A Plea for Natural Philosophy

Abstract

In ‘A plea for excuses’, Austin offers excuses as a suitable topic if one wishes to employ the method of ordinary language philosophy. Reversing the order, this essay proposes the natural-philosophical approach of the early moderns (e.g., Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, also Boyle and Newton) as a suitable method if one wishes to investigate the topic of the world and our place in it. It argues that this method, which recognizes no distinction between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’, lives on in contemporary interdisciplinary inquiries in the foundations of the various sciences, and that, in contrast, some mainstream topics that we now call ‘philosophy’—in epistemology (e.g., analysis of ‘knowledge’) and metaphysics (e.g., color ontology)—are different, arising in the wake of Kant’s later introduction of a priori critical philosophizing. Special attention is given to the history of epistemology and the primary/secondary distinction.