Natural Philosophy Course

In a previous post, I described the various Course Guides that I use for my philosophy courses. On the one hand, they are not textbooks, although they do include materials that would otherwise be handouts. On the other hand, the Guides are not manuals, as they contain many questions designed to help students think through the primary and secondary materials of the course. Let me reiterate: many questions, intended not only to guide the students through the course but to guide them through thinking about the path of thought in the course.

Since the Philosophy of Nature course is relatively new in the curriculum, its Course Guide has been completed last. After teaching a version of the course in previous semesters, I’ve completed the Course Guide for Spring 2026 and would like to share some thoughts about the topic below.

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The main readings for the course are as follows:

• Aristotle. Physics, or Natural Hearing. Translated by Glen Coughlin. St. Augustine’s Press, 2004. ISBN: 978-1587316289 [link] 
• Augros, Robert, and George Stanciu. The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature. Principle Source Publisher, 2013. ISBN: 979-8500037480 [link]
• Brungardt, John G. Natural Philosophy: An Introduction. Catholic Handbooks Series. ECT Press, 2025. ISBN: 978-1966127048 [link]
• Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Peter Kalkavage. 2nd ed. Focus, 2016. ISBN: 978-1585107926 [link]
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Joseph Pearce. Ignatius Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1586171384 [link]
• Wallace, William A. The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis. The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. ISBN: 978-0813208602; link]

Yes, I do ask students to buy my own book, as it serves as a nice supplement to the Course Guide.

The reading schedule is below.

After the introduction to the course, the only main reading in the first week is from Simplicius, “On the Interest of Physics,” an excerpt from a great essay by Rémi Brague on the same theme generally in the ancient and medieval worlds. Simplicius lists a variety of reasons why one should desire to study physics (a.k.a. natural philosophy), some of which will be very foreign to students. We contrast this with the contemporary understanding of the natural sciences using the first two chapters of Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature, which clearly describes instrumentalism and mechanism and what they are opposed to.

During the second week of the course we read and discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (using the 1818 text). As I mentioned in the previous post on these Course Guides, I find that literature with themes on or adjacent to the course topics fire students’s imaginations and help them engage with the material later in the course. Victor Frankenstein is a student of “natural philosophy” in the heady days of the new natural sciences, especially early experiments with electricity, and he seeks mastery over nature’s secrets. (We also read the famous excerpt from Descartes’s Discourse VI on that theme, included in the Course Guide.) Part of the aim of reading and discussing the novel is to point out what it means to contemplate nature, use nature, and how human nature is part of the natural order.

During the third and fourth weeks, we turn to study some of the Greek predecessors to Aristotle’s natural philosophy in the Physics. For a couple days, we discuss various fragments of the Pre-Socratics, not only those that are relevant to Physics, Book I–II, but fragments that provide some one-liners for thought later in the course. We also spend three days—yes! not enough!—studying Plato’s Timeaus. The dialogue presents many things, but the main idea students are supposed to garner is what it looks like to model the whole cosmos (Timaeus’s “likely story”), and the various limitations and insufficiencies that come with the human attempt to do so. Kalkavage’s translation is very helpful with a great glossary and three appendices. We spend a day looking at key points from those appendices which, respectively, point out some of the ideas underlying the music, astronomy, and geometry in the dialogue. This discussion also sets the stage for readings later in the course, especially those involving early modern mathematical physics.

During weeks 5–9 we study Aristotle’s Physics, Books I–III, with some other key excerpts. In this part of the course, some of the readings from Aristotle are paired with Wallace’s recapitulations in The Modeling of Nature. The main purpose here is not to reinvent the wheel when introducing the perennial questions and resolutions of each of these three books. The ancillary purpose is to develop a set of distinctions and a vocabulary about nature’s principles and causes so that, during the second half of the course, these can be reviewed and practiced and developed when studying more detailed and difficult examples, as presented in Wallace’s Modeling as well as the excellent book by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. The study of the Physics also features two secondary readings, an article by Robert Augros (“Nature Acts for an End”) and a lecture by his son Michael Augros (“A ‘Bigger’ Physics”). The former article assists with our study of Physics, II.8–9, while the latter adds some helpful details and distinctions after Physics, III.1–3 (since we have not the time to study all of the Physics). Robert Augros’s article from The Thomist is an excellent examination of teleology, written in the form of a Summa article; the objections and responses are pedagogically illuminating, and the respondeo helpfully comments on the main arguments Aristotle makes in Physics, II.8. Michael Augros’s lecture explores the key distinction between general conceptions and specific conceptions about nature (i.e., Deely/Peirce’s cenoscopic vs. ideoscopic knowledge). This helps us to rethink the three books of the Physics in light of the idea of the “natural path” in our thinking that Aristotle describes in Physics, I.1. The lecture also discusses a number of helpful examples, and the course focuses on the one about Zeno’s paradoxes and the continuity of motion.

