Late Medieval Science and Modern Science: Two Cultural Options?

Abstract

This contribution mixes a dual perspective, i.e., the history of science and philosophy of science, to analyze late medieval science which is compared with modern science and the Scientific Revolution. This combination is very fruitful, since it provides a complete yet detailed picture of late-medieval science, in which we glimpse two phenomena typical of the fourteenth century: a general process of mathematization, calculation and mechanization, and a keen interest in the inductive method and experimental science, which cannot be confined to William Ockham, but which has at least begun by John Duns Scotus to arrive to Adam Wodeham and John Mirecourt through John Reading. So why didn’t the mathematization and mechanization of Nature, on the one hand, and the theologians’ inductive method, on the other, merge to give rise to a scientific revolution already in the fourteenth century? This article analyses late-medieval science from a dual perspective: the history of science and philosophy of science. Such a perspective allows us to obtain a detailed overall picture, which will then be compared with modern science and the Scientific Revolution.