Reason in Action: Natural Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts

Abstract

N ATURAL PHILOSOPHY, OR NATURAL SCIENCE AS IT WAS SOMETIMES called, was the most widely taught discipline at the medieval university. For more than four centuries, virtually all students who obtained the master of arts degree had studied natural philosophy, and most undergraduates were exposed to significant aspects of it. What was natural philosophy for university students in the late Middle Ages? WHAT IS NATURAL PHILOSOPHY? In the broadest sense, natural philosophy was the study of change and motion in the physical world. In Chapter 3, we saw that it was one of Aristotle's three subdivisions of theoretical knowledge, or knowledge for its own sake. Natural philosophy was concerned with physical bodies that existed independently and were capable of motion, and therefore subject to change. In truth, Aristotle's natural philosophy was also concerned with bodies in motion that were themselves unchanging, as was assumed for all celestial bodies. In general, Aristotle's natural philosophy was concerned with separately existing animate and inanimate bodies that undergo change and possess an innate source of movement and rest. Because the domain of natural philosophy was the whole of nature, as the name suggests, it did not represent any single science, but could, and did, embrace bits and pieces of all sciences. In this sense, natural philosophy was “The Mother of All Sciences.”