Study of Nature

Exploring our understanding of Nature, as well as the power and limits of modern science, in the light of human experience and rational inquiry

For centuries modern empirical science has provided privileged answers to that question, answers typically given in terms of mechanism, mathematicism, and reductionism. "Mechanism" is explaining nature in terms of the parts of things and motive (efficient) causes. "Mathematicism" means seeing natural regularities in things as epiphenomena of more fundamental “laws of nature,” understood mathematically. "Reductionism" means that wholes are explained without loss in terms of the law-like motions and mechanical interactions of their parts.

But a growing number of thinkers are reconsidering this conception of Nature and the role of modern science in its development. Coming from the scientific side, we are anti-reductionists, “emergentists,” holists, structuralists, self-organization theorists, systems thinkers, and complexity theorists. From the philosophical side, we are non-reductionists, “anti-realists” (a term of art that does not imply pure subjectivity and constructivism), neo-Aristotelians, neo-Thomists, phenomenologists, and more generally all those who take seriously the need to account for the data of everyday human experience. On the historical front, we study especially the early modern period and crucial thinkers such as Bacon and Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, and their world-changing scientific, theological, and philosophical claims.