Natural philosophy or 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.
From the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term
"natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the
practice of studying nature. It was in the 19th century that the concept of
"science" received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as
"biology" and "biologist", "physics" and
"physicist" among other technical fields and titles; institutions and
communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions
with other aspects of society and culture occurred.[1] Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), 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 (1867).
In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) persisted into the
18th and 19th century as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit. Some of the greatest names in German
philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel and Schelling.
Origin
and evolution of the term[edit]
The term natural philosophy preceded our current natural science (i.e. empirical 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 (and after Galileo, quantitative reasoning), whereas natural history
was essentially qualitative and descriptive.
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.[2]
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.
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 (1687),
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 (1867).
Scope
of natural philosophy[edit]
In Plato'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 (like ethics).
Sciences that guide arts and draw on the philosophical knowledge of nature may
produce practical results, but these subsidiary sciences (e.g., architecture or
medicine) 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 philosopherSextus 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 Cartesian Dualism describes two kinds of substance:
matter and mind. According to this system, everything that is
"matter" isdeterministic 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 of natural philosophy[edit]
Major branches of natural philosophy
include astronomy and cosmology, the study of nature on the grand
scale; etiology, the study of (intrinsic and
sometimes extrinsic) causes;
the study of chance,
probability and randomness; the study of elements; the study of the infinite and
the unlimited (virtual or actual); 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. (Adler, 1993)
History
of natural philosophy[edit]
|
Background[hide]
|
|
By
era[hide]
|
|
By
culture[hide]
·
African
·
Chinese
·
Indian
|
|
·
Biology
·
Botany
·
Ecology
·
Geology
·
Physics
|
|
·
Algebra
·
Calculus
·
Geometry
·
Logic
|
|
·
Anatomy
·
Pharmacy
|
|
·
v
·
t
·
e
|
For the history of natural philosophy prior to the 17th century,
see History of physics, History of chemistry,
and History of astronomy.
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 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.[3] 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, τὰ φύσει ὄντα, 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 aphilosophy....
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.[4]
Aristotle surveyed the thought of his
predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course
between their excesses.[5]
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 fromEpicurus… 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.[6]
"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 (associated
primarily with form) that makes the object behave in its customary fashion..."[7] 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, [and] ‘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 (sperma) conveys the essential nature (common to the
species), as a hypothetical ratio.[8]
Material cause
An
object's motion will behave in different ways depending on the
[substance/essence] from which it is made. (Compare clay, steel, etc.)
Formal
cause
An
object's motion will behave in different ways depending on its material
arrangement. (Compare a clay sphere, clay block, etc.)
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:[9]
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
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."[10]
Medieval philosophy of motion[edit]
Medieval thoughts on motion involved much
of Aristotle's works Physics and Metaphysics.
The issue that medieval philosophers had with motion was the inconsistency
found between book 3 of Physics and book 5 of Metaphysics. Aristotle claimed
in book 3 of Physics that motion can be categorized by
substance, quantity, quality, and place. where in book 5 of Metaphysics he stated that motion is a magnitude
of quantity. This disputation led to some important questions to natural
philosophers: Which category/categories does motion fit into? Is motion the
same thing as a terminus? Is motion separate from real things? These questions
asked by medieval philosophers tried to classify motion.[11]
William Ockham gives a good concept of
motion for many people in the Middle Ages. There is an issue with the
vocabulary behind motion which makes people think that there is a correlation
between nouns and the qualities that make nouns. Ockham states that this
distinction is what will allow people to understand motion, that motion is a
property of mobiles, locations, and forms and that is all that is required to
define what motion is. A famous example of this is Occam's razor which simplifies vague statements by
cutting them into more descriptive examples. "Every motion derives from an
agent." becomes "each thing that is moved, is moved by an agent"
this makes motion a more personal quality referring to individual objects that
are moved.[11]
Aristotle's philosophy of nature[edit]
"An
acorn is potentially, but not actually, an oak tree. In becoming an oak tree,
it becomes actually what it originally was only potentially. this change thus
involves passage from potentiality to actuality—not from nonbeing to being but
from one kind or degree to being another"[7]
Aristotle held many important beliefs
that started a convergence of thought for natural philosophy. Aristotle
believed that attributes of objects belong to the objects themselves, and share
traits with other objects that fit them into a category. He uses the example of
dogs to press this point an individual dog (ex. one dog can be black and
another brown) may have very specific attributes(ex. one dog can be black and
another brown,) but also very general ones that classify it as a dog (ex. four
legged). This philosophy can be applied to many other objects as well. This
idea is different than that of Plato, with whom Aristotle had a direct
association. Aristotle argued that objects have properties "form" and
something that is not part of its properties "matter" that defines
the object. The form cannot be separated from the matter. Giving the example
that you can not separate properties and matter since this is impossible, you
cannot collect properties in a pile and matter in another.[7]
Aristotle believed that change was a
natural occurrence. He used his philosophy of form and matter to argue that
when something changes you change its properties with out changing its matter.
This change happens but replacing certain properties with other properties.
