The Identity of Natural Philosophy. A Response to Edward Grant

The Identity of Natural Philosophy. A Response to Edward GrantAuthor(s): Andrew CunninghamSource: Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2000), pp. 259-278Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4130186 .

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THE IDENTITY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. A RESPONSE TO EDWARD GRANT

ANDREW CUNNINGHAM

University of Cambridge

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 re- searches 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 distin-

guish 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,

' Edward Grant, "God, Science, and Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages," in Between Demonstration and Imagination. Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North, eds. Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 243-67.

2 John A. Schuster, "The Scientific Revolution," in Companion to the History of Modern Science, eds. R.C. Olby et al. (London: Routledge, 1990) 217-42, p. 224. What Schuster says is: 'every system of natural philosophy, whether of a generally Aristotelian, mechanistic or Neo-Platonic magical/alchemical type, purported to describe and explain the entire universe and the relation of that universe to God, however conceived. The enterprise also involved, explicitly, a concern with the place of human beings and society in that universe' (my italics). It will be seen that I agree wholeheartedly with this description.

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2000 Early Science and Medicine 5, 3



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that in this sense it had no identity separate from that of (modern) science, that the only significant difference between natural

philosophy and (modern) science was a matter of the period at which it was practised and the level to which it had been devel-

oped. As a result, we have no histories of natural philosophy as such, only histories of 'medieval science' and of 'early modern science'.

The meanings we attribute to the term 'science' in our re- searches and writings as historians of science are crucial, yet are

usually uninspected and unspecified by us. This is a potential source of confusion and mistaken identities. We use the term 'science' in many senses. Sometimes we mean the activity of

making science, sometimes we mean the product of scientific research, sometimes we mean an attitude of mind, sometimes we mean an external judgement made on the status of a statement or

activity, sometimes we mean more than one of these at once. It is a very slippery term. We rarely specify which meaning we intend at a given time, relying on our readers or listeners to recognise which one we mean. It is no surprise that we misunderstand and

disagree with each other from time to time as historians of science, as one person may be meaning it in one sense, and another person hearing it in another. This is one of the issues, I believe, which lies at the root of the disagreements between myself and Professor Grant. As will already have been seen, in the hope of introducing some clarity into my own usage of the term I am using the expression (modern) science constantly in this paper, with the brackets round the modern, to express a particular sense of the term. I shall explain this curious usage at the end. In the meantime I hope it will not be too irritating.

One set of senses of the term 'science' is particularly pertinent to discussion of the medieval and early modern period, and needs to be raised before we start. 'Science' of course comes from scientia, a Latin term which was widely used by educated men. Scientia was applied by medieval people to the best kind of knowl-

edge: knowledge that was based on demonstrable principles, that is of effects through their causes. Scientia was also used for disci-

plines or activities which produced knowledge of this kind. Thus in the 13" century, when theology as a new discipline was established in the new universities, it was a science. It produced firm knowledge, that is science, and was thus 'scientific' (i.e. productive of scientia). It was often called the 'queen of the sciences'. Yet it



THE IDENTITY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 261

has to be remembered that, at least in its earliest period, theology was, like the other sciences, a rational subject, one whose practitioners preferred to rely on reason rather than on faith or reve- lation as their guarantee of truth. Now when, as historians of science, we use the terms 'science' and 'scientific' about the medieval period, although we know all this about the relation of theol-

ogy and science, this is not what we usually mean. What we mean is that the practice or text we are discussing reminds us of (modern) science-reminds us of what we today know as science in our own world-and looks to us simply like an early version of it. So

already there is a confusion, or at the least an ambiguity, between our usage of the term 'science' and that of the people of the 13th

century. But we don't specify this difference. The ambiguity is made worse by the fact that the particular medieval academic dis-

ciplines which historians of science have chosen to study, were of course also sciences (scientiae). So natural philosophy as a domain or discipline, was in practice made up of several scientiae, and could itself be seen as a scientia in this sense. So these disciplines, and natural philosophy as a whole, were science, but not in the

meaning which the historian of science usually intends. The re- verse, however, was not the case: science was not natural philosophy. Thus if one were to say that in the medieval period 'science

equals philosophy' or 'science equals natural philosophy' (as has been maintained, though not by Professor Grant),3 then all the terms are topsy-turvy, with a complete mix-up of medieval and modern meanings. For what this assertion means is that (modern) science in their period went under the titles of 'philosophy' or 'natural philosophy', which I trust is self-evidently absurd as a historical claim.

Given the vast difference in the nature of the societies of medieval and early modern Europe from the society of today, it seemed a reasonable first assumption to me when starting this line of research, that the identity of natural philosophy-a discipline no- where pursued today in the modern world, as far as I know-may have differed from that of (modern) science. Initially I raised this

simply as a possibility, a possibility whose validity could only be tested by historiographic investigation and by empirical historical

' John Murdoch, "Philosophy and the Enterprise of Science in the Later Mid-

dle Ages," in The Interaction Between Science and Philosophy, ed. Y. Elkana (Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974) 51-113, p. 52. This is the argument of Murdoch's whole paper.



