Antiquity

.Before the invention or discovery of the  of  by the , the same words tend to be used to describe the natural "way" in which a plant grows, and the "way" in which, for example, one tribe worships a particular god. For this reason it is claimed these men were the first philosophers in the strict sense, and also the first people to clearly distinguish "nature" and "convention Science was therefore distinguished as the knowledge of nature and things which are true for every community, and the name of the specialized pursuit of such knowledge was philosophy — the realm of the first philosopher-physicists. They were mainly speculators or, particularly interested In contrast, trying to use knowledge of nature to imitate nature (artifice or Greek technē) was seen by classical scientists as a more appropriate interest for lower class artisans. A clear-cut distinction between formal (eon) and empirical science (doxa) was made by the pre-Socratic philosopher (fl. late sixth or early fifth century BCE). Although his work Peri Physeos (On Nature) is a poem, it may be viewed as an epistemological essay on method in natural science. Parmenides' ἐὸν may refer to a formal system or calculus which can describe nature more precisely than natural languages. "Physis" may be identical to ἐὸν.