philosophy of nature

In the philosophy of nature (see philosophy of biology; philosophy of physics), Aristotelianism denotes an optimistic position concerning nature’s aims and its economy; believing in the perfection and in the eternity of the heavenly, geocentric spheres, perceiving them as driven by intelligent movers, as carrying in their…

…various aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy for his own scientific and philosophical treatises, and around 1245 Roger Bacon commented on the Physics and on part of the Metaphysics. It would be wrong, however, to try to find in this scholarship the origin of modern experimental science, which is rather to…

…first classification of substances in nature, are those between solids, liquids, gases, and fire. These differences are an observed datum that must be accounted for by every scientific theory of nature. It was, therefore, only natural that one of the first attempts to explain the phenomena of nature was based…

…this school were Ernst Mach—a philosophical critic of the physics of Isaac Newton, an original thinker as a physicist, and a historian of mechanics, thermodynamics, and optics—and Richard Avenarius, founder of a philosophy known as empiriocriticism.

Dewey held that this philosophy of nature was drastically impoverished. Rejecting any dualism between being and experience, he proposed that all things are subject to change and do change. There is no static being, and there is no changeless nature. Nor is experience purely subjective, because the human mind…

Nature is the opposite of spirit. The categories studied in Logic were all internally related to one another; they grew out of one another. Nature, on the other hand, is a sphere of external relations. Parts of space and moments of time exclude one another;…

…traced to his rejection of Nature philosophy, and the violence of his rejection of this seductive view of the world may well indicate the early attraction it had for him. Nature philosophy derived from Kant, who in the 1780s had suggested that the concepts of time, space, and causation were…

…phase, which Plotinus often calls nature, it acts as an indwelling principle of life and growth and produces the lowest forms, those of bodies. Below these lies the darkness of matter, the final absence of being, the absolute limit at which the expansion of the universe—from the One through diminishing…

Philosophy in the modern world is a self-conscious discipline. It has managed to define itself narrowly, distinguishing itself on the one hand from religion and on the other from exact science. But this narrowing of focus came about very late in its…

This philosophy of nature, the first independent philosophical accomplishment of Schelling, made him known in the circles of the Romanticists.

…theory of knowledge and the philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and ethics.

The world in its awesome entirety is so ruled as to exhibit a grandeur of orderly arrangement that can only serve as a standard for humankind in the regulation and ordering of life. Thus, the goal of humans is to live according to nature, in agreement…

Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which appealed to Tillich’s own feeling for nature, offered a conceptual framework interpreting nature as the dynamic manifestation of God’s creative spirit, the aim of which is the realization of a freedom that transcends the dichotomy between individual life and universal necessity.…

…birds, or insects creating the world and of creators with animal attributes or animal companions, but these are isolated traditions. Even in the widespread motif of the birth of the world from a cosmic egg there is rarely the notion of a bird laying or incubating the egg (the most…

As an alternative interpretation to this view of humanity’s fatal involvement with time, the tragedy of the human situation has also been explained in terms of the soul’s involvement with the physical universe. In some systems of thought (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism), the two…

…a very specific conception of nature and natural laws and cannot, therefore, be generally applied. The significance of a miraculous event is frequently held to reside not in the event as such but in the reality to which it points (e.g., the presence or activity of a divine power); thus,…

…the world, the operations of nature, and causality. The emergence of the concept of nature as a closed system functioning in accordance with strict causal laws created problems more than once, but medieval Christian and Jewish thought had no difficulty in maintaining that the order created by God could also…

…many countries, the concept of nature as a totality is unknown; only individual natural phenomena—e.g., stars, rain, and animals—are comprehended as natural objects or forces that influence them and are thus in some way worthy of being venerated or placated. Nature as an entity in itself, in contrast with human…

…through the general order of nature. There is, however, no irreconcilable opposition between general and special revelation. Vedanta Hinduism and Buddhism, even if they do not speak of special revelation, believe that their religious books and traditions have unique value for imparting a saving knowledge of the truth. The Bible…

…of human culture—such as the philosophy of nature, the natural sciences (especially botany and zoology), alchemy, and medicine (including anatomy, physiology, pathology, and psychiatry). In the works of Jacob Böhme, alchemy (e.g., the elements, fire, salt, sulfur, mercury, tincture, gold, essence, the philosopher’s stone, and the transmutation) found an all-inclusive…

What Romantics, or nature philosophers, as they called themselves, could see that was hidden from their Newtonian colleagues was demonstrated by Hans Christian Ørsted. He found it impossible to believe that there was no connection between the forces of nature. Chemical affinity, electricity, heat, magnetism, and light must,…

…5th–3rd centuries bc, theories of nature were based on conceptions of material elements (fire, wind, water, earth, and space), vitalism (“animated atoms”), and dualisms of love and hate or action and reaction. The alchemist coloured metals and on occasion “made” gold, but he gave little importance to that. His six…