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research. However, here I found that my fellow historians of science had not only not raised this possibility but, for the most

part, they were not interested in raising it. And why should they have been, given that they believed that they already knew the state of things, viz. that natural philosophy was merely an early name for (modern) science at an earlier stage of its development? What

point then in asking whether natural philosophy and (modern) science were different from each other, whether the practitioners of the one would recognise the practice of the other, whether the

point of the one differed from the point of the other, whether the

findings in the one practice had a different status from the find-

ings in the other practice? If there were only one practice, in an

early and late form, there was no point in raising any of these

questions. Nevertheless, I persevered. In my first publication in the area I

explored some aspects of the identity of science as a practice, and where and how that practice might have originated.4 In itself such an exploration broke new ground. I must have been just about the first historian of science who had ever asked how historians of science formulated topics for their research, and how they then found those topics in the past they study. It was central to my ar-

gument in that first paper that science is an intentional activity. In this sense it is like a game: you must have a concept of the activity in order to engage in it, and you can only engage in it deliberately. It is not something you do while you thought you were doing something else. So that would mean that if natural philosophy had had an identity different from that of (modern) science, then natural philosophers would not, could not, have been practising (modern) science, while simply being unconscious of themselves

doing so, nor could they have been making findings in (modern) science while believing that they were making findings in natural

philosophy. If the intentionality argument is to be taken seriously, then the implications for the separate identity of natural philosophy from that of (modern) science were very strong.

Subsequently I explored something of Isaac Newton's practice of natural philosophy, what he meant by the term when he used it

4 Andrew Cunningham, "Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19

(1988)" 365-89.




to describe his own practice and his own published work.5 New- ton is the most famous practitioner of natural philosophy and, if natural philosophy was indeed a practice different from (modern) science, then it would be important to understand what Newton meant when in 1687 he called his famous book 'The Mathemati- cal Principles of Natural Philosophy' (Principia Mathematica Philoso-

phiae Naturalis). As historians of science we have always read this work and its title as paradigmatic early-modern instances of (modern) science. Perhaps it would read differently--perhaps it would mean something different-if we looked at it instead as a paradigmatic instance of natural philosophy, as the title its author chose for it seemed to announce it to be?

Finally on the historiographic side, I wrote an article with a col-

league, Perry Williams, on the origins of our present-day picture of the history of science, and on the possibility of making a different, and indeed superior, 'big picture' of the history of science.6 The role of natural philosophy as a possible different practice of

investigating nature from that of (modern) science played a ma-

jor role in our argument. Historiography-talking about doing history-is one thing.

Doing the history is another. I began to explore the medieval ori-

gins of two particular versions of natural philosophy with another

colleague, Roger French. The book that we published in 1996 dealt with the origin, nature and deployment of versions of natural philosophy by two Orders of friar in the early 13f century: the Dominicans and the Franciscans. We called it Before Science: The Invention of the Friars' Natural Philosophy.7 It was an area new to both of us. Looking back, I am struck by our initial innocence in un-

dertaking the project which resulted in that book. For when we started neither of us (not being Catholics, or indeed religious) even knew the difference between a monk and a friar. But by the time we finished we could tell which Order of friars a particular author belonged to-whether Dominican or Franciscan-simply from what he wrote about creatures and their study, so distinctive

5 Andrew Cunningham, "How the Principia got its Name," History of Science 29 (1991): 377-92.

6 Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, "De-centring the "Big Picture": The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science," British Journal

for the History of Science 26 (1993): 407-32. 7 Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the

Friars' Natural Philosophy (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996).



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had we discovered the goals, topics, forms and language of these two versions of natural philosophy to be. We believe we are the first historians to have asked why any versions of natural philosophy were created at all, and what relation any version of natural

philosophy had to the world in which it was practised: why it was

brought into existence, and what purposes it served. The contrast here with the conventional approach to natural philosophy by historians is very striking. For if one assumes (as most historians seem to do) that natural philosophy was nothing more than an earlier

stage of (modern) science, then the raising and answering of 'why' questions is hardly necessary. The assumptions we customarily make about the reasons for the practice of science today can sim-

ply be taken as having applied equally to natural philosophy. And as we hardly ever seem to raise such questions about the present- day practice of science, so we may need never raise them about the practice of natural philosophy!

