Natural philosophy:

Introduction:

The study of physics, or the study of nature and the physical universe, is known as natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from the Latin philosophia naturalis). Before the advent of modern science, it ruled.

 

Natural philosophy

Natural philosophy, a broad phrase that included botany, zoology, anthropology, and chemistry in addition to what we now call physics, was the popular title for the study of physics (nature) from the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century. The 19th century saw the development of various branches of science, including astronomy, biology, and physics, giving the concept of science its present form. Science-focused organisations and communities were established.The phrase "natural philosophy" was first used in Isaac Newton's work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which is now known in English as Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Treatise on Natural Philosophy was the name of the book that helped define much of contemporary physics even in the 19th century (1867).

 

After rejecting the scholastic tradition and substituting Kantian rationalism for Aristotelian metaphysics and those of the dogmatic churchmen, Naturphilosophie (the philosophy of nature) persisted in the German tradition into the 18th and 19th centuries as an attempt to realise a speculative unity of nature and spirit. Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling are just a few of the prominent figures who are connected to this movement in German philosophy. In contrast to John Locke and other thinkers who advocated a more mechanical philosophy of the universe, viewing it as being like a machine, Naturphilosophie was connected with Romanticism and a viewpoint that viewed the natural world as a sort of enormous organism.

 

History:

See History of science, History of physics, History of chemistry, and History of astronomy for information on the history of natural philosophy before the 17th century.

 

There is no doubt that human thought about nature existed before civilization and historical records. Ancient Greece is where philosophical thought first began, and more specifically, nonreligious thought about the natural world. These schools of thought existed prior to Socrates, who changed his focus from naturalistic theories to a consideration of man, or political philosophy, in his philosophical studies. The natural world was at the centre of the thinking of ancient philosophers like Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus.In addition, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, three Presocratic philosophers who resided in Miletus on the Ionian Sea (thus the Milesian School of philosophy), made an effort to explain natural facts without turning to Greek god-centered origin myths. They were referred to as physikoi (Latin for "natural philosophers") or physiologoi (Aristotle). Plato followed Socrates in focusing on the human being. Empiricism was restored to its rightful position by Plato's pupil Aristotle, who also left room for man in the world by basing his philosophy on the natural world.

 

According to Martin Heidegger, Aristotle created the conception of nature that persisted from the Middle Ages to the present:

“In his lecture on The Physics, he tries to ascertain the nature of independently existing creatures, or v. The "physics" of Aristotle is distinct from the "physics" we use today not just because it comes from antiquity while the current physical sciences come from modernity, but also because Aristotle's "physics" is philosophy while modern physics is a positive science that assumes a philosophy. Even in those instances where modern thinking appears to be at odds with ancient thinking, this book identifies the weave and weft of all Western thought. However, opposition is always characterised by a significant, and frequently even dangerous, dependence.Galileo would not have existed without Aristotle's Physics.”

 

Natural philosophy

Aristotle studied the ideas of his forebears and developed a conception of nature that steered clear of their excesses:

“The ephemeral and unchangeable Forms of Plato's cosmos, inadequately embodied in material form by a divine Artist, stand in stark contrast to the many mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, at least by the fourth century, the most well-known. Throughout the ancient world, this argument would continue. Epicurus gave atomistic mechanism a boost, whereas the Stoics adopted a divine teleology. The decision appears to be straightforward: either demonstrate how a regular, structured universe could develop from random events, or introduce intelligence into the system. When he was still a young Plato's disciple, this was how Aristotle perceived the situation. If troglodytes were suddenly thrust into the upper world, they would immediately assume it had been cleverly set up, according to Cicero, who maintains Aristotle's own cave-image.However, Aristotle eventually came to reject this theory; despite his belief in a supernatural being, he maintains that the Prime Mover is not the effective cause of the universe's actions and has nothing to do with its creation or organisation. Aristotle rejects the idea of a divine Artificer, yet he does not turn to a simple mechanism based solely on chance. Instead, he attempts to create a compromise between the two views, one that strongly relies on the idea of Nature, or phusis.”

 

The cosmos and motion were studied by early Greek philosophers. Others, like Leucippus and Democritus, saw the cosmos as a swirl of dead atoms, while Hesiod saw the natural world as the progeny of the gods. Anaximander reasoned that apertures in celestial fire rings cause eclipses to occur. According to Heraclitus, the heavenly bodies were made of fire and were housed in bowls. He believed that as the bowl turned away from the earth, eclipses would occur.According to Anaximenes, air was an essential element that could be changed in thickness to produce other elements like fire, water, soil, and stones. Fire, air, earth, and water are the four elements that Empedocles recognised as the foundations of the universe. All change, according to Parmenides, is illogically impossible. He uses nothing's ability to change from nonexistence to existence as an illustration. According to Plato, the universe is a flawed recreation of a concept that a divine artisan previously cherished. He also thought that the only way to properly understand something was by reason and logic, not by studying the thing itself, and that it is possible to study changeable matter.

