Natural philosophy Did You Mean Natural?

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Natural philosophy is a term applied to the objective study of nature and the physical universe before the development of modern science.

In other words, all forms of science historically developed out of philosophy or more specifically natural philosophy. At older universities, long-established Chairs of Natural Philosophy are nowadays occupied mainly by professors of physics.

Natural philosophy was the term whose usage preceded our current term science in the sense that prior to the replacement of the term "natural philosophy" with the term science, the term science was used exclusively (and comparatively rarely) as a synonym for knowledge or study and when the subject of that knowledge or study was 'the workings of nature', then the term "natural philosophy" would be used.

Robert Boyle wrote what is considered to be a seminal work on the distinction between nature and metaphysics called A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. This book, written in 1686, marked the point where the scene was set for natural philosophy to turn into science.

An important distinguishing characteristic of science and natural philosophy is the fact that natural philosophers generally did not feel compelled to test their ideas in a practical way.

Instead, they observed phenomena and came up with 'philosophical' conclusions.

Proposals for a much more 'inquisitive' and practical approach to the study of nature originated with Francis Bacon.

Boyle, while he is the first to fully embrace such an approach in both his experimental endeavours and his writings, shares with Bacon (and Galileo who was the inspiration in these matters for both Bacon and Boyle) a conviction that practical experimental observation was the key to a more satisfactory understanding of nature than would have otherwise been sought through either exclusive reference to received authority or a purely speculative approach.

Although Galileo's 'natural philosophy' is hardly distinguishable from science in many ways, the connection between his experiments and his writings about them is characteristically philosophical, rather than being cluttered with the results of meticulously recorded observational detail of practical scientific research, in the way that Boyle (subsequently) advocated.

Despite Boyle describing what he was practicing as being Natural Philosophy, the very innovations that Boyle introduced (such as an insistence upon the requirement for publication of detailed experimental results, including the results of unsuccessful experiments and also a requirement for the replication of experiements as a means of validating observational claims) can be seen as a basis for delineating a transition from proto-science to science.

However, deciding which side of the proto-science/science divide that you include the term 'natural philosophy'is largely determined by whether you treat Boyle's use of the term as being something he himself invalidated when he applied it to his own work (an anachronistic conflation which is removed by recognising that the distinction between the terms natural philosophy and science only arose (at the earliest) in the post-Newtonian era, after Boyle's passing, and once the term science was in regular use).

Thus Boyle could describe his work as Natural Philosophy, whereas we could describe it as science, and yet Boyle's use would be correct (for him) despite the fact that he is in many ways the architect of the modern distinction between the two terms.

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