It will be becoming clear, I hope, that in my view the identity of natural philosophy is and was intimately bound up with the prac- tical role it played in the society and world of those who practised it. Why it was practised, what larger goals its practice served, what its products meant to its practitioners and other contemporary audiences, how the products of natural philosophy were to be in-

terpreted by its producers and their immediate audience, are all

part of the identity of natural philosophy. We cannot legitimately take just the statements we might find in texts produced by natural philosophers, and treat the technical content of these statements-as it appears to our much, much, later eyes-as constitut-

ing the entire identity of natural philosophy. For as historians, if we want to understand the identity of natural philosophy our role

surely is to see such statements as historic products, products of

people living, working and striving in precise social and intellectual conditions.

In my own work I have made a few further recent attempts to look at the identity of natural philosophy for some of its practitioners at different periods, and to see natural philosophy as a domain where political, religious, social and intellectual battles could be

fought out.8

8 See Andrew Cunningham, "Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici: Rea- son, Nature and Religion," in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth Century England, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996) 12-61; The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical




It is to such views of mine that Professor Grant has taken excep- tion, and to which he has responded. Naturally enough, in order to make his case against my views he has left to one side all of my substantive work in which I believe I have made much of the case. He does not, for instance, assess the arguments or the evidence adduced for them, presented in Before Science, the only historical book on the nature of natural philosophy yet produced, and

equally the only book which deals with the origins of any version of natural philosophy. Have we made the case for the Dominican version of natural philosophy being based on Aristotle in order to counter the arguments of the Cathars, who themselves used the works of Aristotle to deny the truth of Catholic Chrisitianity? Have we made the case for the Franciscan version of natural philosophy being based on Pseudo-Dionysius (and hence on neo-Platonism) in order to promote particular spiritual practices, and thence to

improve the sanctity of the Franciscans themselves and of the people of 13th century Europe whom they saw as their flock? Have we shown adequately why Franciscans and their sympathisers devel-

oped a scientia of perspectiva in order to study the continual crea- tive activity of God in the universe He created? Similarly, with re-

spect to Isaac Newton and his book The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, have I produced a satisfactory account, built on his own words and intentions, of why he should have named his famous book in this way, and what he intended thereby?

On all these matters of empirical historical research on my part, Grant says not a word.' Naturally, it is disappointing to a scholar to find his evidence and arguments ignored and only his conclusions, in their starkest terms, taken in isolation, especially when those conclusions have been misinterpreted. For Professor Grant has focussed almost exclusively on just two things. One is the formula of mine that natural philosophy was 'about God and His creation', and in his riposte Grant has set out to argue 'that natural philosophy is not primarily about God and His creation' (p.

Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997); "Science and Religion in the 13th Century Revisited: The Making of St Francis the Proto-Ecologist. Part 1: Crea- ture not Nature," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (A) (forthcoming, 2000).

9 Out of the 274 pages of text and notes of Before Science, the only pages to which Grant refers or gives a reference are five pages of the Epilogue (pp. 269- 73). Since he comments on the title, we should perhaps also add the title page, making a total of six pages.



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244). The other is our claim that medieval natural philosophy was one thing, (modern) science is another. As Grant puts it, 'I want to deny the claim that there was no science in the Middle Ages, and also to reject the sharp dichotomy that Cunningham and French draw between medieval natural philosophers, who alleg- edly always thought about God and His creation in all their works, and modern scientists, who supposedly eliminated God and His creation from their works' (p. 244). Grant even brings in a statis- tical analysis to make his case: he classifies and counts the occur- rences of different discussions of God and the Christian faith in a

range of 13h and 14h century natural philosophy writings, which is quite a labour of love. He finds relatively few explicit mentions. His conclusion is that 'medieval natural philosophers who expli- cated the texts of Aristotle's natural books kept their inevitable involvements with God and the faith to a minimum'. And even Dominican theologians such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas

Aquinas, he says, 'refrained remarkably from intruding theology into their natural philosophy' (p. 263).

Obviously that formula that 'natural philosophy was about God and His creation' can be interpreted in many ways, and Grant

explores some of them. But he does so while ignoring the senses in which I obviously mean it. For the published examples I have

given make perfectly clear the meaning I intend. There is not

space here to rehearse the detailed arguments of my papers and books or bring forward the pertinent evidence. I must rely on interested readers pursing that themselves. For the moment I need to deal with some of the ways in which I do not mean it, since these are ways in which Grant has chosen to interpret it.

