Abstract
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 18th and 19th 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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This point was well made long ago by A. E. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1932. See also E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1969.
For Newton’s impact on his successors see P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Wildwood, London, 1973.
Two books that explore this problem, and argue that it is the fundamental problem of all of thought and life, are my The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2001; and Cutting God in Half – And Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy, Pentire Press, London, 2010.
For an account of Popper’s ambivalent attitude towards natural philosophy see N. Maxwell, ‘Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy’, in Cambridge Companion to Popper, edited by J. Shearmur and G. Stokes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012.
J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963; T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986; D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.
S. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, Hutchinson, London, 1993, pp. 133–134.
J. Ziman, Public Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p. 31.
As I have put it in ‘Arguing for Wisdom in the University’, Philosophia, this issue, if scientists only accepted theories that postulate atoms, and persistently rejected theories that postulate different basic physical entities, such as fields — even though many field theories can easily be, and have been, formulated which are even more empirically successful than the atomic theories — the implication would surely be clear. Scientists would in effect be assuming that the world is made up of atoms, all other possibilities being ruled out. The atomic assumption would be built into the way the scientific community accepts and rejects theories — built into the implicit methods of the community, methods which include: reject all theories that postulate entities other than atoms, whatever their empirical success might be. The scientific community would accept the assumption: the universe is such that no non-atomic theory is true. Just the same holds for a scientific community which rejects, or rather ignores, all seriously disunified rivals to accepted more or less unified theories, even though these rivals would be even more empirically successful if they were considered. Such a community in effect makes the assumption: the universe is such that no disunified theory is true (unless approximate and implied by the true unified theory).
This argument is spelled out in much greater detail in my The Comprehensibility of the Universe: A New Conception of Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998; Is Science Neurotic?, Imperial College Press, London, 2004, chs. 1–2 and appendix; ‘Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism’, Philosophia 32, nos. 1–4, 2005, pp. 181–239; From Knowledge to Wisdom, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984; 2nd edition, Pentire Press, London, 2007 – especially 2nd edition, ch. 14; ‘A Priori Conjectural Knowledge in Physics’, in What Place for the A Priori?, edited by M. Shaffer and M. Veber, Open Court, Chicago, 2011, pp. 211–240. See also my ‘Arguing for Wisdom in the University’, Philosophia, this issue.
For more detailed expositions of, and arguments for, aim-oriented empiricism see works referred to in note 9.
I. Newton, Principia, University of California Press, Berkeley, vol. 2, 1962, p. 398.
See N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, pp. 41–47.
See works referred to in note 9.
See my ‘Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism’.
See works referred to in note 9.
See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, especially chs. 4 and 7.
See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, pp. 219–223; Is Science Neurotic?, pp. 49–50.
See my What’s Wrong With Science? Towards a People’s Rational Science of Delight and Compassion, Bran’s Head Books, Frome, 1976 (2nd ed., Pentire Press, London, 2009); ‘Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism’, Inquiry 23, 1980, pp. 19–81; ‘Philosophy Seminars for Five-Year-Olds’, Learning for Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2005, pp. 71–77 (republished in Gifted Education International, Vol. 22, No. 2/3, 2007, pp. 122–127).
See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, pp. 26–33; Is Science Neurotic?, ch. 2.
See my ‘Physics and Common Sense’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16, 1966, pp. 295–311; ‘Can There Be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19, 1968, pp. 1–25 (reprinted in R. Swinburne, ed., The Justification of Induction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974, pp. 149–174); ‘Understanding Sensations’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46, 1968, pp. 127–146; From Knowledge to Wisdom, ch. 10; ‘The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism’, Philosophy 75, 2000, pp. 49–71; The Human World in the Physical Universe, especially ch. 5; Cutting God in Half – and Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy, especially ch. 3; ‘How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World?’, in Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom: Studies in the Philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell, ed., L. McHenry, Ontos Verlag, 2009, pp. 3–5, 38–56; ‘Reply to Comments on Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom’, Philosophia, 38, Issue 4, 2010, pp. 677–684; ‘Three Philosophical Problems about Consciousness and their Possible Resolution’, Open Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 199–208; ‘Arguing for Wisdom in the University’, Philosophia, this issue.
T. Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83, 1974, pp. 435–450; F. Jackson, 1986, ‘What Mary Didn’t Know’, Journal of Philosophy 3, 1986, pp. 291–295.
See ‘Arguing for Wisdom in the University’ for a discussion.
See my The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 7; Cutting God in Half – And Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy, ch. 8.
For a guide as to how this fundamental problem might be explored, see my Cutting God in Half – And Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy.
See my ‘Arguing for Wisdom in the University’, Philosophia, this issue, and works referred to in that paper in notes 1 and 2.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Maxwell, N. In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life. Philosophia 40, 705–715 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9376-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9376-3