What was Philosophical about Natural Philosophy?

Prof. Peter Harrison (University of Queensland)

Historians are agreed upon that fact that ‘science’ is a relatively recent conception and that ‘natural philosophy’ was, roughly speaking, the pre-nineteenth century equivalent.  However, there remains room for discussion about the exact identity of this early enterprise.  In this paper I survey some common claims about the category ‘natural philosophy’, and propose that we understand this activity better if think less about disciplines, doctrines, and methods, and a more about the way in which particular intellectual activities shape the person, mould behaviour and mental habits, and render the mind susceptible to the reception of particular truths.  Natural philosophy, I will suggest, can be regarded as a means of intellectual and moral formation, in other words, as contributing in important ways to the classical philosophical goal of the good life.

Professor Peter Harrison is Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. Prior to taking up this position, he was for a number of years the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. At Oxford he was a member of the Faculties of Theology and History, a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre where he continues to hold a Senior Research Fellowship. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, Yale, and Princeton, is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. His five books include, most recently, Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2010). He has published over 60 articles or book chapters. He is currently editing his Gifford Lectures under the working title of ‘Science, Religion and Modernity’ and is also working on a project concerned with conceptions of progress in history and the historical sciences.