**Marcin J. Schroeder**

Global Learning Center, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8576, Japan; schroeder.marcin.e4@tohoku.ac.jp

Received: 6 July 2020; Accepted: 26 August 2020; Published: 1 September 2020

**Abstract:** Contemporary Natural Philosophy is understood here as a project of the pursuit of the integrated description of reality distinguished by the precisely formulated criteria of objectivity, and by the assumption that the statements of this description can be assessed only as true or false according to clearly specified verification procedures established with the exclusive goal of the discrimination between these two logical values, but not with respect to any other norms or values established by the preferences of human collectives or by the individual choices. This distinction assumes only logical consistency, but not completeness. Completeness (i.e., the feasibility to assign true or false value to all possible statements) is desirable, but may be impossible. This paper is not intended as a comprehensive program for the development of the Contemporary Natural Philosophy but rather as a preparation for such program advocating some necessary revisions and extensions of the methodology currently considered as the scientific method. This is the actual focus of the paper and the reason for the reference to Baconian *idola mentis*. Francis Bacon wrote in *Novum Organum* about the fallacies obstructing progress of science. The present paper is an attempt to remove obstacles for the Contemporary Natural Philosophy project to which we have assigned the names of the Idols of the Number, the Idols of the Common Sense, and the Idols of the Elephant.

**Keywords:** contemporary natural philosophy; *idola mentis*; scientific methodology; quantitative and qualitative methods; structural analysis; abstraction; complexity

> *Dedicated to Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic who proposed the idea of the Contemporary Natural Philosophy Project*
