Lectures - History/Philosophy Science

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Browsing Lectures - History/Philosophy Science by Subject "Catholic Church"

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    Jesuits and the New Cosmology
    (1991-06-10) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
    Because the Jesuit order was formed in 1540 and survived as a vibrant and powerful force until 1773, when it was dissolved in Europe, Jesuit natural philosophers found themselves living in a period of enormous scientific and intellectual change. Founded only three years before the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, the Jesuits had to confront the new science that was emerging from that landmark treatise. In a real sense, they were caught between two intellectual conceptions of the world: the geocentric Aristotelian world view and the new one taking shape around the heliocentric system of Copernicus and the new discoveries of Tycho Brahe and Galileo. What was the reaction of Jesuit natural philosophers?
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    The Nature of West European Science in the Late Middle Ages (1200-1500)
    (1993-04-30) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
    By the twelfth century, western Europe had developed a hunger for new secular learning. Up to that time, what scholars knew about the physical world was derived from traditional Latin handbooks that contained the remnants of a popular science that went back to the Greeks of the Hellenistic period. The knowledge they sought has been appropriately characterized as "Greco-Arabic" science because it consisted of works written in Greek within a Greek cultural orbit going back as far as the 5th century B.C., and also of works written in Arabic that had been either translated from Greek or were original compositions. The number of works translated from Arabic into Latin far exceeded those translated from Greek into Latin. These translations were made by scholars from all parts of Europe, who went to Spain, Sicily, and northern Italy, or were already inhabitants of these places. Most of those who translated from Arabic to Latin had to learn Arabic, which was not their native language. Without their extraordinary achievements, late medieval science in Europe might never have occurred. This vast amount of new learning that entered western Europe, and which had never before known in the Latin language, is appropriately divisible into two categories: the first includes treatises that were devoted to technical science, such as Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest; the second embraces those that were classifiable as works of natural philosophy, especially those written by Aristotle (along with commentaries on Aristotle's treatises by the Arabian commentators, Averroes [1126-1198] and Avicenna [980-1037]). Although both of these divisions of Greco-Arabic science were important for the development of the history of science, I will argue that what medieval scholars did with natural philosophy and the role they assigned to it in intellectual life was ultimately more important than what they did with the technical sciences. In this lecture, I shall focus on the role of natural philosophy.