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Late-Medieval Natural Philosophy: Some Recent Trends in Scholarship*

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Late-Medieval Natural Philosophy: Some Recent Trends in Scholarship* LATE-MEDIEVAL NATURAL PHILOSOPHY: SOME RECENT TRENDS IN SCHOLARSHIP* 1. General Orientation In this survey, I should like to present an overview of the scholarly literature that appeared during the last decade or so in the field of fourteenth-century natural philosophy1. This survey is partial in both senses of the term: it is fragmentary, and occasionally, it records my disagreements with some of the scholarly literature. Before narrowing down its scope it might be well to raise two methodological problems which one encounters when attempting to deal with the history of late-medieval natural philosophy of the sort with which this survey is * Research for this article was financially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (200-22-295). I wish to thank Christoph Lüthy and Paul Bakker for their helpful suggestions. 1. To my knowledge, no other surveys of scholarship in the field of late-medieval nat- ural philosophy have recently appeared. A useful introduction to the scholarly literature up until approximately 1989 is given in the following essays: J. COLEMAN, «The Oxford Calculatores: Richard and Roger Swineshead», in: G. FLØISTAD (ed.), Contemporary Phi- losophy. A New Survey, Dordrecht-Boston-London 1990, Vol. 6/1, pp. 467-471; J. SARNOWSKY, «The Oxford Calculatores», in: G. FLØISTAD (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy. A New Survey, pp. 473-480; E. GRANT et J. E. MURDOCH, «The Parisian School of Sci- ence in the Fourteenth Century», in: G. FLØISTAD (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy. A New Survey, pp. 481-493; J. ZUPKO, «The Parisian School of Science in the Fourteenth Cen- tury», in: G. FLØISTAD (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy. A New Survey, pp. 495-509. Fur- ther references can be found in: J. NEU, Isis Cumulative Bibliography 1986-95, 4 vol., Canton (Mass.) 1997, and Bibliographie Annuelle du moyen-âge tardif. Auteurs et textes latins, Paris — Turnhout 1991 sqq., and, moreover, in the collections of articles by lead- ing historians of medieval science which have been published over the years by Variorum reprints and by other publishers. To the older collections of essays by Clagett, Grant, Lindberg, Maier, Moody, and Weisheipl have been added over the last decade: J. D. NORTH, The Universal Frame. Historical Essays in Astronomy, Natural Philosophy and Scientific Method, London 1989; ID., Stars, Minds and Fate. Essays in Ancient and Medieval Cosmology, London 1989; G. BEAUJOUAN, Science médiévale d’Espagne et d’alen- tour, London 1989; ID., Par raison de nombres. L’art du calcul et les savoirs scientifiques médiévaux, London 1991; A. C. CROMBIE, Science, Optics, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought, London 1990; ID., Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought, London 1996; G. MOLLAND, Mathematics and the Medieval Ancestry of Physics, London 1995. ©RTPM 67,1 (2000) 158-190 LATE-MEDIEVAL NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 159 concerned. First, the terminology of «natural philosophy», and sec- ond, the relation between natural philosophy and theology in the late Middle Ages. As a convenient point of departure to address these two prelimi- nary issues, I have chosen a recent book by Roger French and Andrew Cunningham2. In it, the authors claim that it is a commonly held assumption among historians of medieval science today that medieval people were practising science (in which we customarily use that term today), and that their expression «Natural philosophy», philosophia naturalis, essentially meant the same thing to them as our expression «sci- ence» means to us (p. 4). In contrast to this approach, French and Cunningham want to draw a picture which highlights the God-oriented nature of natural phi- losophy and its «religio-political» motivation. According to the authors, the historiography of medieval science has suffered a major distortion, which is due to the fact that the modern category of science, both as a form of knowledge and as an activity, has been retrospectively cast back on men of religion and on to the secular masters of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The elision of the subject-area the medievals were pursuing in their work on nature (that is, natural philosophy) with the modern subject they were not pursuing, because it had not yet been created (that is, science), has not been noticed. Partly this is because modern scholars have been particularly con- cerned with those respects in which natural philosophy appears most to resemble modern science, and they have thus been least concerned with those respects in which they differ. Partly, as hinted above, it is because the achievements (or otherwise) of these medievals in their work on nature is, for modern writers, part of a larger modern dispute about the relative status of secular and religious values. What the medievals were actually concerned with in their discussions of nature has therefore not been been a question that has been asked (p. 274). The above characterization of present-day historiography of medieval science is, I believe, fundamentally misleading, if not a caricature. Over the past few decades, the general consensus among historians of medieval science has been that the history of science (and mathemat- ics) runs parallel to the history of philosophy. Or, as John Murdoch 2. R. FRENCH et A. CUNNINGHAM, Before Science. The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy. Aldershot 1996. 