Philosophy of nature

Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, U,K. 

Daoism, as the primary indigenous religion of China, is a highly esoteric tradition. Constructed of many different strands, over several thousand years, Daoism has a complex history of integrating various techniques of meditation, spirit communication, consciousness projection, bodily movements, medicine, and "internal alchemy" with a profound transpersonal philosophy of nature and a metaphysics of human relationships based on an ideal of spiritual transformation leading to immortality... 

Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius. The Philosophy of Natural Magic. 1531. 

These two nations developed the most consistent and logical theories, strangely parallel indeed in their development. Scholars are not agreed upon the question as to whether the development of the philosophy of nature in the two ancient civilizations has been entirely independent. Certain it is that, up to the present time, no historical evidence has been discovered which indicates any direct contact of Hindu and Greek thought, though it is not thereby rendered impossible nor even improbable that through Persian mediation Hindu concepts may have found their... 

Epicurus (342-270 B.C.), revived the atomic theory of Democritus, though the efforts of his school to expound or develop it, appear not to have been very successful. Their theory is expounded very fully by the Latin poet Lucretius in his Be Rerum Natura. Indeed it is said that it was this work that inspired Gassendi in the seventeenth century to revive the Democritan atomic theory as part of his campaign against the authority of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. 

The high reputation in which the name of Djaber was held by later alchemists seems to be due to the appeal of his metaphysical philosophy of nature and perhaps to its mystical obscurity as well, for there is no evidence of any important achievement of his, either in the direction of theory or in practical advances in chemical knowledge. 

Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1983. 

Historians have tended to subsume alchemy within this more general "occult philosophy," focusing on the power that alchemical ideas could offer early modern elites. Because alchemy was both a philosophy of nature and a practical technology, however, it offered more direct and concrete opportunities for control as well, especially in the economic arena.2 As this chapter argues, alchemists practical expertise in the extraction and... 

IDEAS FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Copyright 1988. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was a chemist attuned to the aesthetic side of chemistry. As chemist proper, he produced the first synthetic colour in 1833. As experimenter, his Romantically accented philosophy of nature and his Goethean morphological approach allowed him to generate glorious... 

This description stems from Hegel s critique of the bad philosophy of nature in ibid., pp. 542-3. 

His scientific reading was thorough - his study of the philosophy of nature demonstrates knowledge of German, French and English journals. 

G. Schiemann (ed.) Herman von Helmholtz s Mechanism at the Dawn of Modernity. A Study on the Transition from Classical to Modern Philosophy of Nature. 2008... 

Klein argued that the authors of seventeenth-century chemical-pharmaceutical books of recipes had no coherent conception of the chemical transformations underlying their operations . Influenced by Paracelsus s philosophy of natural... 

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