philosophy of nature

the discipline that investigates substantive issues regarding the actual features of nature as a reality. The discussion here is divided into two parts: the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology.

In this discipline, the most fundamental, broad, and seminal features of natural reality as such are explored and assessments are made of their implications for metaphysics, or theory of reality; for one’s Weltanschauung, or “world view”; for anthropology, or doctrine of humans; and for ethics, or theory and manner of moral action. These implications are explored on the assumption that the understanding of the natural setting in which life is staged strongly conditions beliefs and attitudes in many fields.

In its German form, Naturphilosophie, the term is chiefly identified with Friedrich Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, early 19th-century German Idealists who opposed it to Logik and to the Phänomenologie des Geistes (“of the spirit or mind”). Employment of the term spread, in due time, beyond its narrower historical context in German Idealism and came to be used, particularly in Roman Catholic parlance, in the sense that it bears in this article (e.g., the philosophies of physics and biology). Despite a notable decline in its usage in more recent years, the term is here employed, in the interest of the clear delineation of topics, as a complement to the philosophy of science, the discipline to which its subject matter has been allocated by recent philosophers. Thus in this work, the article on the philosophy of science is largely restricted to man’s approach to nature, and thus to epistemological (theory of knowledge) and methodological issues, while that on the philosophy of nature encompasses the more substantive issues about nature as it is in itself.