Natural Philosophy

The author of this important study has a background spanning chemistry, molecular biophysics and theology. He has recently retired as the Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford. As many readers will be aware, the term ‘scientist’ was first proposed by William Whewell in the 1830s, prior to which the term natural philosophy encompassed not only the natural sciences but also the now distinct disciplines of mathematics, music, philosophy and theology. It was concerned not only with learning about nature but from nature. The two parts of the book explore the origins, scope and eventual demise of natural philosophy, then a reconceived ‘disciplinary imaginary’ appropriate for our time.

Natural philosophy gave an underlying coherence to the western world view over many centuries. McGrath goes back to the Greek kosmos, Aristotle’s theoria and his development of induction, moving on to medieval natural philosophy in Christian, Islamic and Jewish contexts and its subsequent decline. Along the way, he notes the mystical approaches of Hugh of St Victor and Hildegard of Bingen, also discussing alchemy and magic though without considering the Anima Mundi and the work of Frances Yates on the corresponding Renaissance worldview. The next chapters consider the cosmological natural philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, followed by English natural philosophy in Bacon, Boyle and Newton. It was at this point that I made a detour to look more closely at the philosophy of Francis Bacon in the books by Peter Dawkins reviewed in Books in Brief below. Few scholars understand the full range of his thinking grounded in the divine, focusing instead on his contributions to science and its philosophy. Newton brought in a new cosmic coherence subsequently re-conceptualised in mechanical metaphors. McGrath makes the important point (p. 93) that Newton has been read selectively according to subsequent mechanistic agendas – though he notes the romantic reaction to this trend in Goethe, Schelling and Blake.

Natural philosophy gradually morphed into natural science focusing on the objectivity and observation rather than what the author calls ‘ethical inhabitation of nature’. Interestingly, TH Huxley recognised the central role of philosophy in enquiring into the foundation of first principles, though he later separated philosophy from science, insisting contra AR Wallace that all scientific explanations must be naturalistic. The importance of Darwin’s work lay in its explanatory power in relation to the observational evidence, taken much further by his neo-Darwinist successors. McGrath points out that there are two distinctive connotations of objectivity, one as an unbiased interpreter, and another as the detached observer that can readily accommodate capitalist exploitation of nature.

The basis of the second part is the wider and more expansive conceptual space implied by natural philosophy, ‘linking attentiveness to the natural world to the quest for understanding, wisdom, and well-being.’ (p. 113) This approach has practical as well as theoretical applications at a time when an understanding of unity and interconnectedness is critical for our planetary future. It also has the potential to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge. McGrath brings to bear the work of Mary Midgley on maps as metaphors for multiple ways of engaging the world, as well as the three worlds of Sir Karl Popper. He has chapters on theoria representing the contemplation of nature, objectivity as understanding the external world and subjectivity as an affective engagement with nature.

We necessarily see nature through a theoretical lens, and our observations and interpretations are consequently theory-laden. A reconceived natural philosophy can become a new ‘disciplinary imaginary’ allowing multiple disciplinary conversations and correlations. (p. 139) The limits of objectivity are clearly articulated, bounded as this is by unexamined presuppositions that prioritise impersonal quantified accounts and exclude affective responses to nature. This view easily morphs into scientism, supposedly dispensing with philosophy, but, as the author points out, this is a category error representing a second-order philosophical claim about science (p. 148). Subjectivity also plays an important role in relation to beauty and wonder, as well as responding to nature through imagination and poetry.

McGrath’s conclusion proposes – like the Franciscan St Bonaventure with his eyes of sense, reason and contemplation – that we can engage with the world through multiple interrelated perspectives: the scientific eye, the aesthetic eye, the ethical eye, and the spiritual eye. Each is equally significant and subject to integration – of which one model is the complementary roles of left and right hemisphere modes of attention. At any rate, we do need to attend to nature in a new and more respectful fashion embodied in an environmental ethic and expressed in a 2017 manifesto from the Museum of Natural History in Paris. This leads the author to conclude, rightly in my view, that ‘to be truly human, we need an extension of our vision of our world, expanding our minds and imaginations to embrace the vast natural world for what it is, rather than reducing that world to what we consider manageable and palatable’ (p. 183) – and, one might add, exploitable. With nearly 60 pages of references, this book is a significant scholarly contribution to a wider and deeper worldview affirming science, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics within a reimagined natural philosophy.