Natural philosophy versus philosophy of naturalness

Philosophy of biology versus philosophy of physics.

Not long ago I witnessed a remarkable interchange between two great thinkers: the cosmologist and physicist John Archibald Wheeler, and the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper. Popper and Wheeler were meeting with a dozen other philosophers and scientists at Schloss Kronberg, the Victorian castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm's mother outside of Frankfurt during the closing years of the nineteenth...

Philosophy of Philosophy of Religion

William Harvey's natural philosophy

The reception of Harvey's doctrines of the movement of the heart and of the circulation of blood was the result of a complex interaction of intellectual, political and social factors. As French's book shows, Harvey's views were not simply accepted or rejected; they were interpreted-and often misunderstood-in the light of different philosophical and religious ideas. In university faculties and c...

Qcd and Natural Philosophy

QCD sheds considerable light on several of the most basic features of the natural world including the origin of mass, the feebleness of gravity, the extent to which the properties of matter can be determined conceptually, the possible utility of the anthropic principle, and the metatheoretic notions of effectiveness and computability. I discuss these applications here. Contemporary academic or ...

From philosophy to science (to natural philosophy): evolutionary developmental perspectives.

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or da...