Sklar, Lawrence - Philosophy of Physics

The demarcation of the natural sciences from philosophy has been a long and gradual process in Western thought. Originally, inquiry into the nature of things consisted in an amalgamation of what would now be thought of as philosophy: general considerations of the broadest sort about the nature of being and the nature of our cognitive access to it, and what would now be considered to be the specific sciences: the amassing of observational fact and the formulation of general and theoretical hypotheses to explain it.