The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science

Abstract

Unlike the science of the present day, which is frequently set in opposition to philosophy, the science of the Middle Ages was an integral part of a philosophical outlook. The field of vision for this outlook was that originally defined by Aristotle, but enlarged in some cases, restricted in others, by insights deriving from religious beliefs — Jewish, Islamic, and Christian. The factors that framed this outlook came to be operative at different times and places, and they influenced individual thinkers in a variety of ways. As a consequence, there was never, at any period of the Middle Ages, a uniform philosophical setting from which scientific thought, as we now know it, emerged. Rather, medieval philosophy, itself neither monolithic, authori-itarian, nor benighted — its common characterizations until several decades ago — underwent an extensive development that can be articulated into many movements and schools spanning recognizable chronological periods. Not all of this development, it turns out, is of equal interest to the historian of science. The movement that invites his special attention is a variety of Aristotelianism known as high scholasticism, which flourished in the century roughly between 1250 and 1350, and which provides the proximate philosophical setting for an understanding of high and late medieval science. Explaining such a setting will be the burden of this essay: how it came into being, why it stimulated the activity that interests historians of science, and how it ultimately dissolved, giving way in the process to the rise of the modern era.¹