Edward Grant, A history of natural philosophy: from the ancient world to the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xiv, 361, £40.00, $70.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86931-7); £14.99, $24.99 (paperback 978-0-521-68957-1).

Abstract

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. Grant constructs an illuminating history of natural philosophy, which he considers to be a discipline distinct from theology, mathematics and mixed mathematics. The chronological scope of the narrative reaches from around 3500 bc to the nineteenth century, but the book has a strong emphasis on the Middle Ages and the importance of this period for the Scientific Revolution. The central thesis for which the book argues is that “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” (p. xii). The outcome of this union, so Grant continues his argument, 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” (p. xii). The book derives its scope and central thesis from a disagreement between Grant and the historian Andrew Cunningham on the nature of natural philosophy. On multiple occasions, including an “open forum” discussion between Grant and Cunningham in the journal Early Science and Medicine (2000, 5 (3): 259–300), Grant had the opportunity to take issue with Cunningham's views. In the book under review he returns to these issues repeating most of his arguments against Cunningham's thesis on the nature of natural philosophy. Cunningham's view on the identity of natural philosophy is that it is about God and His creation. “For the whole point of natural philosophy was to look at nature and the world as created by God, and as thus capable of being understood as embodying God's powers and purposes and of being used to say something about them” (Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science’, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 26: 407–32, p. 421). Grant's response is to insist on the separation of natural philosophy from theology. He generalizes that “the penetration of substantive religious material into natural philosophy was minimal during the late Middle Ages. For the most part, medieval natural philosophers focused their attention on the study of natural phenomena in a rational and secular manner” (p. 261). Within the space of this review I will limit my brief comments to Grant's reaction to a second, but related aspect of Cunningham's thesis. Cunningham has insisted on the rejection of the concept of “scientific revolution” which placed, or rather misplaced, the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. For Cunningham, natural philosophy and science, an “invention” of the nineteenth century, are two mutually exclusive endeavours. Grant's reaction is to return to the use of the concept of “scientific revolution” and to the restoration of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution. However, his rejection of Cunningham's thesis depends here on the ambiguity of the term “science”. The medieval mixed mathematical disciplines were, of course, also scientiae (in their own terms), and Grant chooses to understand the term in this sense. Therefore, the central thesis of the book that the Scientific Revolution was about the fusion of the exact sciences (or mixed mathematics) and natural philosophy is for Grant an argument against Cunningham's thesis. An uncoincidental consequence of Grant's view is that endeavours such as medicine and alchemy—of which he only occasionally points out whether they were considered part of natural philosophy—are again pushed to the margins of the description of the Scientific Revolution. But perhaps this is somewhat unfair to Grant's book. With it, Grant joins the ranks of those historians (such as John Schuster and others, including Cunningham) who have pointed to the neglected importance of the category of natural philosophy for an understanding of the changes in natural knowledge practices in the seventeenth century. Although the polemical context may have introduced more ambiguities (such as that of the term “science”) than one would have wished, the book should, without hesitation, be applauded for this important contribution.