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Natural Philosophy

The term natural philosophy preceded the usage of the term natural science (empirical science). “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.”1

Isaac Newton’s book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term in the 17th century.

Natural philosophy isn’t necessarily identical to what’s now called science though.2

Natural philosophy: “…nature in her entirety, cosmology in its widest sense—that is a mixture of Science, Theology, and Metaphysics.”3

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy ↩︎

  2. Alchemy Restored: Lawrence M. Principe ↩︎

  3. ibid., Walter Pagel, “The Vindication of Rubbish,” originally published in the Middlesex Hospital Journal (1945), rpt. in Religion and Neoplatonism in Renaissance Medicine (London: Variorum, 1985), pp. 1–14, on p. 11; see the similar definition of natural philosophy as a topic “in which physics, metaphysics, and theology could meet and negotiate their claims” in Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), p. 3. ↩︎