160 RECHERCHES DE THÉOLOGIE ET PHILOSOPHIE MÉDIÉVALES once put it, a good part of the history of medieval science is part of the history of medieval philosophy3. For this reason, historians in this field have been agreeing for a long time that the most appropri- ate designation for the medieval study of nature is «natural philoso- phy» or «philosophy of nature» and that the alternative expression «science» should always be used with this connotation4. As is well known, the creation of medieval natural philosophy as a discipline is intimately linked to the introduction of Aristotle’s works into the university curriculum5. By the end of the twelfth century, most of Aristotle’s works had been translated into Latin. They came, however, only slowly into circulation. The year 1255 is usually taken as a dramatic turning point in the world of medieval learning. In that year, the arts faculty at Paris passed legislation which made all known works by Aristotle compulsory reading to all students. Other univer- sities too had already introduced or introduced his works into their curricula. For the next four hundred years, these Aristotelian texts came to be continuously studied and commented upon at all the centers of learning in Europe. One of the new domains of philoso- phy created by the introduction of Aristotle’s works into the curricu- lum was natural philosophy. It was variously designated as scientia naturalis, physica, philosophia naturalis, and, in the post-medieval period, as physiologia. The second preliminary observation concerns the religious and theological contexts of late-medieval natural philosophy. Roger French and Andrew Cunningham in their book maintain that «the science of the medieval people was highly religious», or that «religion 3. J. E. MURDOCH, «From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning», in: J. E. MURDOCH et E. SYLLA (edd.), The Cul- tural Context of Medieval Learning, Dordrecht 1975, pp. 271-272. 4. See, for instance, D. C. LINDBERG (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages, Chicago 1978, pp. vii-xv, and ID., The Beginnings of Western Science. The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450, Chicago-Lon- don 1992, pp. 1-4. 5. This is not to say that natural philosophy did not exist before the transmission of Aristotle’s treatises to the West. A comprehensive discussion of natural philosophy in the twelfth century is given in A. SPEER, Die entdeckte Natur. Untersuchungen zu Begrün- dungsversuchen einer «scientia naturalis» im 12. Jahrhundert, Leiden-New York-Köln 1995. This study revives the notion of the School of Chartres as a coherent branch of Platon- ism, which, according to the author, ought not to be considered as the preparation for the entry of Aristotle in the West. LATE-MEDIEVAL NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 161 was the matrix in which science was shaped in medieval times» (p.4). This observation is only true in the very general sense that natural philosophers, like any Christian, were not supposed to contradict the truths of faith. What French and Cunningham, however, really mean by their observation is that there never existed an autonomous nat- ural philosophy during the Middle Ages. They state that late- medieval natural philosophy was God-oriented, that is, that natural philosophy was a study in which the central concerns were the detec- tion, admiration and appreciation of God’s existence, goodness, providence, munificence, forethought and provision for His creation (p. 4). The self-proclaimed purpose of their book is «to bring back into vis- ibility» this alleged nature of natural philosophy6. By their claims, the authors deny that natural philosophy consti- tuted an independent discipline pursued for its own sake, that is, independently from theology. In my view, the characterization given by French and Cunningham of medieval natural philosophy ignores the abundant evidence found in late-medieval texts that natural phi- losophy and theology were two separate, though connected, disci- plines. Medieval natural philosophers and theologians had a clear sense, for instance, that appeals to faith did not count as arguments in natural philosophy, and, moreover, that natural philosophers had to steer away from theological issues. Yet, some of the finest work in natural philosophy seems to have been done within a theological context. How is this phenomenon consistent with the supposed autonomy of natural philosophy7? 6. The thesis of French and Cunningham has also been criticised by Edward Grant, though along different lines than here.
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