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Natural philosophy

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Thinking hardly
or hardly thinking?

Philosophy
Icon philosophy.svg
Major trains of thought
The good, the bad,
and the brain fart
Come to think of it
Warning icon orange.svg This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved.

Natural philosophy could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

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).