What is nature?

Author: Héctor Velázquez
Published in: ¿Qué es la naturaleza? (Porrúa. Mexico, 2007. 279 pp.) ISBN: 978-97-007-7189-2
Publication date: 2007

subject Answering the question "What is nature?" is not only a question for experimental science or the 

history of science, but a philosophical exercise that is born in the very heart of the development of questions about the physical world, and that allows and currently demands an articulation of knowledge that gives us a unitary and integrated answer about the meaning and destiny of the natural environment, of which we are a very small but peculiar part.

This book is an introduction to the philosophical reflections that could be developed from particularly important moments in the history of science and about the proposals that have been put forward at those moments to answer the global question of what nature is.

The author studies specific stages in the history of science: classical antiquity, medieval, Arab and modern science, positivism, the evolution and breaks with mechanicism, the emergence of complex systems, contemporary cosmology and current ecologism; he also analyses epistemological, ontological and anthropological problems derived from the scientific activity of these particular moments in science, such as: the geometrisation of reality, the struggle between modern astronomy and cosmology, the quantitative overcoming of Aristotelian qualitative physics, the extrapolations of positivism and evolutionary epistemology, chaos and its role in the development of the cosmos, the bioethical problematic of human structural manipulation, or the foundation of an ethics that includes responsibility towards the biosphere.