Abstract

The paper engages initially with ideas about nature of three natural philosophers who were deeply impactful in the Early Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century inaugurator of the science of chemistry, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, authors well known both to an audience of lawyers and of scientists. The paper places emphasis in the fact that Hobbes, Boyle, and Locke were not merely natural lawyers, but natural philosophers. Natural philosophers were not either what today we call scientists. In his Introduction to the Philosophical Works by Isaac Newton, Andrew Janiak explains that the difference between the notions of 'natural philosophers' and 'scientists' is that the latter is a much more modern term, from around the mid-nineteenth century, apparently coined by William Whewell, for people practising science. Differently, natural philosophers studied nature, practised experiments, and discovered things like the laws of gravity, but also 'discussed many aspects of human beings, including the psyche and how nature reflects its divine creator'. Natural philosophers worked to develop a comprehensive view of nature. Therefore, the notion of natural philosophers already suggests 'interdisciplinarity' and a broader outlook, both empirical and existential in their analysis of problems. The paper investigates the impact that this modern notion of nature developed in the Scientific Revolution has had in the way we think today about law.