So first, by saying that natural philosophy was about God and His creation, I do not mean that natural philosophy was another name for theology, as Professor Grant assumes. No: these were

quite separate disciplines for medieval and early modern people. Unfortunately theology is the only academic discipline which we have today which is 'about God', in the sense of having God as part of its immediate subject-matter, and I suppose it is understandable that at the mention of a discipline being 'about God and His creation', the modern mind will automatically think of theology. It will

require a little historical imagination (of the disciplined kind, not the creating of fictions) to envision a medieval and early modern

discipline which could have God's creation and His attributes as




its point and goal, yet not be theology. Such, I believe, was natural

philosophy. Second, when I say that natural philosophy was about God I do

not mean that it was therefore some bastard mixing of science with

religion. From the way he has countered me, it seems that Profes- sor Grant believes I am also trying to bring back the old science/ religion opposition into the discussion of 'medieval science', a

ghost which was laid to rest long ago. I am not in fact trying to do so. I have been trying to put that modern dichotomy aside, and

get away from the assumption that the medieval period witnessed an encounter, or series of encounters, between religion and science.'0 But interestingly, this demarcation still guides both Grant's own interpretation of the 131h century and also his criticisms of my position. Customarily it has been believed that there was an encounter between religion and science and that it was hostile: the Catholic Church, standing for religion and faith, tried to restrain and constrain the development of science. By contrast Grant's own revisionist view is that the encounter was extremely benign, so much so that (as he has stated in his recent book) 'the Christian accommodation with Greek science and philosophy [was an] in- strumental condition that facilitated the widespread, intensive

study of natural philosophy during the late Middle Ages.' Similarly he has also written there that 'The amazing lack of strife between

theology and science is attributable to the emergence [in the 131

century] of theologian-natural philosophers who were trained in natural philosophy and theology and were therefore able to interrelate these disciplines with relative ease'." But however benign

10 My reason for this will be obvious: that I think the science category misplaced for the medieval and early modern periods. Without one of the partici- pants it is difficult to have a duel, or any other kind of relationship.

" Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. Their Re- ligious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 8-9, 84-5. In the same volume he also writes: 'With theology and natural philosophy related so intimately during the Middle Ages, and with arts masters forbidden to apply their knowledge to theology, it remained for the theologians to interrelate these two disciplines, that is, to apply science to theology and theology to science ... Theologians had remarkable intellectual freedom and rarely permitted theology to hinder their inquiries into the physical world. If there was any temptation to produce a "Christian science", they successfully re- sisted it ...The positive attitude of medieval theologians toward natural philosophy, and their belief that it was also a useful tool for the elucidation of theology, must be viewed as the product of an attitude that was developed and nurtured during the first four or five centuries of Christianity'. (pp. 84-5. He repeats these



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he sees the relationship as having been, he still maintains the

science/religion apposition as his analytic tool, and since he treats natural philosophy as simply an early version of (modern) science, whenever he speaks of a 'natural philosophy/religion' (or theol-

ogy) apposition this means just the same thing. So he and I are

unfortunately separated here by a common language. Whatever I

say about natural philosophy he hears as being about (modern) science, and whenever I speak about natural philosophy being 'about God and His creation' he hears me as saying that 'science was about

religion' (or perhaps theology), which I am not saying at all. Simi-

larly, Grant's view of natural philosophy (because he elides it with (modern) science) is that it is and was a totally secular undertak-

ing, and should be kept so. So, unfortunately, when he hears me

saying that 'natural philosophy was about God and His creation', he also hears me saying that 'theologians (or theology) improperly inter-

fered with natural philosophy' (= science). His own view is that there was an 'amazing lack of strife between theology and science', as we know from his recent book (see above), and he thinks I am

saying the opposite of this, which I am not. The particular lan-

guage he uses to point out my supposed error here clearly shows the way he sees natural philosophy as science, he sees science as secular, and he sees theology as a discipline which absolutely must not interfere with science. For the word he uses most in order to show what theology or theologians were not doing to natural philosophy (= science) is a word expressing the commitment of a vio- lent act. It is intrude: he is showing that theology was not forcibly and unwarrantably being introduced where it had no right to be."

sentiments on pages 174-6.) Although Grant sometimes uses the term 'natural philosophy' to referjust to physics in the medieval period, yet here and elsewhere in his book he is using it as a synonym for 'science', so what he is talking about here actually is a science-religion encounter. The interchangeability of the terms natural philosophy and science for Grant is quite striking.

1 Here are the occasions, with my emphasis added. He speaks of investigating possible instances of 'the intrusion of God, His creation and theology into natural philosophy' or vice versa (p. 246); he asks whether the medieval commen- tators were trying 'to intrude as much religious material as possible into their in- vestigations into natural questions' (p. 247); in the medieval period, he says, 'it was inevitable ... that theological concepts would intrude into natural philosophy' (p. 248); he counts and classifies the occasions 'where God and matters of faith are intruded into commentaries and questions on Aristotle's natural books' (p. 248); he says that 'a treatise on cosmology was an ideal place' for Roger Bacon 'to intrude thoughts about God and the faith', but he chose not to do so (p. 251); he says that Albertus Magnus makes it clear that 'unless unavoidable, theology should not be intruded into natural philosophy' (p. 252); he says that Thomas




The boundaries between science and religion were being properly respected, not forcibly and unwarrantably breached.

