In the High Middle Ages clear lines of demarcation were generally drawn between science and rhetoric. Science represented the summit of intellectual achieve-
ment. Different from the science of our day, with its accent on ex-
periment and measurement, medieval science aimed at a loftier
ideal: universal truths that are necessary and cannot be otherwise.
It sought knowledge that is certain and unrevisable, because cer-
tified through the causes that make things be what they are. Such
causes, when uncovered, functioned as middle terms in a special
type of syllogism known as a demonstration. The canons govern-
1 Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined scientia as knowledge of something through its proper cause (Summa contra Gentiles, Bk. 2, chap. 94). In this he was merely epitomizing Aristotle’s characterization of “unqualified scientific knowledge” (episteme, translated into Latin as scientia), which reads as follows: “We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing . . . when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is” (Posterior Analytics, 71b8-ll). For a summary explanation of what the definition entails and how the kind of knowledge it represents is related to modern science, see the article “Science (Scientia)” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. W. J. MacDonald et al., 15 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967), 12:1190-1193.
2The term “demonstration” has a technical meaning in the Aristotelian tradition, presupposing as it does the concept of scientia explained in the previous note. Its characteristics are explained in detail in another article in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, that on “Demonstration,” 4:757-760.
ing this scientific syllogism were set forth in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, then regarded as the basic treatise on scientific methodology. Rhetoric (or rhetorica), on the other hand, was much the same as we understand it today. Rather than be concerned with necessary truths, its domain was contingent subject matters. Its three kinds of proof (logos, ethos, and pathos) moved an audience to prefer one opinion over another, but it drew the material for its discourse from the general type of knowledge found in topoi or loci, employing these not in the demonstrative syllogism but in the less rigorous mode of enthymeme and example.
Intermediate between the two in the medieval scheme, and serving to enforce the clearcut distinction between science and rhetoric, came dialectics (or dialectica). Aristotelian dialectics is not to be confused with Plato’s dialectics, or even less with Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It is basically concerned, as is rhetoric, with topoi, and not surprisingly its procedures are explained in Aristotle’s Topics and, more simply, in the De topicis differentiis of Boethius. Aristotelian dialectics could treat either necessary or contingent subject matters, and thus it shared common terrain with both science and rhetoric. But its distinguishing feature was that it used only logical principles, not proper causes as did science, and that it used these in the syllogism and induction, more formal modes of reasoning than rhetoric’s enthymeme and example. It did this to establish an opinion that was firm, while not excluding completely an opposing view. Dialectics thus shared with rhetoric its broadness of scope, its ability to deal with any subject matter. It was also the ally of science in that it could aid in the discovery of causal principles on which a strict demonstration could be based, although without this discovery and on its own merits it attained only probable truth.
Whereas scholars in the Early Middle Ages were content with dialectics and its sic et non procedures, later to be refined into the scholastic disputation, those of the High Middle Ages were strongly attracted to the ideal of science found in the Posterior Analytics, newly introduced into the Latin West at the end of the twelfth century. Recent studies of William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Thpmas Aquinas reveal how these investigators rediscovered the Analytics and applied it methodically to uncovering the secrets of nature. All had confidence that truth and certitude could be attained using the Aristotelian canons, that they could arrive not merely at “knowledge of the fact” but also at “knowledge of the reasoned fact” once its causes were properly ascertained. This they believed even thoughthere were many matters—the heavenly bodies and the elements, for example—on which doubts not only could be, but actually were, expressed.
Because of Grosseteste’s and Bacon’s interest in light rays and their geometrical mode of propagation, mathematics exerted a strong attraction for these Oxford Aristotelians. Through the use of geometry, for instance, they gained certitude in their science of optics, much as do mathematical physicists in the present day. Albertus Magnus and his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, concentrated more on the discovery of physical causes, a difficult undertaking because of the contingency that attends nature’s operations. Indeed, Albertus cites several times a statement of Ptolemy to the effect that naturalists always disagree over their science while mathematicians do not, implying that mathematics alone should lay claim to strict certitude. But by employing the principle that nothing is so contingent that it does not involve some element of necessity, Aquinas explained how it is possible to have a true science of nature despite the contingency of its subject matter. In effect his method consists in formulating reasonable “suppositions” on which scientific syllogisms can be based, on which account the procedure came to be known as demonstration ex suppositione. A supposition is a kind of hypothesis, and so Aquinas’s procedure bears some similarity to the hypothetico-deductive method of modern science. It differs from the latter, however, in that it yields not probability but certitude, granted that this is based not on the absolute necessity found in mathematics but on the suppositional necessity found in the world of nature.
