Concept
Natural science
Overview
Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Natural science can be divided into two main branches: life science and physical science. Life science is alternatively known as biology. Physical science is subdivided into physics, astronomy, Earth science, and chemistry. These branches of natural science may be further divided into more specialized branches, also known as fields. As empirical sciences, natural sciences use tools from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, converting information about nature into measurements that can be explained as clear statements of the "laws of nature".
Modern natural science succeeded more classical approaches to natural philosophy. Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton debated the benefits of a more mathematical as against a more experimental method in investigating nature. Still, philosophical perspectives, conjectures, and presuppositions, often overlooked, remain necessary in natural science. Systematic data collection, including discovery science, succeeded natural history, which emerged in the 16th century by describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals, and so on. Today, "natural history" suggests observational descriptions aimed at popular audiences.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Natural science is discussed.
Mineralogy also, especially where it becomes geology, inclines towards etiology, though it principally belongs to morphology. Etiology proper comprehends all those branches of natural science in which the chief concern is the knowledge of cause and effect. The sciences teach how, according to an invariable rule, one condition of matter is necessarily followed by a certain other condition; how one change necessarily…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
We have to discuss the philosophy of natural science. Natural science is the science of nature. But--What is nature? Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
names the idea; states what it is
Some schools have even gone so far as to regard moral excellencies, qualities of character as of value only because they promote natural goods. But the experimental logic when carried into morals makes every quality that is judged to be good according as it contributes to amelioration of existing ills. And in so doing, it enforces the moral meaning of natural science. When all is said and done in criticism of…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
states what it is; names the idea
The first point, therefore, to be noted in regard to what is called the uniformity of the course of nature, is, that it is itself a complex fact, compounded of all the separate uniformities which exist in respect to single phenomena. These various uniformities, when ascertained by what is regarded as a sufficient induction, we call in common parlance, Laws of Nature. Scientifically speaking, that title is employed…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
states what it is; author linked in the graph
Teleology, therefore, as science, belongs to no Doctrine, but only to Criticism; and to the criticism of a special cognitive faculty, viz. Judgement. But so far as it contains principles _a priori_, it can and must furnish the method by which nature must be judged according to the principle of final causes. Hence its Methodology has at least negative influence upon the procedure in theoretical Natural Science, and…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Natural science
- Avicenna
- G. E. Moore
- Ernest Nagel
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Mircea Eliade
- John Stuart Mill
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
- William of Conches
- Adam Smith
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Max Weber
- Noam Chomsky
- Jaegwon Kim
- Richard Dawkins
- Aristotle
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Michael Oakeshott
- Moses Hess
- Friedrich Engels
- Carl Stumpf
- Ernst Cassirer
- Beyond Good and Evil
Related ideas
- Condemnations of 1210–1277
- Eusebius
- Celestial mechanics
- Force
- Falsifiability
- Francis Bacon
- General relativity
- Geology
- Genetics
- Outline of ancient India
- Theory of impetus
- Hinduism
- Philosophy
- Yin and yang
- India
- Isaac Newton
- Vedas
- Indus River
- Albertus Magnus
- Johannes Kepler
- John Locke
- Karl Popper
- History of Animals
- Meteorology (Aristotle)
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.