 

Many crucial ideas advanced by Aristotle contributed to the development of natural philosophy. According to Aristotle, an object's characteristics are a part of the object itself, and it shares characteristics with other objects that place it in a category. He emphasises this argument by using the illustration of dogs. One dog may be black, while another may be brown, among other highly particular and extremely broad characteristics that define it as a dog (ex. four-legged). Numerous other things can also be affected by this way of thinking. Aristotle had a close relationship with Plato, yet this thought is distinct from his. According to Aristotle, an object's "shape" is one of its properties, and its "matter," which is one of its unrelated properties, defines the object.The matter and the form are inseparable. You cannot gather properties in one pile and matter in another, for example, as it is impossible to separate properties and matter.

 

Change, according to Aristotle, is a normal occurrence. He made the case that when something changes, you can modify its qualities without changing its matter using his theory of form and matter. A change is made by swapping out certain attributes for others. Change is a controllable order of traits since it is always a planned transformation, whether by forced or natural methods. He contends that these three types of being—non-being, prospective being, and actual being—cause this. The process of altering an object through these three states just blurs the boundaries between the two states rather than actually destroying the thing's shapes. An illustration of this might be using a transitional purple phase colour to turn an object from red to blue.

 

Aristotle's books on Physics and Metaphysics were heavily cited in mediaeval ideas on motion. The discrepancy between Book 3 of Physics and Book 5 of Metaphysics was the problem that mediaeval philosophers encountered with regard to motion. Motion can be classified by substance, quantity, quality, and place, according to Aristotle, who made this claim in Book 3 of Physics. when he claimed that motion is a magnitude of quantity in book 5 of Metaphysics. This argument raised the following significant queries for natural philosophers: What classification(s) does motion fall under? Does motion equate to a terminus? Is motion distinct from actual objects? By asking these queries, mediaeval philosophers attempted to categorise motion.

 

Many people in the Middle Ages have an excellent understanding of motion because to William of Ockham. The terminology used to describe motion has a problem that leads some listeners to believe that nouns and the characteristics that define nouns are related. This distinction, according to Ockham, is what will help people grasp motion. Motion, he claims, is a quality of objects, places, and forms, and that is all that is necessary to define what motion is.Occam's razor is a well-known illustration of this, which clarifies ambiguous statements by breaking them down into more illustrative examples. Every motion originates from an agent, but when expressed as "Every thing that is moved, is moved by an agent," motion acquires a more individualised quality that refers to specific objects that are moved.

 

The scientific method has a long history, and Galileo is a prime example of the mathematical comprehension of nature that distinguishes modern natural scientists. Galileo postulated that things falling in an equal medium would descend at the same rate regardless of their mass. The contrast made in the 19th century between a scientific endeavour and conventional natural philosophy has its origins in earlier eras. Francis Bacon, whose passionate convictions greatly contributed to the popularisation of his incisive Baconian technique, made recommendations for a more "inquisitive" and practical approach to the study of nature.Thomas Browne used the Baconian technique throughout his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672), which uses scientific observations of nature to disprove a variety of widely held myths. A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, one of Robert Boyle's major works on the division between physics and metaphysics, and The Skeptical Chymist, after which the current science of chemistry is named, are both works by the natural philosopher from the late 17th century (as distinct from proto-scientific studies of alchemy).These writings of natural philosophy show a break from the mediaeval scholasticism that was taught in European colleges and, in many ways, foreshadow the advancements that would lead to science as it is currently practised. Science would come to be considered as having a defining trait, if not the very key to its success, in "vexing nature" to divulge "her" secrets through scientific investigation as opposed to relying solely on historical, even anecdotal, observations of empirical events. Boyle's biographers tend to overlook how steadfastly he adhered to the scholastic sciences in theory, practise, and doctrine in favour of emphasising how he founded modern chemistry.But he scrupulously documented every observed aspect of his practical study, and he later pushed for not only this technique but also its dissemination for both successful and unsuccessful trials so that individual assertions might be supported by other studies.

 

It was sometimes derogatory to refer to natural philosophers of the late 17th or early 18th century as "projectors." In the parody, a projector was a businessman who urged people to invest in his innovation but who, it was said, could not be trusted because his technology was often unrealistic. In his book Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift mocked the Royal Society's natural philosophers by referring to them as "the academy of projectors." Natural philosophers and the so-called projectors' methodology and objectives occasionally overlapped, according to science historians.