The doctrine on suppositional necessity and demonstration ex suppositione was not known to Averroes and seems not to have been part of the intellectual equipment of the Latin Averroists. It surely was not appreciated by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, who construed the natural philosophy of the Paris Aristotelians as a type of metaphysics that was incompatible with the Catholic faith. He struck forcibly at the alleged truth and certainty of many theses of the Averroists concerning man and the physical universe, some of which were also theses of Thomas Aquinas, in the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277. As a result of such condemnations, the Dominicans came under a shadow first at Paris and then at Oxford, and their traditional rivals, the Franciscans, were able to challenge them on grounds of orthodoxy at both centers of learning.
Late Medieval Science
Let us take 1277, then, as the point of demarcation for the late Middle Ages. The characteristic note in philosophy and theology for that period, as found in two Franciscans, Scotus and Ockham, though in different ways, was the accent on will as opposed to intellect, which favored a type of voluntarism over the intellec-tualism that had hitherto prevailed. For those interested in the history of science, Ockham exerted the decisive influence. In his view,reality is a collection of absolute singulars that depend for their being on the will of God, which can accomplish anything that does not imply a logical contradiction. In effect this implied a universe radically contingent on the divine will, in which there is no natural necessity and thus no solid basis for causal reasoning. Ockham wrote a treatise De demonstratione, but in it he did not defend demonstration as yielding truth and certitude; for him, the best it could attain was probability, since God could intervene at any time and impede the expected effect. In this way scientia was demoted by Ockham, moved down a notch, as it were, to bring it closer to dialectics and rhetoric.
In England, where Ockham’s nominalism early took root, “that uncertain feeling” became quite pervasive. Logic flourished, to be sure, and all the modes of consequentiae and of hypothetical reasoning were investigated in exhaustive detail. But the natural philosophy of English nominalists never yielded a conclusion that could give ecclesiastical authorities cause for alarm. Sophismata and du-bitabilia became the stock in trade of those pursuing the science of nature. Working secundum imaginationem, investigators at Merton College, Oxford, explored in tedious detail the kinematics of moving bodies. They studied the properties of uniformly acceleratedmotion, for example, and yet not one of them thought of applying them to the natural fall of bodies, so absorbed were they in logic, so insulated from concern with the real world.
The nominalism that developed across the channel at the University of Paris in the fourteenth century owed much to Ockham and the Mertonians. Still, there are two important particulars in which Parisian terminists, Jean Buridan and his followers, departed from Ockham and his interpretation of Aristotle. The first was in their understanding of motion and the causality involved in its production, and the second was in their estimation of the truth and certitude to be found in the science of nature. Ockham, with a sweep of his mythical razor, had denied that motion was an absolute entity and so held that it did not require a cause. He further invoked the Condemnation of 1277 to argue that the study of nature, and of morality along with it, could never achieve certain truth. Buridan rejected both theses, the second by invoking Aqui-nas’s earlier teaching on demonstrations made ex suppositione naturae, the first by laying bare hitherto unknown causes and effects of local motion. He and his group, the Doctores Parisienses, brought the science of dynamics to its most advanced state, and were hailed on that account by Pierre Duhem as “the medieval precursors of Galileo.”
Despite this defense of the Aristotelian ideal of natural science, however, subsequent history saw that ideal rarely being realized. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries authors of textbooks turned eclectic, giving equal time to nominalists and to realists, even though this meant embracing contradictory solutions to many problems in natural philosophy. As the fifteenth century wore on, with the invention of printing and the publication of the Opera omnia of the medieval doctors, the situation was exacerbated even more. Religious orders exerted their influence in the universities, and soon there were not only nominalist chairs but Thomistic and Scotistic chairs as well. In the sixteenth century there was a scholastic revival at the University of Paris wherein Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and secular masters vied with each otherin the preparation of manuals. Each school, to be sure, could see its distinctive positions as true and certain, but the overall impression was unmistakable. On key issues in natural philosophy, then still called scientia naturalis, there was no universal agreement, no publicly verifiable certitude about any of the propositions being taught. Science had degenerated to dialectics, and rhetorical overtones were already discernible in disputations among the various schools.
