Edward Grant

A History of Natural Philosophy

From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world. It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little concerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences were narrowly confined to various computations that did not involve physical causes, functioning totally independently of natural philosophy. Although this began slowly to change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and thereby made the Scientific Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reflects the new relationship. Natural philosophy became the 'Great Mother of the Sciences', which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physical, and biological sciences to maturity, thus enabling them to leave the 'Great Mother' and emerge as the multiplicity of independent sciences we know today.

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Natural philosophy was concerned with all mobile physical bodies in the universe. It sought to determine the physical causes of the effects of natural phenomena, something that the exact mathematical sciences failed to do. Natural philosophy in the Middle Ages emphasised rational discussion, with little reliance on experiment, mathematics, or observation. The book describes how, in the seventeenth century, natural philosophy and the exact mathematical sciences were joined together to make the Scientific Revolution possible and lay the foundations for the emergence of numerous modern sciences in the nineteenth century.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 376
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Januar 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 504g
• ISBN-13: 9780521689571
• ISBN-10: 0521689570
• Artikelnr.: 20911267

Autorenporträt

Edward Grant is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author and editor of twelve books, including God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2001), and The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge, 1996). He is also the author of approximately ninety articles on the history of science and natural philosophy. He was Vice-President and President of the History of Science Society and was awarded the prestigious George Sarton Medal of that society.

Inhaltsangabe

1. Ancient Egypt to Plato; 2. Aristotle (384-322 BC); 3. Late antiquity; 4. Islam and the eastward shift of Aristotelian natural philosophy; 5. Natural philosophy before the Latin translations; 6. Translations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; 7. Natural philosophy after the translations; 8. The form and content of late medieval natural philosophy; 9. The relations between natural philosophy and theology; 10. The transformation of medieval natural philosophy from the early modern period to the nineteenth century; Conclusion; Notes.

Rezensionen

'Edward Grant is one of the world's greatest authorities on medieval science. In the book under review he brings together his lifelong research on medieval science to reflect on the relation between natural philosophy and science.' Medical History