Weeks 9–12 then feature a study of Wallace’s Modeling. We read the first and second chapter on modeling natures and inorganic natures (the next three chapters are optional, in view of the book by Augros and Stanciu). The main focus, however, is to study his presentation of the philosophy of science and in particular the demonstrative regress, found in the second part of Modeling. My goal here is to show in more detail how the natural philosopher progresses from the general and common natural path in the study of nature to the specific and technical paths of the natural sciences (themselves “private” areas, as it were, of natural philosophy). After the chapters reviewing some fundamental ideas in the philosophy of sciences (chs. 6–7), we study the demonstrative regress (ch. 8), and then examples of it in the history of the sciences (chs. 9–10). This part of the course is new (previously, some of it was in the Epistemology course), and it will most likely prove very difficult. I plan to spend one day on examples in chs. 9–10 involving astronomy (Wallace, of course, focuses on some of Galileo’s discoveries), one day on Newton’s use of the regressus when arguing for universal gravitation, and one day on Wallace’s examples from chemistry and biology. (His example from William Harvey I plan to keep in the aforementioned Epistemology course; repetitio mater studiorum.)

The final major section of the course is a study of Augros and Stanciu’s book The New Biology. This is also a new addition to the course, and apart from (hopefully) being an enjoyable read—it is an excellent presentation of reasons for philosophical realism in the sciences, especially biology—it will provide students the opportunity to apply the various distinctions and principles from the Physics and Modeling. In particular, Chapter 1’s discussion of physics, biology, and reductionism afford the opportunity to discuss the definition of nature; Chapter 2’s arguments that living things are not machines allows us to revisit how nature is more form than matter; Chapter 3’s extensive discussion of the difference between humans and non-human animals develops all four causes; Chapter 4’s exploration of competition as paradigmatic in nature (not competition) involves the various modes of causality; Chapter 5’s discussion of the various harmonious relationships between environment and organism lead to discussions of natural and hypothetical necessity; Chapter 6’s trenchant exposition of paleo-Darwinian theory and its proposal of new model for evolution permit one to practice the demonstrative regress method with the origin of species as a case study; Chapter 7’s discussion of purpose is open to many of the above themes; and the final two chapters on the hierarchy and wisdom in nature allow students to see how natural philosophy is sapiential.

Now, Augros and Stanciu’s intention in the book is to enrich biology with a hearty dose of natural philosophic realism in the Aristotelian-Thomistic spirit, and they succeed marvelously. The edition for class is a reissue, as the book was originally published in 1987; however, its examples and argument hold up well. If anything, its anticipation of regulatory genetics’s role in evolution and what (essentially) is systems biology allows for helpful “updates” in class. These scholarly points aside, however, the book is rich in memorable and helpful examples, which is the main reason I hope for its success in class.

In the final day of the course (“time permitting,” as we say), the Course Guide includes a summary of fine-tuning in cosmology, and our last discussion is based upon a fine essay by Timothy Kearns about humankind’s role as stewards in the cosmos. This not only helps us to recapitulate many themes of the course (with a call-back to the “mastery of nature” idea from the Frankenstein week), but it also helps students to think about the place of the human person in the cosmos (a theme also present in Augros and Stanciu). Since the next course students will take is The Philosophy of the Human Person, it is also something of a segue.

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All told, I am hopeful for this version of the course, especially in light of the many “teachers” I have been able to recruit in its various texts. Comments/questions/criticism are welcome.