Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Ancient Egypt to Plato
- 2 Aristotle (384–322 BC)
- 3 Late Antiquity
- 4 Islam and the Eastward Shift of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy
- 5 Natural Philosophy before the Latin Translations
- 6 Translations in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
- 7 Natural Philosophy after the Translations: Its Role and Place in the Late Middle Ages
- 8 The Form and Content of Late Medieval Natural Philosophy
- 9 The Relations between Natural Philosophy and Theology
- 10 The Transformation of Medieval Natural Philosophy from the Early Modern Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Ancient Egypt to Plato
- 2 Aristotle (384–322 BC)
- 3 Late Antiquity
- 4 Islam and the Eastward Shift of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy
- 5 Natural Philosophy before the Latin Translations
- 6 Translations in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
- 7 Natural Philosophy after the Translations: Its Role and Place in the Late Middle Ages
- 8 The Form and Content of Late Medieval Natural Philosophy
- 9 The Relations between Natural Philosophy and Theology
- 10 The Transformation of Medieval Natural Philosophy from the Early Modern Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As we look back on the history of science, it seems that a strong case can be made for the assumption that the emergence of modern science was in some significant and meaningful sense dependent on the existence of a well-developed natural philosophy. To establish this thesis, we must first go back to the late Middle Ages, when natural philosophy reached its mature development after it became a required subject in the medieval universities. Did this mature and institutionalized natural philosophy possess the requisite characteristics that would enable science in general, and the particular sciences that comprise it, to emerge in the centuries to follow?
Is this perhaps a pseudo-issue? Was it not true that during the late Middle Ages exact, or “middle,” sciences, such as astronomy, optics, and mechanics, already existed independently of, but concurrently with, natural philosophy? In truth, these exact sciences had themselves once been a part of natural philosophy as far back as the period just before Aristotle. In his classification of theoretical knowledge, Aristotle classified the exact sciences as independent of natural philosophy, because they were seemingly as much mathematical as they were natural philosophy; but they were neither mathematics nor natural philosophy. Nor were they sciences in the later modern sense. Why is this so? Precisely because they were mathematical disciplines that were only supposed to focus on limited problems that could be resolved only by mathematics but were not to be resolved by natural philosophy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Natural PhilosophyFrom the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, pp. 323 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007