12 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Medieval German Dominican friar and polymath who systematically introduced Aristotle's natural philosophy into the Christian intellectual tradition — and was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas.
Ancient Greek astronomer who proposed the heliocentric model — that the Earth revolves around the Sun — approximately 1800 years before Copernicus, with his theory being rejected by the ancient world and largely forgotten.
Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 treatise proposing the heliocentric model of the solar system — placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the center — published in the year of his death and the foundational text of the Copernican Revolution.
English philosopher who argued against dogmatic certainty in natural philosophy and theology, defended the new science against Aristotelian scholasticism, and controversially defended the existence of witches.
Roman Epicurean philosopher and poet who wrote De Rerum Natura — the most sustained and beautiful Latin philosophical poem — presenting Epicurean atomism as a liberation from the fear of gods and death.
English philosopher and author who developed a materialist vitalist natural philosophy — matter is self-moving and self-knowing — and wrote the first science fiction novel in English.
Avicenna's Kitab al-Shifa (Book of the Remedy/Healing) — the most comprehensive philosophical encyclopedia of the medieval world, covering logic, natural science, mathematics, and metaphysics in the Aristotelian tradition.
A Hippocratic text arguing that air/breath (pneuma) is the fundamental principle of life and the cause of disease — one of the more philosophical texts in the Hippocratic corpus.
Lucretius's six-book Latin poem presenting Epicurean atomism — the universe is atoms and void, the soul is mortal, the gods are indifferent — as the philosophical cure for religious terror.
Aristotle's systematic investigation of nature, motion, change, place, time, and the infinite — the foundational text of natural philosophy for over 1800 years.
French philosopher and mathematician who founded modern philosophy through radical methodological doubt, the cogito, and the substance dualism of mind and body.
Plato's cosmological dialogue in which the Demiurge (a craftsman god) creates the physical universe by imposing mathematical form on a pre-existing receptacle (the chora), using the Forms as models.