Aristotelian Commentaries and Scientific Change: The Parisian Nominalists on the Cause of the Natural Motion of Inanimate Bodies

Abstract

Following the lead of Pierre Duhem, historians of medieval science have long studied the work of medieval natural philosophers with an eye to seeing how it led or did not lead to the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century.1 If one accepts the view of Duhem and others that quite a lot of good natural philosophy was done by fourteenth-century scholastic Aristotelians such as John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, and Albert of Saxony at Paris, and Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, and Richard Swineshead at Oxford, then the question may arise why it took so long for modern science to break away from scholastic Aristotelianism to produce the new physics of the likes of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Edward Grant has proposed that it was, in part, the commentary form that brought it about that scholastic Aristotelians absorbed a multitude of small variations on