Natural History in Early Modern Philosophy: An Introduction

Definition

“Natural history” is an antiquated name for a cluster of interests, practices, and forms of inquiry. It lives on today principally in the names of the science museums in many municipalities. Natural history museums, like the tradition that gave them their name, seek to give a comprehensive account of the diversity and the order of nature as a whole, from cosmology to biology. The term contains the word “history,” but should not for this reason be interpreted to mean that natural history concerns itself exclusively or even predominantly with events and processes that occurred in the past. Rather, natural history is “historical” in the archaic sense that it is concerned with surveying a diversity of singular things.

Detailed Description

The natural historian observes, describes, and places the many things he observes and describes into some sort of systematic order, though often without claiming that this order is the final and definitive one that captures nature as it really...