Certainly by the examples he gives and his listing of categories under which God, faith and the supernatural are discussed in the natural philosophy treatises he has investigated, Grant has shown that theology or theologians were not doing unnatural violence to natural philosophy in the 13' and 14th centuries. If I had made the claims that he counters, then Grant's case on this point would be

perfect and my case would fall. But I did not. His responses and counters are to positions I do not hold. As with all good counter-

arguments, what Grant has done is to redefine my claims in his terms, and then he has refuted those terms. What he has not done is heard (let alone refuted) my claims in my terms. My language meant something quite different from how he has interpreted it. And I don't think discussion of the identity of natural philosophy will get very far if it is constantly reduced to an inappropriate science/religion apposition. The whole question here is: what was the identity of natural philosophy? Not: was there a science/religion encounter; or: did theologians abuse natural philosophy?

The third way in which my claim that 'natural philosophy was about God and His creation' has been misinterpreted by Grant is this: he seems to assume that I mean that natural philosophy was a discipline which constantly discussed God, or was concerned with

promoting particular matters of Christian faith or particular items of Christian doctrine. This is not so. Such matters did arise from time to time (as Grant has shown) as natural philosophers com- mentated their way through the libri naturales of Aristotle and other texts of the curriculum, and found points where Catholic doctrine was in disagreement with Aristotelian explanation. Rather, what I believe (and have repeatedly said) is that God and His creation were the point of the creation, maintenance and modification of the study of natural philosophy.

Nor do I mean that natural philosophy was about the supernatural (a charge Grant makes more than once), though it may

Aquinas, like Albertus 'sought to minimize theological intrusions into his commentaries on the books of Aristotle' (p. 255). Other terms he uses in a similar way are 'penetrate' and 'entanglement'. In his conclusion, he says: 'the most important reason why theology did not significantly penetrate natural philosophy is simply that while theology needed natural philosophy, natural philosophy did not need theology' (p. 265). When speaking of the 310 questions of the question treatises by the 14th century writers he explores, he says that '217 are free of any entanglement with the theology or faith' (p. 257-8).



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have sometimes considered questions about spiritual beings in this world and the chain of beings between man and God.

Finally, I do not maintain that modern scientists do not believe in God. In opposing what he sees as my unfounded inferences about the content of the thinking of medieval natural philosophers, Grant quotes a recent study which indicates that about 40% of scientists still believe in a personal God and an afterlife. This is fine by me. What I wrote was 'That modern science does not deal with God or with the universe as God's creation', is an assumption which 'is one of the most basic things that the members of the modern scientific community hold in common'.13 I said nothing there about what scientists do, or may, believe in private. To quote myself again, from an article Grant does not refer to, 'It is possible today for scientists to have religious beliefs, but these are supposed to be irrelevant to their science; their religion is supposed to be a matter only of private belief'.'4 That scientists can believe what they like about God is one of the marks of the secularity of modern society, which is such a contrast to the medieval period. That modern science does not deal with the universe as God's creation is another such mark, compared to medieval natural philosophy.

With all that put aside, I want now to turn to a question on which hangs the possibility of reaching the identity of natural philosophy: Can we tell what was in the minds of people in the past? Grant says no: 'We cannot know what was in the minds of medieval or early modern natural philosophers as they wrote their treatises'. He rejects all attempts at doing so with a brisk 'It is best to leave such matters to psychohistorians'. Thus we cannot enter the minds of past natural philosophers; we have only their writings to go on. He puts forward a non-nonsense approach toward assessing these writings: 'When they write about God and faith, then that segment of their writings is about God and the faith. But when there is no mention of God and faith, or allusions to them, then it is not about God and faith'. This appears to be a strong position: we base ourselves strictly on the texts, we talk only about the texts, and thus we can find out what these texts are-and hence were- about.

But this position is in fact naive. Intellectual history would be

'- Cunningham, "How the Principia got its Name," pp. 382-3. 14 Cunningham and Williams, "De-centring the "Big Picture," p. 424.




impossible if we were to follow this course. Not only does it forbid all interpretation, but it also ignores the nature of the very kind of intellectual activity that the historian of science, and the historian of ideas more generally, seeks to recover: thinking. Nor is this

approach followed by Grant himself. For instance, in his present article Grant takes a 130 century document, The Book ofJordanus de Nemore On the Theory of Weight, and says that the treatise 'deserve [s] the title "science" just as much as Einstein's article on thermody- namics' (pp. 244-5). But who is to be the judge of what deserves the title of science? Grant also says that 'both treatises would meet reasonable and appropriate criteria for being scientific' (p. 244). But what are these critieria? Who established them, how and when? Who determines whether the criteria of assessment are reasonable and appropriate? Of course, in a medieval sense, this treatise byJordanus is a scientia, and indeed the word 'scientia' appears twice in the first sentence of the treatise, which begins 'Since the science of weights is subalternate both to geometry and to natural

philosophy, certain things in this science need to be proved in a

philosophical manner'.'5 But this medieval sense of 'science', the sense which would include theology as a science, is not the sense that Grant means; it is clear that he intends the modern meaning, since he says of it (to quote him again) that this treatise 'deserve [s] the title "science" just as much as Einstein's article on thermody- namics' (pp. 244-5).

