Today the study of the physical world and its contents is principally the concern of the physicist, chemist, engineer, or biologist, rather than that of the philosopher, even the philosopher of science. In keeping with this disciplinary demarcation, non-historical discussions of the nature of body or of the constituents of the physical world make infrequent appearances in volumes or journals devoted to contemporary philosophy. By contrast, the disciplinary demarcations of the early modern period were such that investigations and speculations on ‘body and the physical world’ were legitimate concerns not just of those one would now describe as ‘scientists’, but of most of the philosophical community, who shared a much broader conception of the scope of ‘philosophy’ than is common among philosophers today.

PERIPATETIC NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

The Peripatetic tradition was the intellectual framework within which most seventeenth-century philosophers were educated and within which many of them pursued their philosophical careers (see Chapter I). Peripateticism, in whatever propaedeutic form, was the earliest contact they had as individuals with serious philosophical and scientific concerns. However unsatisfying it became for some of them, at least it comprised a rigorously organised body of doctrine that included a systematic interpretation of the diversities of nature. It showed the thoughtful student of nature that an intelligible and comprehensive account of natural phenomena was a prima facie possibility. At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, Peripatetic natural philosophy was the principal object of criticism for many of those who participated in the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the period.