Benny Goldberg asked me when the phrase “physical sciences” first started being used. At first I went with “intuition”, which suggested that it was a recent invention. But then I looked at Google Books, and was surprised to find (never having thought about this before) that the phrase in English goes back at least to the 1790s. One prominent occurrence is in Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the physical sciences (1835). Her work, which is organized around astronomy and geology, includes also celestial mechanics, acoustics, optics (including color theory), heat theory, electricity, magnetism (these are not yet one topic), gravitation, and a little bit on the influence of climate on living things.
Occurrences in English before 1790 seem to be borrowings from the Continent. The French phrase “sciences physiques” is found as early as 1753 (Encyclopédie, s.v. Chymie, p410)—I doubt that that is the first occurrence. The Latin scientia physica is very common from the beginning of Medieval philosophy onward; it is supposed to denote knowledge of natural things (“physical” in the Aristotelian sense) in general, so that biology or rather the scientia de anima insofar as it deals with the soul as a principle of rest and motion in living things is a scientia physica. The sense of the phrase is thus not quite the same as that of “physical science”.
The question then is: does anyone know the history of this phrase? Or of the term ‘physical’ (and its relatives in French, etc.)? It would seem that the restriction of the physical to the topics treated by Mary Somerville occurred sometime after the decline of Scholasticism, and that our notion of the physical rests on that restriction. Which is to say, that if you call yourself a physicalist then to any philosopher before 1600 you would probably have some explaining to do.
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