The Identity of Natural Philosophy. a Response To Edward Grant

Abstract

The editors of Early Science and Medicine have kindly invited me to reply in the pages of this journal to an extended critique of my views by Professor Edward Grant which was published last year in a Festschrift volume dedicated to John D. North.' The issue on which my position is currently under attack is the one I have used as the title to the present piece: the identity of natural philosophy. This issue is, I would hope, highly relevant to the readership of the present journal. For natural philosophy was the intellectual domain, the discipline, or the group of disciplines, under which Nature was usually discussed and studied among medieval and early modern men of religion, in the medieval and early modern university, and in the early modern court. Natural philosophy was practised in Europe, in one form or another, from the early thirteenth to the early nineteenth century. Natural philosophy subsumed or included some or all of the studies that we historians would customarily want to include under the title of 'medieval and early modern science'. And yet, as far as my researches have gone over more than a dozen years of interest in this topic, I have only found one historian in the 191 or 20th century who has tried to define what natural philosophy was, or to distinguish it clearly from (modern) science.2 For historians of science today simply act as if natural philosophy was just (modern) science under an earlier name and at an earlier stage in its development,