PHILOSOPHY AND BIOLOGY

Abstract

A scientist who seeks to explain the actual universe, or any (nonhuman) part of it, in detail as it is, in terms of its concrete history, can properly be called a natural historian - he is literally concerned with the history of nature. The natural philosopher on the other hand is devoted to the search for fundamental laws of the highest possible generality – laws which he hopes will apply throughout space and time. For the natural historian, the laws of natural philosophy are not ends in themselves, but tools for the understanding of the actual universe … The mode of thought typical of the natural historian … is much more akin to that of Sherlock Holmes than to those of Newton, Einstein, Bohr or Rutherford. Crowson 1970, pp. 3–4 I began Chapter 1 of this book with an epigraph from Crowson 's book on taxonomy, and I again quote from him in the final chapter. The distinction between Natural History and Natural Philosophy is not a new one. It is (or was) embodied in the titles of professorial chairs in the ancient Scottish universities, meaning Zoology (or Biology) and Physics, respectively, and can be regarded as explicit at the beginning of the systematic study of the Philosophy of Science. Bacon, as Crowson points out, coined the terms in his De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623).

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