Acts of labelling, which seem so innocent to us that we rarely notice we are doing them, are amongst the most powerful ways in which we ascribe thoughts and intentions to past actors. Thus, by calling this treatise by Jordanus de Nemore 'science' and 'scientific', a whole set of things have now been ascribed to Jordanus by Professor Grant for which the textual evidence is, at best, ex-

tremely ambiguous-things such as attitudes, intentions, activities, ways of thinking. And, as science is by its nature an intentional ac-

tivity (see above), it is not legitimate for us to label the statements or the treatise as 'science' and 'scientific' while at the same time

15 'Cum scientia de ponderibus sit subalternata tam geometrie quam philosophie naturali, oportet in hac scientia quedam philosophice, quedam geometrice probari'. Text and translation as in Jordanus de Nemore, "Liber Jordani de Ponderibus," The Medieval Science of Weights (Scientia de Ponderibus). Trea- tises Ascribed to Euclid, Archimedes, Thabit ibn Qurra, Jordanus de Nemore and Blasius of Parma, eds. Ernest A. Moody and Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952).



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claiming that we are saying nothing about what was in Jordanus's mind. If we are (as Grant is doing) judging Jordanus's work to be scientific, then we are claiming that he was practising science. In- tentional activities are like that: you can't have the one (the product) without the other (the practice). You can't produce scientific

findings without practising science. So by labelling his work in this

way we are reconstructing Jordanus's thinking activity (whether correctly or otherwise), just the thing Grant asserts is impossible and undesirable. And because our use of the term 'science' always has its first referent to modern science unless we qualify the term, we are reconstructing Jordanus's work as an activity that Jordanus himself would not and could not have recognised.16 It is because we quite unconsciously do this labelling of past people's activities as early versions of (modern) science, that we can write books on 'the history of medieval science' and omit the theology and include only the things which look to us like (modern) science.17

Of course we can, and regularly do, reach the thinking processes of dead people: we can know what was in their minds as they wrote their treatises, and hence we can even get to know why they did so. The texts we have are not themselves the thinking process, but

they are indeed relics of thinking, the surviving evidence that a

particular thinking process went on, and the result of it. Hence we can use them as means to reach the thinking processes which produced them.'8 It is like the work of a detective. When the historical detective work is done properly, then we are not arguing from silence, but from evidence, argument and probabilities. It is not

always easy, and the typical medieval treatise, such as Jordanus's

16 As Grant himself points out, this treatise by Jordanus is a 'middle science' and not part of natural philosophy, so I do not need to show that it is natural philosophy and has the characteristics I have ascribed to natural philosophy, and which Grant disputes.

"7 To be fair to Grant, in the Preface (p. ix) to his Source Book he does say that 'To represent medieval science faithfully it seemed essential that science be con- strued in a medieval rather than a modern sense. It was necessary therefore, to go beyond mathematical, physical and biological sciences, and to include al- chemy, astrology ... logic, and theological reactions to science and philosophy'; Edward Grant, ed., A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). However, Grant's 'medieval science' category is still problemmatic, since it still omits all the other medieval sciences.

18 On the process, see Adrian Wilson and T.G. Ashplant, "Whig History and Present-centred History," The HistoricalJournal 31 (1988), 1-16, and T. G. Ashplant and Adrian Wilson, "Present-centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge," The Historical Journal 31 (1988), 253-74.




On the Theory of Weight, can look particularly unpromising for this treatment. But it is not impossible to use such treatises to reach what was in the minds of their writers. Just to take the treatises as they stand, however, to forbid oneself to make the attempt to reach the life of the mind, is to treat the treatises as dead materi- als and their producers as mere ciphers. I know that historians of 'medieval science' have hitherto been largely engaged with ideas (such as the void, the cosmos or kinetics) treated in a largely dis- embodied way, rather than with the thinkers of the ideas, but that's no reason to reject the possibility out of hand. Already there are positive signs, and the practice I am calling for here, which is commonplace among historians of science who work on later periods, is already being put into effect by a number of medievalists, including Professor Grant himself.19

Having established that it is possible in principle, and often also in practice, to find out what was going on in the heads of dead people, even ones writing natural philosophy texts in the medieval period, I want now to return to assessing Grant's claim that 'When they write about God and faith, then that segment of their writings is about God and the faith. But when there is no mention of God and faith, or allusions to them, then it is not about God and faith'. At first glance it would all seem to be very straightforward: talk of God is talk of God, talk of nature is talk of nature. Keep your eyes strictly on the texts and the commentaries and you won't go wrong in finding out what they are about. Grant finds the mentions of God and the faith relatively infrequent, and from looking at the highly technical subject-matter of the natural philosophy treatises, he can claim that 'natural philosophy was about Aristotle's principles, ideas and concepts, and was therefore about natural phenomena and not about God, faith, and the supernatural'.

