scholarly journals Before Science and Religion: Learning from Medieval Physics

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-135
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
Scientific Imagination

Scientists today are surprised when confronted by the sophistication of natural philosophy of the thirteenth century. Although clearly of a former age and holding very different perceptions of material structure, its mathematical and imaginative exploration of nature is striking. It also finds a natural theological and contemplative framing; because of this it can work as a resource for contemporary projects constructing ‘theology of science’ and constructing different approaches to the relation of science and religion. Taking the work of the English polymath Robert Grosseteste from the 1220s as an example, I exemplify these claims in more detail through three aspects of medieval physics: 1) a teleological narrative for science; 2) a fresh apprehension of scientific imagination; and 3) a christological and incarnational metaphysics.

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

Twelfth-century Cosmography, theDe secretis philosophie, and Māshā'allāh (Attr. to),Liber de Orbe

Traditio ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 235-276
Author(s):  
Barbara Obrist
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Lunar Eclipse ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Central Section ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester ◽  
The Universe

TheLiber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (fl. 762–ca. 815) in the list of Gerard of Cremona's translations, stands out as one of the few identifiable sources for the indirect knowledge of Peripatetic physics and cosmology at the very time Aristotle's works on natural philosophy themselves were translated into Latin, from the 1130s onward. This physics is expounded in an opening series of chapters on the bodily constitution of the universe, while the central section of the treatise covers astronomical subjects, and the remaining parts deal with meteorology and the vegetal realm. Assuming that Gerard of Cremona's translation of theLiber de orbecorresponds to the twenty-seven chapter version that circulated especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was, however, not this version, but a forty-chapter expansion thereof that became influential as early as the 1140s. It may have originated in Spain, as indicated, among others, by a reference to the difference of visibility of a lunar eclipse between Spain and Mecca. Unlike the twenty-seven chapterLiber de orbe, this expanded and also partly modified text remains in manuscript, and none of the three copies known so far gives a title or mentions Māshā'allāh as an author. Instead, the thirteenth-century witness that is now in New York attributes the work to an Alcantarus:Explicit liber Alcantari Caldeorum philosophi. While no Arabic original of the twenty-seven chapterLiber de orbehas come to light yet, Taro Mimura of the University of Manchester recently identified a manuscript that partly corresponds to the forty-chapter Latin text, as well as a shorter version thereof.

Hugh of St Victor, Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Place of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Architectures of Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 153 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-318
Author(s):  
Alexander Fidora ◽  
Nicola Polloni
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One ◽  
Mechanical Arts

This contribution engages with the problematic position of the mechanical arts within medieval systems of knowledge. Superseding the secondary position assigned to the mechanical arts in the Early Middle Ages, the solutions proposed by Hugh of St Victor and Gundissalinus were highly influential during the thirteenth century. While Hugh’s integration of the mechanical arts into his system of knowledge betrays their still ancillary position as regards consideration of the liberal arts, Gundissalinus’s theory proposes two main novelties. On the one hand, he sets the mechanical arts alongside alchemy and the arts of prognostication and magic. On the other, however, using the theory put forward by Avicenna, he subordinates these “natural sciences” to natural philosophy itself, thereby establishing a broader architecture of knowledge hierarchically ordered. Our contribution examines the implications of such developments and their reception afforded at Paris during the thirteenth century, emphasising the relevance that the solutions offered by Gundissalinus enjoyed in terms of the ensuing discussions concerning the structure of human knowledge.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-202
Author(s):  
Mike A. Zuber
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Chemical Processes ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Jacob Boehme ◽  
Material Substances

The epilogue summarises the book’s narrative and outlines avenues for future research. Spiritual alchemy is chiefly important as a hybrid that defies a straightforward distinction between science and religion. In a way, its story is one of religious dissenters productively appropriating natural philosophy to articulate their faith. After laboratory alchemy was effectively eclipsed and the link to Jacob Boehme weakened, spiritual alchemy lost its internal cohesion and gave way to many divergent interpretations of alchemy that distanced it from the manipulation of material substances through chemical processes. Future studies will be able to shed more light on various alternative interpretations of alchemy that can now be perceived more clearly in contrast to the long tradition of spiritual alchemy described in this book.

scholarly journals The First Astronomical Text Published in the American Continent

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (S349) ◽  
pp. 435-437
Author(s):  
Marco Arturo Moreno-Corral ◽  
William J. Schuster
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
American Continent ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
And Algebra ◽  
Mathematics Book

AbstractIn 1539 the Italian Giovanni Paoli, better known as Juan Pablos, began operating in Mexico City the first printing press that existed in the New World. The first books he printed were religious texts, vocabularies of some indigenous languages of Mexico, and compilations of ordinances and laws. In 1556 followed the Sumario compendioso de las cuentas, a text of arithmetic and algebra that was the first American mathematics book. A year later, he printed the Physica Speculatio by friar Alonso de la Veracruz, a text of Natural Philosophy that dealt with Aristotelian works such as Physics, On the Heavens, and Meteorology. As part of this book, was included the text of geocentric astronomy written during the thirteenth century by the Italian mathematician Giovanni Campano de Novara, entitled Tractatus de Sphaera, where the author discussed, from a geometric perspective, the cosmic structure and the stellar distribution. No doubt this is the first astronomical treatise that was published in the entire American continent, which is why it is emphasized here.

John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion. Nicholas H. Clulee

Isis ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-135
Author(s):  
Lesley B. Cormack
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion

Heavens On Earth. From the Tabula Smaragdina To the Alchemical Fifth Essence

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Technical Process ◽  
Full Development ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
John Of Rupescissa ◽  
Heaven And Earth

AbstractAlchemical writings of Arabic origin introduced into the Latin natural philosophy of the twelfth century a cosmological issue that was at variance with Aristotelian cosmology: the idea of a subtle substance that stood at the origin of the four elements and encompassed heaven and earth. In this article, I consider the links of this notion with Hermetic and Stoic thought; its association with the technical process of distillation; its emergence in some philosophical texts of the early thirteenth century; and finally its full development in two fourteenth century alchemical treatises, the Testamentum attributed to Raimond Lull and the Liber de consideratione quintae essentiae written by John of Rupescissa.

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