The Identity of Natural Philosophy. a Response To Edward Grant

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12619829
AutoresAshley Cunningham (0000-0003-2536-3011, 1University of Cambridge, autor de correspondencia)
Año2000
Volumen5
Número3
Páginas259-278
Fecha de publicación2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEarly Science and Medicine (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1383-7427 • E-ISSN: 1573-3823
EditorialBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/157338200x00227
OpenAlexW1986282854
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6

The editors of Early Science and Medicine have kindly invited me to reply in the pages of this journal to an extended critique of my views by Professor Edward Grant which was published last year in a Festschrift volume dedicated to John D. North.' The issue on which my position is currently under attack is the one I have used as the title to the present piece: the identity of natural philosophy. This issue is, I would hope, highly relevant to the readership of the present journal. For natural philosophy was the intellectual domain, the discipline, or the group of disciplines, under which Nature was usually discussed and studied among medieval and early modern men of religion, in the medieval and early modern university, and in the early modern court. Natural philosophy was practised in Europe, in one form or another, from the early thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Natural philosophy subsumed or included some or all of the studies that we historians would customarily want to include under the title of 'medieval and early modern science'. And yet, as far as my researches have gone over more than a dozen years of interest in this topic, I have only found one historian in the 191 or 20th century who has tried to define what natural philosophy was, or to distinguish it clearly from (modern) science.2 For historians of science today simply act as if natural philosophy was just (modern) science under an earlier name and at an earlier stage in its development

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