Since this change is always an intentional alteration whether by forced means
or but natural ones, change is a controllable order of qualities. He argues
that this happens through three categories of being; nonbeing, potential being,
and actual being. through these three states the process of changing an object
never truly destroys an objects forms during this transition state just blurs the
reality between the two states. An example of this could be changing an object
from red to blue with a transitional purple phase.[7]
Other significant figures in natural philosophy[edit]
![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
Early Greek Philosophers studied motion
and the cosmos. Figures like Hesiod regarded
the Natural world as offspring of the gods, where others like Leucippus and Democritusregarded to world as lifeless atoms
in a vortex. Anaximander deduced
that eclipses happen because apertures in rings of celestial fire. Heraclitus believed
that the heavenly bodies were made of fire that were contained within bowls, he
thought that eclipses happen when the bowl turned away from the earth. Anaximenes is believed to have stated that an
underlying element was air, and by manipulating air someone could change its
thickness to create fire, water, dirt, and stones. Empedocles identified
the elements that make up the world which he termed the roots of all things as
Fire, Air. Earth, and Water. Parmenides argued
that all change is a logical impossibility. He gives the example that nothing
can go from nonexistence to existence. Plato argues that the world is an imperfect
replica of an idea that a divine craftsman once held. He also believed that the
only way to truly know something was through reason and logic not the study of
the object itself, but that changeable matter is a viable course of study.[7]
The scientific method has ancient precedents and Galileo exemplifies
a mathematical understanding of nature which is the hallmark of modern natural
scientists. Galileo proposed that objects falling regardless of their mass
would fall at the same rate, as long as the medium they fall in is identical.
The 19th-century distinction of a scientific enterprise apart from traditional
natural philosophy has its roots in prior centuries. Proposals for a more
"inquisitive" and practical approach to the study of nature are
notable inFrancis Bacon,
whose ardent convictions did much to popularize his insightful Baconian method. The late 17th-century natural
philosopher Robert Boyle wrote
a seminal work on the distinction between physics and metaphysics called, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly
Received Notion of Nature, as well as The
Skeptical Chymist, after which the modern science of chemistry is
named, (as distinct from proto-scientific studies of alchemy). These works of natural philosophy
are representative of a departure from the medievalscholasticism taught in European universities, and anticipate in many ways, the
developments which would lead to science as practiced in the modern sense. As
Bacon would say, "vexing nature" to reveal "her" secrets, (scientific
experimentation), rather than a mere reliance on largely historical,
even anecdotal, observations of
empirical phenomena, would come to be regarded as a
defining characteristic of modern science, if not the very key to its
success. Boyle's biographers, in their emphasis that he laid the foundations of
modern chemistry, neglect how steadily he clung to the scholastic sciences in
theory, practice and doctrine.[12] However, he meticulously recorded
observational detail on practical research, and subsequently advocated not only
this practice, but its publication, both for successful and unsuccessful
experiments, so as to validate individual claims by replication.
For sometimes we use the word nature for
that Author of nature whom the schoolmen, harshly enough, call natura naturans, as when it is said that nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen
scruple not to call the quiddity of
a thing, namely, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is,
whether the thing be corporeal or
not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angel,
or of a triangle, or of a fluid body, as such. Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion, as when we say that a stone let fall
in the air is by naturecarried towards the
centre of the earth,
and, on the contrary, that fire or flame does naturally move upwards toward heaven. Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things, as
when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day, nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men. Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body, especially a
living one, as when physicians say
that nature is strong or weak or spent, or that in
such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure. Sometimes we take nature for
the universe, or system of the corporeal works of God,
as when it is said of aphoenix, or
a chimera,
that there is no such thing in nature,
i.e. in the world. And sometimes too, and that most commonly, we would express
by nature a semi-deityor other strange kind of being, such
as this discourse examines the notion of.[13]
— Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly
Received Notion of Nature
The modern emphasis is less on a broad
empiricism (one that includes passive observation of nature's activity), but on
a narrow conception of the empirical concentrating on thecontrol exercised through experimental
(active) observation for the sake of control of nature. Nature is reduced to a
passive recipient of human activity.
Current
work in natural philosophy[edit]
In the middle of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr's discussions on the teleology of
nature brought up issues that were dealt with previously by Aristotle
(regarding final cause) and Kant (regarding reflective judgment).[14]
Especially since the mid-20th-century
European crisis, some thinkers argued the importance of looking at nature from
a broad philosophical perspective, rather than what they considered a narrowly
positivist approach relying implicitly on a hidden, unexamined philosophy.[15] One line of thought grows from the
Aristotelian tradition, especially as developed by Thomas Aquinas. Another line springs from Edmund Husserl, especially as expressed in The Crisis of European Sciences.
Students of his such as Jacob Klein andHans Jonas more
fully developed his themes. Last, but not least, there is the process philosophy inspired by Alfred North
Whitehead's works.[16]
Among living scholars, Brian David Ellis, Nancy
Cartwright, David Oderberg, and John Dupré are
some of the more prominent thinkers who can arguably be classed as generally
adopting a more open approach to the natural world. Ellis (2002) observes the
rise of a "New Essentialism."[17] David Oderberg (2007) takes issue with
other philosophers, including Ellis to a degree, who claim to be essentialists.
He revives and defends the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition from modern
attempts to flatten nature to the limp subject of the experimental method.
0 comments:
Post a Comment