But this is not an adequate way of assessing the matter, for it interprets the 'about' question only in the narrowest sense. When we talk about what a text 'is about' we always mean several senses

19 See, for instance, the account in Edith D. Sylla and Michael R. McVaugh, "Introduction," Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science, eds. Edith D. Sylla and Michael R. McVaugh (Leiden: Brill, 1997), on what has been happen- ing amongst medieval scholars over the last thirty years. Grant's own contribu- tion to this volume, on Oresme, reveals him asking questions about attitudes, intentions, activities, and ways of thinking-all taking him far beyond the strict letter of the text.



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at once. One of those is the immediate content. Another is its wider meaning. Another is why it was created, and so on. This is

abundantly clear in the case of imaginative writing, such as a novel, play or poem. What is Kafka's The Castle about? Or Shakespeare's Hamlet? Or Blake's The Sick Rose? Certainly the literal story told in each of them is one of the answers to the question, but it is only one and the least interesting one at that, and only a child would be satisfied that the question 'what is it about?' had been answered

by telling the story. All imaginative writing is 'about' something beyond itself: it is the vehicle for larger meanings than just the literal, meanings which may be spiritual, social, political, intellectual, aesthetic. The fullest and most accurate answer we might give to the question in the case of any of these texts might well be in terms of things not even mentioned in those texts (think of the

Blake!): social, political, intentional, artistic, personal, sexual. So literalism in our interpretations is a very crude instrument, and

counting of particular word frequencies is not necessarily a very good key. It was Einstein who is said to have remarked: 'Not eve-

rything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted'.

Now, works of a more factual or technical nature are also about more than meets the eye at first glance, and I believe this to be the case even with natural philosophy texts. So yes, if we inspect a natural philosophy text at its most immediate, then we could be

right in saying that it is 'about' physics. In this sense I agree with Professor Grant that the treatises are (for the most part) 'about natural phenomena', and I have never maintained otherwise. But

just because the content of a work is technical this doesn't mean its roles-which also constitute a significant part of its identity, since the existence, form, nature, significance and meaning of the text itself cannot be explained without them-can't be something other than, and larger than, technical. The teaching of the technical content can be a route to another goal, for instance. This is what I believe was the case in the initial instituting and subsequent modification of natural philosophy by concerned men over the centuries.

We have neither captured nor exhausted the identity of natural

philosophy by showing that the texts are technical in immediate content and concern natural phenomena. For instance, as Grant

points out, the Aristotelian books commented on in natural philosophy courses included On the Soul (De Anima). A first question




might then be: what is this natural philosophy discipline about, which includes both physics and the soul? It is certainly not one we know today. Perhaps the grouping of these texts together is

doing more work than the sum of the parts? Other 'about' questions we can ask include why are these treatises being taught at all, why were they introduced into teaching in the first place, what functions does their teaching promote? And so on. Thus the point of using a particular treatise or group of treatises, or for promoting a particular field of study, may well lie outside the words of the texts used in day-to-day teaching. To understand the identity of natural philosophy we may have to raise our eyes occasionally from the texts themselves.

So with the question of 'what was natural philosophy about?', I thus think that both Professor Grant and I are right. But our 'about' words have different referents, narrow and wide respec- tively. For myself, I think that it is probably at moments of crisis for a discipline where we as historians get our best opportunities to appreciate and understand its nature and identity, since moments of stress are far more revealing than the every-day. Under what conditions do people worry about the validity or direction of a discipline, or try to reshape it according to new criteria? When do they feel the identity of a discipline is threatened? In my own work I believe I have shown some of the reasons why three forms of natural philosophy were produced (Dominican, Franciscan and Newtonian), and all of them involved issues of God, society and the threat of heresy. In the widest sense of the term, they were all

political. Different versions of natural philosophy were created to meet wide needs, needs wider than the technical content alone of the treatises, and these needs related to the wider society within which natural philosophy was taught and pursued. How God was conceived and his attributes appreciated at different times led to the creation of modified versions. Hence the core point of natural

philosophy (viz., that it was about God and His creation) remained the same. In this respect, an interesting point in Grant's critique (a point on which he does not comment), is that virtually all the writers of natural philosophy works that he mentions were men of

religion. In other words, medieval natural philosophy was a disci-

pline which Grant's own examples show was initially largely shaped by professional religious men, men who were theologians, bishops and friars, whose lives were totally dedicated to the service of God as they believed that He wanted them to serve Him. Aquinas and



