A True and Permanent Philosophy

This is a quote from Experimental Philosophy, written by Henry Power in 1664.  At the time, Isaac Newton was 21 years old.

These are the days that must lay a new Foundation of a more magnificent Philosophy, never to be overthrown; that will Empirically and Sensibly canvass the Phaenomena of Nature, deducing the Causes of things from such Originals in Nature, as we observe are producible in Art, and the infallible demonstration of Mechanicks; and certainly, this is the way, and no other, to build a true and permanent Philosophy...

What Henry Power is proposing is a philosophy based upon the study and observation of nature. This is essentially, the manifesto of Natural Philosophy.

Nature vs. Fantasy

Philosophy, as the term is now used, has been the intellectual justification for the murder of one-hundred million people in the twentieth century (these were deliberate murders, not casualties of war). And yet, the philosophies that led to this bloodshed, while taken as gospel by their adherents, were speculative in nature and were not based upon proven facts. Philosophy is a dangerous game and needs to placed upon a more solid footing before being applied to others by force.

Historically, there has been an alternative to the use of speculation in philosophy and that alternative offers a counter to the tyranny of pure ideas. Among the ancients, the speculative philosophy of Plato, from whom modern philosophy draws its inspiration, was balanced by a curriculum of "natural philosophy," the search for wisdom in the fact-based experience of nature. Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius looked to nature herself for understanding and wisdom.

The study of nature. which we now call "science," has a record of success since the time of Copernicus that is only matched by the record of folly by the philosophers of speculation. Galileo and Isaac Newton were considered natural philosophers. Newton even referred to speculative philosophy as "fantasy." He was right, if it does not come from the experience of nature it comes from the experience of our fanciful imaginings.

The problem with the natural philosophers is that they branched out into their various fields of science and became excluded from the enterprise we now know as philosophy. This specialization produced great progress in scientific knowledge, but the specialists no longer contributed to the debates of the generalists.

And those philosophers who disavowed speculation never themselves became students of science. David Hume argued persuasively that experience is the only source we have of real knowledge, but he did not turn to science to gain further wisdom from its experiential approach to nature. The logical positivists remained philosophers who, while limiting the search for wisdom to facts and logic, did not become scholars of the facts of nature. 

This blog site is dedicated to natural philosophy and the search for wisdom in the experience of the universe that we are a part of. Science and other sources of fact, rather than imagination, serve as our only guides.