle grew to abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it... But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature, or phusis. 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 sciencethe matter, the form, the mover, [and] that for the sake of which. While the vagrancies 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 (sperma) conveys the essential nature (common to the species), as a hypothetical ratio.[4] Science has always been a systematic knowledge of causes. From the late Middle Ages and into the modern era, the tendency has been to narrow "science" to the consideration of efficient or agent causes, and those of a particular kind:[5] The action of an efficient cause may sometimes, but not always, be described in terms of quantitative force. The action of an artist on a block of clay, for instance, can be described in terms of how many pounds of pressure per square inch is exerted on it. The efficient causality of the teacher in directing the activity of the artist, however, cannot be so described The final cause acts on the agent to influence or induce her to act. If the artist works "to make money," making money is in some way the cause of her action. But we cannot describe this influence in terms of quantitative force. The final cause acts, but it acts according to the mode of final causality, as an end or good that induces
Natural philosophy the efficient cause to act. The mode of causality proper to the final cause cannot itself be reduced to efficient causality, much less to the mode of efficient causality we call "force."[6]
Natural philosophy
References
[1] Michael J. Crowe, Mechanics from Aristotle to Einstein (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2007), 11. [2] Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, (Indiana University Press, 1991), 62- 63 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=rWDUmlA6M98C& lpg=PP1& pg=PA63#v=onepage& q& f=false). [3] See especially Physics, books I & II. [4] Aristotle, Physics II.7. [5] Michael J. Dodds, "Science, Causality and Divine Action: Classical Principles for Contemporary Challenges," CTNS Bulletin 21:1 [2001]. [6] Dodds 2001, p. 5. [7] "Teleology and Randomness in the Development of Natural Science Research: Systems, Ontology and Evolution" Interthesis, v. 8, n. 2, p. 316-334, jul/dec.2011 (http:/ / pt. scribd. com/ doc/ 117102437/ Teleology-and-Randomness-in-the-Development-of-Natural-Science-Research-Systems-Ontology-and-Evolution. ) [8] E.A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1954), 227-230. [9] See his The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism 2002. ISBN 0-7735-2474-6 [10] David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (Routledge, 2007). ISBN 0415323649
Further reading
Adler, Mortimer J. (1993). The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical, Moral, Objective, Categorical. Macmillan. ISBN0-02-500574-X. E.A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1954). Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. LCCN:2001036144 ISBN 0-19-514583-6 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1945) Simon & Schuster, 1972. Santayana, George (1923). Scepticism and Animal Faith. Dover Publications. pp.2741. ISBN0-486-20236-4. David Snoke, Natural Philosophy: A Survey of Physics and Western Thought. Access Research Network, 2003. ISBN 1-931796-25-4. (http://www.cityreformed.org/snoke/hsbook/hsbook.html) (http://www. thehomeschoolmagazine.com/Homeschool_Reviews/reviews.php?rid=909) Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Crossway Books, 1994, ISBN 0891077669).
Natural philosophy
External links
"Aristotle's Natural Philosophy" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Institute for the Study of Nature (http://www.isnature.org) " A Bigger Physics (http://www.isnature.org/Files/Augros_2009-Bigger_Physics.htm)," a talk at MIT by Michael Augros Other articles (http://www.isnature.org/articles.htm)
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/