Forthcoming in 2023, the proceedings of the IPC 50 Colloque Charles De Koninck et Maurice Dionne. (Read the final draft; for a final copy, please email me.) The volume will be titled Le discernement des habitus – Autour de Charles De Koninck.
In his 1941 essay “Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature?” Charles De Koninck argued that the philosophy of nature and the natural, experimental sciences are not formally distinct. Rather, the experimental or positive sciences are the natural, dialectical extensions of the philosophy of nature. He developed this qualified continuity thesis throughout the remainder of his career. While it yet has some adherents, today De Koninck’s view seems to be in the minority. It seems more frequent to find Thomists maintaining that the philosophy of nature is a part or a mode of metaphysics, and at any rate distinct from the natural sciences. The great difference in education or training, vocabulary, and even social circles seems to reinforce and even to lead to this conclusion. What indeed does Athens have to do with Stockholm? Are there good reasons to continue to defend De Koninck’s continuity thesis? What difference does it make for understanding the principles of natural philosophy? Might De Koninck’s thesis help us to understand the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences as integral parts of one habitus of speculative knowledge?
The essay revisits De Koninck’s arguments in “Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature.” More from the essay:
To put it in terms of the Posterior Analytics, the grasp of certain middle terms in the arguments of the specific sciences are now the shared common goods of various intellectual research communities. A complete grasp of all the relevant evidence, experimental data, and theoretical structure exceeds the capacity of the individual intelligence as such. This social good of theoretical knowledge, demanded as a method to know the cosmos at the deepest and most causally universal of scales, mitigates any concern over a loss of classical Aristotelian demonstrative knowledge at such levels. Here, too, the private intellectual good is subordinated to the common good. At the same time, however, it also highlights the natural and even pedagogical importance how such a research community ought to find its theoretical unanimity – by « finding strength in what is common to all » as Heraclitus says. That is, such communities of inquiry ought to be united through a common philosophy of nature, rooted in a beginning that is common to all, both in their common predicability and definitional mode as well as in the common telos sought in such theorizing. This is the importance of seeing why the philosophy of nature is not distinct from the experimental sciences: to preserve the theoretical common good of the human knowledge of nature.
John G. Brungardt 
Staying busy!