Mathematics and Its Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Marshall Clagett. Edward Grant , John E. Murdoch

Isis ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-344
Author(s):  
Steven D. Sargent
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Middle Ages

scholarly journals Knowledge of the weather in the Middle Ages: Libellus de disposicione totius anni futuri1

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-78
Author(s):  
Marilina Cesario
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Weather Forecasting ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Academic Learning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

In this chapter Marilina Cesario addresses the subject of weather forecasting in the Middle Ages as revealed in the meteorological prognostics that survive abundantly from throughout the period but particularly from the eleventh century onwards. The chapter focuses in particular on one fifteenth-century medical manuscript from Germany containing an anthology of seven Latin weather texts. Cesario edits and translates the texts for the first time and offers detailed discussion of them. She finds that these treatises contribute to their manuscript’s overarching interest in natural philosophy and that they were mostly given theoretical rather than practical usage, having their place in a context of academic learning (eruditio). One item stands out from the others, however, a puzzling salt prognostication found uniquely here. This text relies not, it is argued, on erudite knowledge but on knowledge acquired empirically and appears to have been designed for practical use.

Robert Grosseteste on the Subalternate Sciences

Traditio ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. R. Laird
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
The Middle Ages

It is well known that in the Middle Ages mathematics had little part in the study of nature. Natural philosophy, which had in its purview all of nature and natural things, was considered fundamentally distinct from mathematics, both in subject matter and in method. Yet there was a handful of sciences in which mathematics and natural philosophy came together, sciences that were to have a very significant role in later scientific thought. These were what Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, called the ‘intermediate sciences’ (scientiae mediae), since they were thought of as in some way intermediate between the natural and the mathematical; they included astronomy, optics, harmonics, and sometimes mechanics. They were also known as the ‘subalternate sciences,’ since they were considered under, or subalternate to, pure mathematics, and sometimes to natural philosophy as well.

The Diffusion of Aristotle's Moral Philosophy in Spain, ca. 1400 — ca. 1600

Traditio ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 287-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. D. Pagden
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout much of the Middle Ages the Iberian Peninsula had been responsible for the transmision to Europe of many of Aristotle's works and those of his Arab commentators. Without the ‘school’ of translators, which flourished at Toledo for nearly a century after its foundation in the 1120s by archbishop Raimundo, the twelfth-century revival of Aristotelianism at Paris would scarcely have been possible. But the motley Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula benefited less from the tradition of Arab scholarship than did their northern neighbours. Intellectual concerns were rather narrowly limited to the requirements of the schools and interest in the moral writings of Aristotle was therefore less pronounced than it was in the sphere of natural philosophy. The evidence for Spanish scholarly initiatives in respect of Aristotle's moral philosophy before the beginning of the fifteenth century is, indeed, slender; there are some commentaries and compendia used in teaching but certainly nothing to compare with the activities of Grosseteste, Moerbeke, Burley, and Oresme.

Humanist Culture and Renaissance Mathematics: The Italian Libraries of the Quattrocento

1973 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 46-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lawrence Rose
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Renaissance Mathematics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

There are two major problems in renaissance science, each of which has a cultural, as well as a scientific, dimension. The first problem concerns the impact of humanism upon the science of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is often claimed that the humanist influence was malign: by attacking scholastic thought, the humanists tried to interrupt the steady evolution of modern science from its medieval scholastic form to the more advanced structure of Galileo. A necessary foundation of this claim is, of course, the internal history of science argument, known as the Duhem thesis, which holds that the main ancestry of Galileo's thought is indeed the scholastic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages.

The Discovery of Nature: The Contribution of the Chartrians to Twelfth-Century Attempts to Found aScientia naturalis

Traditio ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 135-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Speer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

If one takes standard overviews of the history of natural science or natural philosophy as his measure, the object appearing in the title of this study would literally appear not to exist. For, apart from a few scattered encyclopedia entries — which are always of necessity rather summary in character — one searches in vain for studies on the medieval interest in the natural sciences. For the contemporary cosmologist, be he first and foremost philosopher or physicist, the Middle Ages lie in a very deep darkness indeed.

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