As a result, natural philosophy is autonomous and independent of both the other contemplative sciences.
Among 20th-century philosophers were the so-called historicists -- those willing to speculate about and proclaim metaphysical truths independent of empirical evidence -- and the formalists -- those mathematical logicians who considered philosophy an autonomous, ahistorical discipline that replaced metaphysical speculation with scientific thinking.
Instead of adhering to the completely autonomous subjectivity of Fichtean philosophy, Novalis argues that the subject is inwardly split, not just between thought and feeling, but ultimately also between the hubris of believing that thought can in fact grasp the basic self-feeling, and the realization that this feeling cannot be conceptually processed as such.
The interminable discussion of the methodology of arts and sciences in the sixteenth century may be seen as an attempt to defend the scientific status of either the recently found autonomous sciences, like natural philosophy, or, on the other hand, the empirically based productive arts.
Over time, as you solve problems and assess the quality of the decisions you have made, you will be able to evolve from where you started into something autonomous of the original philosophy.
As noted by Romero above, during the colonial period philosophy was not autonomous from education.
Very roughly, non-naturalism in meta-ethics is the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.
One long-term process with profound implications was the steady departure of the various sciences from philosophy to form autonomous disciplines.
Collingwood is the author of one of the most important treatises in meta-philosophy written in the first half of the twentieth century, An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), which is a sustained attempt to explain why philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive method and subject matter that differ from those of the natural and the exact sciences.
In more recent times, the idea that Tempier's condemnation was a symptom of the existence of rationalist currents at the University of Paris, in the sense of the emergence of philosophy as an autonomous discipline vis-à-vis divine revelation, has been further developed by scholars such as Alain de Libera, Kurt Flasch, and Luca Bianchi.
