In Praise of Natural Philosophy A Revolution for Thought and Life

Modern science began as natural philosophy. In the time of Newton, what we call science and philosophy today – the disparate endeavours – formed one mutually interacting, integrated endeavour of natural philosophy: to improve our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and to improve our understanding of ourselves as a part of it. Profound, indeed unprecedented discoveries were made. But then natural philosophy died. It split into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. This happened during the 18 and 19 centuries, and the split is now built into our intellectual landscape. But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavour of natural philosophy. Rigour, sheer intellectual good sense and decisive argument demand that we put the two together again, and rediscover the immense merits of the integrated enterprise of natural philosophy. This requires an intellectual revolution, with dramatic implications for how we understand our world, how we understand and do science, and how we understand and do philosophy. There are dramatic implications, too, for education, and for the entire academic endeavour, and its capacity to help us discover how to tackle more successfully our immense global problems. 1. Natural Philosophy and Its Death Modern science began as natural philosophy – or “experimental philosophy” as it was sometimes called. In the time of Isaac Newton, in the 17 century, science was not only called “natural philosophy”. It was conceived of, and pursued, as a development of philosophy. It brought together physics, chemistry and other branches of natural science as we know it today, with diverse branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, methodology, philosophy of science – even theology. Science and philosophy, which we see today as distinct, in those days interacted with one another and formed the integrated enterprise of natural philosophy. This had, as its basic aim, to improve our knowledge and understanding of the universe – and to improve our understanding of ourselves as a part of the universe. And around the time of Newton there was this great upsurge of excitement and confidence. For the first time ever, in the history of humanity, the secrets of the universe, hitherto wholly unknown, had been revealed and laid bare for all to understand – or at least, for all those who understood Latin and the intricate mathematics of Newton’s Principia. Today we look back at the great intellectual figures associated with the birth of modern science and we unhesitatingly divide them up into scientists on the one hand, philosophers on the other. Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and of course Isaac Newton are all scientists; Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz are philosophers. But this division is anachronistic. They did not see themselves in this fashion. Their work interacted in all sorts of ways, science with philosophy, philosophy with science. They all sought, in one way or another, to improve