Mechanics from Bradwardine to Galileo

It is difficult to understand any movement, as the Schoolmen would say, without knowing its terminus ad quenm. The movement that gave rise to modern science is no exception. Assuming that science in its classical form arrived in Western Europe during the seventeenth century, to investigate how medieval and scholastic thought may have accelerated its arrival one must have clearly in mind what is to be understood by science. It will not do, for instance, to think of an interplay between pure theory and experiment, as though the seventeenth-century scientist was intent on elaborating a postulational system from which he could deduce empirically verifiable consequents. Such a view of science had to wait at least two more centuries; it belongs to a different thought-context than that of the seventeenth century. No, the terminus ad quem of the movement that gave rise to modern science is simpler than that. At the risk of oversimplifying it, in this paper the concept of science will be narrowed to that of physics, and only the part of physics known as mechanics will be considered. More particularly still, discussion will be centered only on the part of mechanics that deals with what the Schoolmen called motus localis, or local motion, comprising the present-day disciplines of kinematics and dynamics.2 From such a restricted viewpoint, seventeenth-century mechanics may be characterized by its attempts at a precise mathematical formulation of laws that regulate such natural phenomena as falling bodies, and by parallel attempts to measure and determine experimentally how well such a formulation corresponds to reality. In sum, the developing science of mechanics, the terminus ad quem of late medieval thought, may be seen as made

Epistemology · Galileo (satellite navigation) · Geodesy · Geology · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Probability and Statistical Research

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