Natural philosophy

This article is about the philosophical study of nature. For the current in 19th-century German idealism, see Naturphilosophie.

Natural philosophy, philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis), or experimental philosophy, until the late modern period, was the systematic and research-based study of nature and the physical universe, while ignoring any supernatural influence. Used since at least Aristotle (classical antiquity) until the 19th century, the term natural philosophy referred to a branch of philosophy—a broader term then, meaning all rational fields of study and contemplation—that explored topics now considered to fall under the purview of science, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy. Thus, natural philosophy served as the precursor to, and has been mostly supplanted by, modern science.

The 19th century established the term science as distinct from philosophy in its rigorously empirical and experimental approach, along with its many modern sub-disciplines, plus the founding of various institutions and communities devoted to them. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century. Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867), authored by Lord Kelvin and Tait.

In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) persisted into the 18th and 19th centuries as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit, after rejecting the scholastic tradition and replacing Aristotelian metaphysics, along with those of the dogmatic churchmen, with Kantian rationalism. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. Naturphilosophie was associated with Romanticism and a view that regarded the natural world as a kind of giant organism, as opposed to the philosophical approach of figures such as John Locke and others espousing a more mechanical philosophy of the world, regarding it as being like a machine.

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