Reconceiving Natural Philosophy

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter opens the second part of this volume, and lays the framework for a proposed strategy of retrieval of natural philosophy as a viable disciplinary imaginary. The chapter explores the pressures that led to disciplinary fragmentation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mary Midgley’s notion of ‘mapping’ our complex world is introduced as a spatial metaphor which enables the imaginative reconnection of the disciplines that were originally enfolded in seventeenth-century approaches to natural philosophy. Finally, the chapter draws on Karl Popper’s notion of the ‘three worlds’ to set out the three broad categories of the human experience of nature that need to be reconnected: its theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects. These aspects of the natural world are engaged in the next three chapters, and set within the framework of a retrieved natural philosophy.