Not to be confused with “natural philosophy”, considered as the pursuit of an objective knowledge of phenomena, several “philosophies of nature” have adopted a more intuitive approach, as followed by thinkers like Gottfried W. Leibniz, Georg W.F. Hegel or Henri Bergson, but also by those who represent the specific current called Naturphilosophie, which belongs to the Romantic period [→ Romanticism] lato sensu (end of the 18th century and first half of the 19th), particularly in Germany.

Among the precursors of Naturphilosophie are, in particular, → Christian Theosophy, “mosaic ph…