There are decisive grounds for holding that we need to bring about a revolution in philosophy, a revolution in science, and then put the two together again to create a modern version of natural philosophy.
Once upon a time, it was not just that philosophy was a part of science; rather, science was a branch of philosophy. We need to remember that modern science began as natural philosophy – a development of philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. Today, we think of Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley and, of course, Isaac Newton as trailblazing scientists, while we think of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz as philosophers. That division is, however, something we impose on the past. It is profoundly anachronistic.
At the time, they would all have thought of themselves as natural philosophers. All were prepared to think about fundamental problems of metaphysics and philosophy in addition to tackling more specialised problems of physics, astronomy, chemistry, physiology, mathematics, mechanics and technology. Philosophy as imaginative and critical thinking about fundamental problems was alive and well – and highly creative and productive. Both Kepler and Galileo made careful observations and performed experiments, as good scientists should; but they also adopted a metaphysical view of nature that held that ‘the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics' as Galileo put it. They both adopted the view, in sharp contrast to the orthodox Aristotelian metaphysics of the times, that simple mathematical laws govern the way that natural phenomena occur, and this metaphysical view played a crucial role in the discovery and acceptance of their great scientific discoveries concerning the motions of the planets (Kepler), and the motion of terrestrial objects (Galileo). Descartes, Huygens, Boyle, Newton and others adopted diverse versions of the then metaphysical view that the Universe is made up of atoms.
But then science broke away from metaphysics, from philosophy, as a result of natural philosophers adopting a profound misconception about the nature of science. As a result, natural philosophy died, the great divide between science and philosophy was born, and the decline of philosophy began.
It was Newton who inadvertently killed off natural philosophy with his claim, in the third edition of his Principia, to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction.
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