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Albertus Magnus were Dominican friars; Roger Bacon and John Pecham were Franciscan friars; Oresme had a theology degree before he wrote his natural philosophy commentaries; Buridan was a secular cleric; Albert of Saxony studied theology, and later worked for the pope and became a priest and finally a bishop. The

only one Grant mentions who had no such known professional commitment to the Christian religious life was the converted Jew, Themon Judeaeus, who was a secular master.20 They wrote technical works in and for the natural philosophy curriculum, but their

jobs and their life commitments lie outside the framework of natural philosophy. Why were they doing it? I believe that in Before Science we gave an account which would explain the motivations of

Aquinas, Albertus, Roger Bacon and Pecham to write such works. That account, of course, depends on natural philosophy having been 'about God and His creation', and created to cope with con- cerns of power and religion in 12th and 13th century Europe. Grant's view, by contrast, is that these people constituted a group of what he calls 'theologian-natural philosophers', and that it is to the existence of this group that 'the amazing lack of strife between

theology and science is attributable' since their training in both fields meant that they 'were therefore able to interrelate these

disciplines with relative ease'.21 Now, why should guardians of the faith want to do a thing like that, unless this natural philosophy was serving some larger role or roles beyond its sheer technical content? Why don't they just cultivate their own garden? Or would that be a question we have to leave to the psychohistorians?

I have a strong suspicion that the claims I have been putting forward about the identity of natural philosophy in my published articles and books raise for some historians of 'medieval science' a number of ghosts which they had hoped were dead by now. There is the science/religion business, which I have already discussed. Then there is my claim that natural philosophy was one thing and (modern) science is another. I can see this might sound like the old continuity/discontinuity issue revived: did Galileo make a com-

plete break with the medieval past, or was he deeply indebted to it? Was (modern) science new in the 17th century, or had it been

flourishing in the medieval centuries? Were the medieval ages

20 Information from the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and from Grant, Source Book.

21 Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, pp. 174-6.




dead and irrelevant or innovative and fundamental? This issue, which goes back to Pierre Duhem and Alexandre Koyre in the first half of the twentieth century, has generally been settled, at least

among historians of 'medieval science', in favour of continuity. The title of Professor Grant's recent book, The Foundations of Mod- ern Science in the Middle Ages, expresses perfectly his current position in favour of continuity. I suspect that the determination of historians of 'medieval science' to promote the continuity thesis may account both for their continued focus on texts (the more technical-because supposedly the more like (modern) science- the better), and their neglect of the larger picture.22 But continu-

ity versus discontinuity is an old battle which may not be worth

fighting any longer. What I think we should be using our energies to do (of course) is investigating natural philosophy as natural

philosophy, and not bothering about questions of the continuity or otherwise of science, which I regard as a misplaced concept.

So this brings me finally to explaining why I have adopted in this

paper this annoying habit of bracketing off the word 'modern' from 'science', why I have been constantly writing '(modern) science' where others would write 'modern science' or just 'science'. If we talk of modern science, with no qualification on the expression, then it is implicit that we take it as given that once

upon a time there was ancient science, then there was medieval science, followed by early modern science and then finally by modern science: that these are stages in the development of one

enterprise with a very long career and which has maintained the same core identity throughout the many centuries of its practice. This is indeed what Professor Grant believes, together with most

members-probably all but one or two, I regret-of the history of science profession. When I qualify that expression by bracketing off the 'modern' in (modern) science, both by punctuation and tone of voice, I want to suggest that while we certainly have here a modern practice-science-a product of the modern era and typical of the modern era, nevertheless this is a practice which did not exist before the modern era. Ideally, I would wish us to be refer-

ring to a historical sequence of philosophy (ancient period), natural philosophy (medieval and early modern period), and then

22 These attitudes about continuity vs. discontinuity, and the fixation on technical texts are still evident even in Sylla and McVaugh, "Introduction," to Texts and Contexts, even where the editors are encouraging the raising of more contex- tual and larger questions.



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science (modern period), disciplines fulfilling different roles in their respective eras. This would show, by using actors' categories, that there had been a series of different academic and courtly en-

terprises in the West which invoked or investigated Nature, each of which had been pursued in one of these successive eras. Ideally again, I would wish that it was inherent in the use of the term 'science' that when we use it without a qualification we are always talking about this uniquely modern enterprise. However, I am not in charge of the words, and the determination of historians of science to give this modern enterprise a long and continuous his-

tory has led to great ambiguity in the use of the term 'science', an

ambiguity which works in favour of the tradition which ascribes to (modern) science a very long history. As long as that view prevails, the identity of natural philosophy will go on being ignored.



Documents

The Identity of Natural Philosophy. A Response to Edward Grant