Quantity and Quality in Scholastic Aristotelian Natural Philosophy:

Abstract

According to a commonly accepted narrative — as found, for instance, in E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture —, in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century qualitative scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy was replaced by quantitative mechanistic Newtonian mathematical physics.1 In such works as Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, this narrative is given a negative slant: the modern degradation of the environment is blamed, at least in part, on the seventeenthcentury replacement of a qualitative or organic by a quantitative or mechanistic view.2 There is a problem, however, with this story, especially in its negative version. Scholastic Aristotelianism, which had dominated European universities since the thirteenth century, does not fit the description of the supposed earlier organic, even feminine, point of view.3 Instead of scholastic Aristotelianism, Carolyn Merchant must take as the source of her pre-existing organic point of view various Renaissance revivals of Neoplatonism, Stoicism, hermeticism, gnosticism, magic, alchemy, the cabala, and so forth.4 Indeed, scholastic Aristotelianism, if looked at in light of Merchant’s dichotomy between a qualitative, holistic, organic, naturalistic, feminine point of view and a quantitative, atomistic, masculine, mechanistic point of view, appears to fall much more on the side of the dry and quantitative.