Humankind's mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history. Philosophical, and specifically non-religious, thought about the natural world goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, or in other words, political philosophy. The thought of early philosophers such as
Parmenides,
Heraclitus, and
Democritus centered on the natural world. In addition, three
Presocratic philosophers who lived in the Ionian town of
Miletus (hence the
Milesian School of philosophy),
Thales,
Anaximander, and
Anaximenes, attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to creation
myths involving the
Greek gods. They were called the
physikoi ("natural philosophers") or, as Aristotle referred to them, the
physiologoi. Plato followed Socrates in concentrating on man. It was Plato's student, Aristotle, who, in basing his thought on the natural world, returned empiricism to its primary place, while leaving room in the world for man.
Martin Heidegger observes that Aristotle was the originator of conception of nature that prevailed in the Middle Ages into the modern era: Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses. "The world we inhabit is an orderly one, in which things generally behave in predictable ways, Aristotle argued, because every natural object has a "nature"—an attribute (associated primarily with form) that makes the object behave in its customary fashion..." Aristotle recommended
four causes as appropriate for the business of the natural philosopher, or physicist, "and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the 'why' in the way proper to his science—the matter, the form, the mover, [and] 'that for the sake of which. While the vagaries of the material cause are subject to circumstance, the formal, efficient and final cause often coincide because in natural kinds, the mature form and
final cause are one and the same. The
capacity to mature into a specimen of one's kind is directly acquired from "the primary source of motion", i.e., from one's father, whose seed (
sperma) conveys the essential nature (common to the species), as a hypothetical
ratio. ; Material cause : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on the [substance/essence] from which it is made. (Compare clay, steel, etc.) ; Formal cause : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on its material arrangement. (Compare a clay sphere, clay block, etc.) ; Efficient cause : That which caused the object to come into being; an "agent of change" or an "agent of movement". ; Final cause : The reason that caused the object to be brought into existence. From the late Middle Ages into the modern era, the tendency has been to narrow "science" to the consideration of efficient or agency-based causes of a particular kind:
In ancient Greece Early Greek philosophers studied motion and the cosmos. Figures like
Hesiod regarded the natural world as offspring of the gods, whereas others like
Leucippus and
Democritus regarded the world as lifeless atoms in a vortex.
Anaximander deduced that eclipses happen because of apertures in rings of celestial fire.
Heraclitus believed that the heavenly bodies were made of fire that were contained within bowls. He thought that eclipses happen when the bowl turned away from the earth.
Anaximenes is believed to have stated that an underlying element was air, and by manipulating air someone could change its thickness to create fire, water, dirt, and stones.
Empedocles identified the
elements that make up the world, which he termed the roots of all things, as fire, air, earth, and water.
Parmenides argued that all change is a logical impossibility. He gives the example that nothing can go from nonexistence to existence.
Plato argues that the world is an imperfect replica of an idea that a divine craftsman once held. He also believed that the only way to truly know something was through reason and logic. Not the study of the object itself, but that changeable matter is a viable course of study.
Natural philosophy in the early modern period The
scientific method has ancient precedents, and
Galileo exemplifies a mathematical understanding of nature, which is a hallmark of modern natural scientists. Galileo proposed that objects falling regardless of their mass would fall at the same rate, as long as the medium they fall in is identical. The 19th-century distinction of a scientific enterprise apart from traditional natural philosophy has its roots in prior centuries. Proposals for a more "inquisitive" and practical approach to the study of nature are notable in
Francis Bacon, whose ardent convictions did much to popularize his insightful
Baconian method. The Baconian method is employed throughout
Thomas Browne's encyclopaedia
Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672), which debunks a wide range of common fallacies through empirical investigation of nature. The late-17th-century natural philosopher
Robert Boyle wrote a seminal work on the distinction between
physics and
metaphysics called,
A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, as well as
The Skeptical Chymist, after which the modern science of
chemistry is named, (as distinct from
proto-scientific studies of
alchemy). These works of natural philosophy are representative of a departure from the
medieval scholasticism taught in European
universities, and anticipate in many ways, the developments that would
lead to science as practiced in the modern sense. As Bacon would say, "vexing nature" to reveal "her" secrets (
scientific experimentation), rather than a mere reliance on largely historical, even
anecdotal,
observations of empirical
phenomena, would come to be regarded as a defining characteristic of
modern science, if not the very key to its success. Boyle's biographers, in their emphasis that he laid the foundations of modern chemistry, neglect how steadily he clung to the scholastic sciences in theory, practice and doctrine. However, he meticulously recorded observational detail on practical research, and subsequently advocated not only this practice, but its publication, both for successful and unsuccessful experiments, so as to validate individual claims by replication. Natural philosophers of the late 17th or early 18th century were sometimes insultingly described as 'projectors'. A
projector was an entrepreneur who invited people to invest in his invention but – as the caricature went – could not be trusted, usually because his device was impractical. Jonathan Swift satirized natural philosophers of the
Royal Society as 'the academy of projectors' in his novel ''
Gulliver's Travels.'' Historians of science have argued that natural philosophers and the so-called projectors sometimes overlapped in their methods and aims. == Current work in the philosophy of science and nature==