Accueil
"I am unaware of any history of natural philosophy. It occurred to me that an account of the historical evolution of natural philosophy should prove helpful to a better understanding of the development of the history of science itself. Indeed, as readers will discover, the historical relationship between natural philosophy and science is by no means straightforward. Opinions about their association and interconnections have often been controversial and sometimes quite elusive.
Once I determined to write a history of natural philosophy, I had to decide whether that history should be all encompassing– from its origins to its general replacement by modern science– or whether it should be confined to one or two historical periods. Because my area of specialization has been the late Middle Ages, it seemed plausible to begin with the origins of natural philosophy in the ancient world and conclude at about 1500, when medieval natural philosophy reached the height of its development. Around 1998 I became aware of an opinion that claimed that natural philosophy was always about God, even when God is not discussed or mentioned ; and, consequently, that natural philosophy could not be science, because the latter was never about God. Although Dr. Andrew Cunningham, the scholar who proposed this interpretation (see Chapters 9 and 10), focused on Isaac Newton and the seventeenth century, his claims applied to all of natural philosophy, including the Middle Ages. This view of natural philosophy was so utterly contrary to my own understanding of that ancient discipline that I decided to extend my historical range, not only to the seventeenth century but also to the nineteenth century." (p.XI)
"The most profound change in natural philosophy occurred in the seventeenth century. It involved a union of the exact sciences and natural philosophy, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the vast literature about the meaning and causes of the Scientific Revolution. Without that fusion, however, it is doubtful that the Scientific Revolution could have occurred in the seventeenth century. One major result of this coming-together was that natural philosophy, once regarded as largely independent and isolated from mathematics and the exact sciences, became significantly mathematized. In this mathematized form, natural philosophy became synonymous with the term science, which came into use in the nineteenth century. As the reader will see, it was because of natural philosophy’s capacity for absorbing sciences and expanding their horizons that, in the seventeenth century, Sir Francis Bacon, with great insight and vision, designated natural philosophy as the “Great Mother of the Sciences.”." (p.XII)
-Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy. From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 361 pages.
