Philosophers from ancient times tried to explain nature logically - the causes of the processes occurring in it, the relationship between its phenomena, to find the meaning and the main or primary basis in it. This philosophical direction was called natural philosophy. The first stage in the development of this direction was the natural philosophy of antiquity, the most typical representatives of which are the Miletus school and the followers of Pythagoras (pre-Socratic period, 7th-6th centuries BC).
The philosophers of the Milesian school were distinguished by pragmatism and combined the search for a single principle of nature with practical inventions such as astronomical instruments, maps, and sundials. So, Thales considered matter to be living, and the main principle - water. Anaximander called primordial matter “apeiron”, believing that as a result of the contradictions existing in it (heat-cold), the world arose. He was also a hylozoist, that is, he believed in the animation of matter. Anaximenes represented the beginning as air, and Heraclitus as fire. Pythagoras and Pythagoreans saw in numbers the mystical basis of all things and their encrypted essence. All of them were united by the conviction that everything in space is interconnected, animated, everything - people, gods, animals - has its place and purpose.
Interestingly, philosophy, trying to explain nature in a similar way and even to some extent restoring the cosmocentrism of antiquity, reappeared in the Renaissance. The natural philosophy of the Renaissance is characterized by an attempt not only to explain nature, but also to combine Christian philosophy with cosmocentrism and even pantheism. The theoretical and epistemological premises of this way of thinking rightfully belong to Nikolai Kuzansky, a native of a peasant family who has become a cardinal. He tried to explain philosophy and theology with mathematical symbols, like the Pythagoreans, and also justified a kind of identity between Nature and God. God, from the point of view of Nicholas of Cusa, is Absolute Being, where the minimum and maximum coincide, but this is the Absolute in a “minimized” form, accessible to faith. It “unfolds” in Nature, and then the mind can comprehend it. He expressed several ideas that anticipated both the theory of Copernicus and the elements of Hegel’s dialectic.
The natural philosophy of the Renaissance, justified by Nikolai Kuzansky, was developed and actually founded by the Neapolitan Bernardino Telezio. God, of course, created the world, being the first impulse, pouring into the world, but He is transcendental to the world, and therefore the material principle prevails in the latter. All things are material, although the principle of materiality itself is invisible. Reason and science are called upon to know nature, which is independent and is the only source of knowledge. By studying nature, one can ascend to God. He revived ancient hylozoism, believing that all matter is capable of sensing, and advanced the theory that all movement in nature is generated by the presence of opposites.
Bernardino Telezio created in his hometown a society of researchers of nature (Academia Telesiana). We can say that the natural philosophy of the Renaissance is represented by natural scientists of this time, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, who proposed a methodology for studying nature and anticipated the experimental and mathematical method of research by Francis Bacon. This method was developed by Galileo Galilei, who, like Telezio, believed that God created the world, but he began to develop according to his own laws, and their study is possible only through experiments.
Astronomers Nikolai Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Tycho de Brahe, like many Renaissance figures, also contributed to the philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy of the Renaissance owes to Copernicus that with his work “On the Reversals of Celestial Bodies” he actually took the Earth out of the astronomical, and man from the “ideological” center of the Universe, putting Cosmos there, contrary to the scientific paradigm of his time. No wonder on his grave it is written: "He stopped the Sun and moved the Earth." Kepler and Tycho de Brahe mathematically proved the doctrine of Copernicus on the circulation of planets and calculated the laws of their motion.
The Renaissance natural philosophy is represented by two other interesting figures - these are Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus (Theophrast Bombast from Gogegheim). Bruno also did not deny that God is dissolved in Nature, and therefore Nature must be infinite in both its states (modes) - that is, in spirit and in space. Therefore, not only the Earth, but many worlds must exist, and the Sun is one of the stars. Like most natural philosophers, Bruno also considered nature to be simultaneously material and animated, bearing the unity of both principles. Paracelsus was simultaneously a physician, astronomer and alchemist. He, too, was convinced that there was a universal connection in nature, and that it was animated, but he believed that this connection was "magical-mystical, " and therefore one key to the "discovery of nature" is possible. The natural philosopher was popular not only among contemporaries - legends circulated about him, and he is one of the prototypes of Dr. Faust in European literature.
