Our Common Cosmos:Towards a New Natural Philosophy

The academic aspects of the tangled and largely misunderstood relationship between theology and science are themselves complicated further by the discipli- nary fragmentation that has marked universities for the last two centuries. The appar- ently super cial change in usage from ‘natural philosophy’ to ‘science’ in the early nineteenth century has disguised, yet signi es linguistic, metaphysical and theologi- cal moves whose consequences for academic fragmentation have surfaced since. In this paper we examine these through the lens of a departure from the notion of ‘wisdom,’ as a complementary good to ‘knowledge.’ We trace a possible re-constitu- tion of a contemporary natural philosophy and its consequences for recognition of a common narrative of creativity in scholarship and beyond, a renewed philosophy of interdisciplinarity, a transformed relation of science and theology, and a route to re-establishing a more democratic participation in the scienti c process.