The inverted commas [around the word ”philosophical”] are intended to emphasize that, for this period, to distinguish rigidly between philosophy and science would be grossly anachronistic, and add even more to the historiographical distortion introduced by the policy of selectivity.

The only way to avoid the production of histories of seventeenth-century philosophy in which all occurrences of the words ”philosophical” and ”scientific” must be corseted by inverted commas is to define the status of natural philosophy, which, after all, provided the platform for the extension of philosophy into the domains we now call science.