Natural philosophy

Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

Greek philosophers defined natural philosophy as the combination of beings living in the universe, ignoring things made by humans.

The first person appointed as a specialist in Natural Philosophy per se was Jacopo Zabarella, at the University of Padua in 1577.

[citation needed] In general, chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors.

Plato's earliest known dialogue, Charmides, distinguishes between science or bodies of knowledge that produce a physical result, and those that do not.

George Santayana, in his Scepticism and Animal Faith, attempted to show that the reality of change cannot be proven.

These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned from his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, or in other words, political philosophy.

In addition, three Presocratic philosophers who lived in the Ionian town of Miletus (hence the Milesian School of philosophy), Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to creation myths involving the Greek gods.

[7] 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...

The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system.

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...

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.

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.

Empedocles identified the elements that make up the world, which he termed the roots of all things, as fire, air, earth, and water.

Aristotle claimed in book 3 of Physics that motion can be categorized by substance, quantity, quality, and place.

Proposals for a more "inquisitive" and practical approach to the study of nature are notable in Francis Bacon, whose ardent convictions did much to popularize his insightful Baconian method.

The Baconian method is employed throughout Thomas Browne's encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672), which debunks a wide range of common fallacies through empirical investigation of nature.

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 medieval scholasticism taught in European universities, and anticipate in many ways, the developments that 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.

And sometimes too, and that most commonly, we would express by nature a semi-deity or other strange kind of being, such as this discourse examines the notion of.

A projector was an entrepreneur who invited people to invest in his invention but – as the caricature went – could not be trusted, usually because his device was impractical.

[16] Jonathan Swift satirized natural philosophers of the Royal Society as 'the academy of projectors' in his novel Gulliver's Travels.

[19] 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.

[22] 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.