Definition

“Natural history” is an antiquated name for a cluster of interests, practices, and forms of inquiry. It lives on today principally in the names of the science museums in many municipalities. Natural history museums, like the tradition that gave them their name, seek to give a comprehensive account of the diversity and the order of nature as a whole, from cosmology to biology. The term contains the word “history,” but should not for this reason be interpreted to mean that natural history concerns itself exclusively or even predominantly with events and processes that occurred in the past. Rather, natural history is “historical” in the archaic sense that it is concerned with surveying a diversity of singular things.

Detailed Description

The natural historian observes, describes, and places the many things he observes and describes into some sort of systematic order, though often without claiming that this order is the final and definitive one that captures nature as it really is. The natural historian’s approach thus differs from that of the natural philosopher who is concerned, typically, with discovering the most general and universal laws governing nature. The natural philosopher of course might pay attention to the descriptions and observations of the natural philosopher and indeed might do some of the describing and observing herself, so that the distinction between the two is not absolute. The two kinds of inquirer overlap, but their respective domains remain clear enough. Natural history takes stock of diversity; natural philosophy seeks to discover the unity behind the diversity.

Just as the tradition of metaphysics has sometimes been said to include whatever Aristotle studied under that name, so too in an important sense natural history is simply that which the first-century-CE Roman author Pliny the Elder covered in his multivolume work, Natural History, or, perhaps alternatively, as the Latin is ambiguous, Natural Histories (Pliny 1938–1962). Metals, comets, fish, spices, perfume, apiculture, and many, many things besides find their way into Pliny’s work. Some of these are covered, too, by Aristotle in his so-called Parva naturalia or small treatises on nature, as well as in his History of Animals. This latter was often purported to be of spurious authorship, since many commentators in the philosophical tradition could not believe that the great Philosopher would interest himself with folklore about elephants and other such trivial matters. But for Aristotle as for Pliny the attention to “trivia” was always part of a larger project of enriching, of fleshing out with detail, a more general vision of the order of the cosmos. Pliny is the natural historian par excellence, Aristotle the natural philosopher, but their shared interests, and contributions to one and the same history of science, are considerable.

In the modern period, George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788) would carry the mantle of natural history much as Pliny did in antiquity. Buffon published his own multivolume Natural History (1749–1804), in which he studies, among other things, quadrupeds, birds, and minerals. Buffon also turns to history in the narrower sense in which we understand the term today, including a supplementary volume in the Natural History on “The Epochs of Nature.” In the eighteenth century, even if evolutionary theory was not widely supported, it was no longer possible to conceptualize nature as static. Rather, nature, like humanity, was something that has a past, and this could be recovered through natural-historical observation, description, and classification of natural objects, including fossils, but also whatever is found at different layers in the sediments of rivers or the strata of rocky outcroppings. Buffon’s work also includes significant discussion of methodology, concerning how natural history is best studied, and toward what ends. In both its methodological considerations and its past-oriented speculations, Buffon’s natural history engages with questions we may easily recognize as philosophical.

The category of natural history begins to decline, historically, in parallel to the decline of natural philosophy. What comes to subsume them both in part, while also rejecting elements of both of them, is science. Natural history becomes that part of science that is generally accorded a lower status: the part that involves field work, rather than laboratory work, collection rather than experimentation. This hierarchy is often seen as emerging in the earliest period of the scientific revolution (a contested term, but convenient), when the primacy of results obtained in controlled experimental conditions was established and given epistemological pride of place. And yet from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, collection, observation, and classification continued to be honored under the banner of “natural history,” not just as complimentary to natural philosophy but as essential to it. It is only in the nineteenth century that physics would become the undisputed sovereign of the sciences, and the nearly exclusive focus of the philosophy of science. Today, however, philosophers are again beginning to notice the potential value of the epistemological lessons that might be drawn from the activities of what was once called “natural history” – to ask themselves, for example, what philosophy of science might look like if it were not physics taken as the paradigmatic science, but instead, say, paleontology (Currie 2018). Natural history, by whatever name, has not gone away, and nor has its importance to philosophy.