Natural philosophy was the philosophic study of nature and the physical universe that was most influential before the growth of modern science. It is thought to be the pioneer of natural sciences.
Nature has two inter-related meanings in philosophy. On the one side, it means that all natural objects, or subject to the normal working of the laws of nature. On the other side, it means the major properties and origin of individual things.
Nature has been discussed in the history of Western Civilization, in the philosophical fields of metaphysics and epistemology, also in theology …show more content…
The ritual cause is the idea which serves as a template towards which things develop - for example following an approach based upon Aristotle we could say that a child develops in a way partly determined by a thing called "human nature". Here, nature is a cause.
The final cause is the aim towards which something is directed. For example, a human aims at something perceived to be good. The ritual and final cause are an important part of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" - his attempt to go beyond nature and explain nature itself.
In contrast, Modern Science took its unusual turn with Francis Bacon, who dismissed the four distinct causes, and saw Aristotle as someone who "did begin in such a spirit of difference and contradiction towards all antiquity: undertaking not only to frame new words of science at pleasure, but to confound and put out all ancient wisdom".
After Bacon's advice, the scientific search for the formal cause of things is now changed by the search for "laws of nature" or "laws of physics" in all scientific thinking. Aristotle's well-known terminology these are descriptions of systematic cause, and not ritual cause or final cause. Modern science limits its theory about non-physical things to the assumption that there are regularities to the ways of every things which don't