PHYSICS discipline of natural philosophy into the science of physics, whose role was the empirical investigation of actual natural laws, and the philosophy of physics, whose task it was to analyse the concepts presupposed by any physical inquiry In the second phase, philosophers examined a wide gamut of possible conceptions of space and time, ranging from the extreme realism of Newton and Clarke to the subjective idealism of Kant In our next and Wnal volume, there will not be a thematic chapter devoted to the philosophy of physics By the nineteenth century physics was a fully mature empirical science, operating independently of philosophy; the history of physics is now quite separate from the history of philosophy To be sure, the philosophy of physics continues on its way, as an analysis of the conceptual implications of novel physical theories Such a discipline, however, can be pursued only by those with more knowledge of the modern science of physics itself than can be presumed in the readership of an introductory history of philosophy 180