Abstract

In this work Ivor Leclerc argues for the contemporary need for a philosophy of nature, a discipline which he takes to be a casualty of the acceptance of the early nineteenth century conception of physics as a mechanics, the science of matter in locomotion in space and time. One of the main consequences of this conception of physics, which grows out of the seventeenth century conception of nature, has been that philosophy cannot have "nature" as its object; rather, the object of philosophy is "science" itself, not nature. The result of this consequence has been, according to Leclerc, "an obscuring, indeed a blocking, of the realization of the full magnitude and extent of the twentieth-century developments in science, in particular of the most fundamental respects, namely, the ontological and metaphysical, in which those developments have affected the conception of nature". This has worked to the disadvantage of both the philosopher and the scientist. In Part 1 Leclerc is primarily concerned with making the above case, while Part 2 is devoted to a historical investigation into the development of the concepts involved in the conception of "physics as a mechanics" and Part III is primarily devoted to a criticism of this view of physics and a suggestion concerning the direction a philosophy of nature should take in the later part of the twentieth century.