In science, natural philosophy refers to search for the general understanding of reality, whose main business, according to Newton (c.1690), is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects. [1]
Natural philosopher | Scientist
In 1833, the term “natural philosopher”, which was the preferred self-description for thinkers such as Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley, was beginning to come under question in respect to its ability to distinguish someone who worked in the so-called “real sciences” per se, after which, amid the so-called Whewell-Coleridge debate, the term “scientist” was coined, by William Whewell (1834), to satisfy this newer and harder branch in the tree of knowledge.
References
1. (a) Koyre, Alexandre. (1965). “Concept and Experience in Newton’s Scientific Thought”, Newtonian Studies (pg. 51). Chapman & Hall.
(b) Foley, Michael. (1990). Laws, Men and Machines: Modern American Government and the Appeal of Newtonian Mechanics (pg. 9). Routledge, 2014.
External links
● Natural philosophy – Wikipedia.
