Natural philosophy

Natural philosophy is a term nobody uses any more. Its use roughly coincides with The Enlightenment, the period between the mid-17th and early-18th centuries, when the foundations of what is now known as science were laid by people such as Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

In natural philosophy, there is an emphasis on deduction as a means of obtaining knowledge, in contrast to the modern emphasis on induction.

Probably the most famous use of the term is in the title of Newton's seminal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).