Table of Contents
Natural Philosophy
Natural philosophy is the systematic study of the natural world through observation, reason, and theoretical inquiry, practiced in the Western tradition from ancient Greece through the early modern period. The term - derived from the Latin philosophia naturalis - was the primary designation for what is now called natural science before disciplinary boundaries and methodological specialization produced the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and related fields. The transition from natural philosophy to modern science is commonly placed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, though scholars disagree on whether this represents a sharp rupture or a gradual reorientation. For the history of that transition, see Natural Philosophy - History.
State of Knowledge
Natural philosophy as practiced from antiquity through the early modern period encompassed what contemporaries did not treat as separate domains: cosmology, physics, biology, meteorology, medicine, and metaphysics were intertwined inquiries into the principles underlying natural phenomena. The ancient Greek tradition - running from the pre-Socratics through Aristotle - established the dominant framework, in which natural explanation sought formal, material, efficient, and final causes. Aristotelian natural philosophy, as transmitted through Islamic scholarship and medieval European scholasticism, remained the institutional standard in European universities into the seventeenth century.
The period known as the Scientific Revolution - roughly 1543 to 1687, from the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus to Newton's Principia Mathematica - saw major revisions to the methods, subject matter, and foundational assumptions of natural philosophy. Figures including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton redefined the role of mathematical formalism, controlled experiment, and mechanical explanation in the study of nature. Newton himself titled his 1687 work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica - the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy - indicating that the term remained in use even at the leading edge of what later generations would call physics.
The disciplinary differentiation that produced modern sciences - with physics, chemistry, and biology as distinct professional fields with their own institutions, journals, and methods - was largely complete by the mid-nineteenth century. The founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 and the coinage of the word scientist (attributed to William Whewell, c. 1833) mark conventional reference points in this transition. Whether natural philosophy was continuous with, or constitutively different from, modern science is a recurring question in History and Philosophy of Science.
Consensus Status
There is broad consensus among historians of science that natural philosophy was the primary institutional and conceptual framework for inquiry into the natural world in Europe from antiquity through the early modern period, and that the modern natural sciences emerged from it. The mechanisms, periodization, and character of that emergence are subjects of ongoing historiographical debate. See Natural Philosophy - History of Science Consensus.
Viewpoints
The Scientific Revolution as Rupture
One tradition in the historiography - associated with Alexandre Koyré and, in different form, with Thomas Kuhn - holds that the seventeenth century represented a genuine conceptual break with the natural philosophy it displaced, not merely its refinement. See Scientific Revolution as Rupture - Viewpoint.
Continuity with Medieval and Scholastic Traditions
Other historians, including Pierre Duhem and his successors, argue that early modern natural philosophy was continuous with medieval scholastic inquiry and that the standard narrative of rupture obscures significant conceptual and methodological inheritance. See Medieval Continuity - Viewpoint.
The Role of Mathematics
The degree to which the mathematization of nature - rather than experiment, mechanism, or other factors - was the defining shift in early modern natural philosophy is debated among historians and philosophers of science. See Mathematization of Nature - Viewpoint.
Natural Philosophy and Theology
Natural philosophers from Roger Bacon through Newton worked within theological frameworks and often understood the study of nature as inquiry into divine creation. Whether theology was incidental, integral, or constitutively enabling to natural philosophy is a subject of historical and philosophical dispute. See Natural Philosophy and Theology - Viewpoint.
The Non-Western Question
Traditions of systematic natural inquiry existed independently in Islamic, Chinese, and Indian civilizations. Whether these constitute forms of natural philosophy, how they relate to the Western tradition, and why Europe underwent the specific transformation it did are questions with no settled answers. See Non-Western Traditions - Viewpoint.
Related Pages
Footnotes
<footnote>Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-48205-7.</footnote>
<footnote>Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-691-14233-0.</footnote>
<footnote>Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957.</footnote>
<footnote>Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.</footnote>
<footnote>Duhem, Pierre. Le Système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic. 10 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1913-1959. Primary source for the continuity thesis.</footnote>
<footnote>Whewell, William. History of the Inductive Sciences. 3 vols. London: J.W. Parker, 1837. Whewell's coinage of “scientist” is discussed in Ross, Sydney. “Scientist: The Story of a Word.” Annals of Science 18.2 (1962): 65-85.</footnote>
<footnote>Newton, Isaac. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. London: Royal Society, 1687. English translation: Andrew Motte, 1729; revised I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-520-08817-7.</footnote>
<footnote>Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-521-56762-6.</footnote>