What Was Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages?

Abstract

Abstract If by natural philosophy we understand everything relevant to nature and natural phenomena, it seems plausible to infer that the subject matter of natural philosophy embraces all inquiries and questions about the phys- ical world. The first humans must have been aware of nature, which was all around them and involved in everything they did. Nature was not invented. It was a given. Long before the Greeks, the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia had already learned much about nature and its actions. But the ancient Greeks brought something new to the study of nature: they invented instructive ways of talking about it. During the period 600 to 400 BC, the foundations of Greek natural philosophy were laid by a group of thinkers known collectively as the Presocratics, who no longer explained natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, lightning, storms, and eclipses, as the actions of happy or angry gods, but as the actions of natural forces that regularly produced such effects. Not only did the Presocratics eliminate the gods as the causes of natural phenomena and replace them with natural causes, but they also devised a number of different approaches to explain the apparent diversity and change they observed in the world around them. In the process, they enunciated some of the most basic problems that would shape the discipline that would eventually be known as physics, or natural philosophy.