The Logic of Nature

Abstract

The philosophy of nature has become virtually an oxymoron for the prevailing philosophical consensus. Reason, we are told, is powerless to conceive what nature is in itself, but it must instead hand over all understanding of physical reality to empirical science. Philosophy may reflect upon how natural science models its data, scrutinizing the consistency of scientific theories and the way research projects are framed, but reason must never go beyond its frail limits to provide a priori ampliative, synthetic knowledge of what holds universally and necessarily of nature. Insofar as the problems of knowing nature a priori apply to any extension of a priori knowledge beyond reason’s knowledge of itself, philosophy should have no aspirations beyond, on the one hand, developing the formal logic of a thinking incapable of generating contents of its own and, on the other, doing “philosophy of science,” finding some regulative, methodological coherence in the endeavors of the empirical sciences.