The Renaissance and Second Scholasticism
The dividing line between late medieval and Renaissance science is difficult to draw. But with the rediscovery and publication of Greek commentaries on Aristotle, one could say that there was a rebirth of learning even in natural philosophy. Unfortunately, the rebirth succeeded in adding another voice to the many already clamoring at the end of the Middle Ages, that, namely, of the Peripatetics who took their truth straight from “the master of all who know.” Not that there had been any abandoning of Aristotle among the scholastics; all still claimed allegiance to him, and his textbooks, including the Posterior Analytics and the Physics, were the backbone of university instruction throughout all of Europe, not excluding Oxford and Cambridge. The problem came with the application of Aristotle’s Organon to refractory material in the world of nature. Here there was no uniform success and a crisis was clearly in the offing.
The triggering influence came from the mathematicians in the person of the Polish astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus. The Pythagorean alternative to a geocentric universe, and the simplifications it seemed to introduce into theories involving eccentrics and epicycles, diverted attention once again to mathematics as a possible source of truth and certitude about the cosmos. Here the disputes between schools overflowed into larger arguments over disciplinary domains—particularly well suited for rhetorical appeals. Who was better equipped to yield a certain conclusion about the heavens, the philosopher or the mathematician? The conventional wisdom then was that the mathematical astronomer could do no more than “save the appearances”; the philosophical astronomer had to pass on the natures of the heavenly bodies and the physical causes of their motions. Mathematical theories, the argument went, would have to be based on arbitrary suppositions and these could be false, thus rendering them incapable of generating certitude in the domain of physics.
An interesting development then took place at Padua in the late sixteenth century, when Peripatetics in the person of Alessandro Piccolomini reacted against the mathematicism there gaining vogue. Piccolomini and his colleagues wrote a number of treatises on the certitude of the mathematical disciplines in which they attacked not only the certitude of applied mathematics but that of pure mathematics as well. They contended that all mathematics failed to meet the rigorous canons of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, that it did not demonstrate strictly, that it had no knowledge of causes, and that its conclusions were therefore not certain. With that the apodictic character of what had traditionally been regarded as the most certain science was called into question, once again the distinction was blurred between science and dialectics, and dialectics itself moved closer to rhetoric in the heat of the subsequent debate.
A final complication came from the religious sector. The Protestant Reformation by this time was in full flower, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation had already begun its course. The scholastic revival initiated at Paris at the onset of the sixteenth century now flourished as Second Scholasticism in Italy and on the Iberian peninsula. Thomistic and Scotistic and nominalist rivalries were as pervasive in theology as they had been in philosophy, only now a more influential faction was coming into power, the newly established Society of Jesus. Thomism had been endorsed by its founder, Ignatius Loyola, but soon that disintegrated into competing schools: Molinism, Suarezianism, Banezianism. The papacy tried to mediate the resulting disputes between Dominicans and Jesuits, and ended by allowing each order to teach its own doctrines, say, on grace and free will, provided it did not accuse the other of heresy. Thus there had to be some latitude in the certitude accorded to the teachings of dogmatic theology. In moraltheology the emerging problems were even more difficult. Proba-bilism was countenanced in many areas, and rigorous solutions given up in this most delicate field of Catholic teaching.
All of this could not help but exert an influence on the certitude to be expected in Renaissance science, for theology then was still regarded as a science, indeed “the queen of the sciences.” The Jesuit professors on whose class notes Galileo drew when beginning to teach at Pisa present an interesting case history in this regard. When dealing with the problems presented by Aristotle’s De caelo, they saw the possibility of mathematical demonstrations providing new knowledge that could be used to emend his conclusions in that work. This led them to question whether the heavens were truly incorruptible, as Aristotle had taught, whether they were composed of the same matter as earth, whether they were moved by informing forms or assisting forms, and so on. Frequently they expressed their teachings in degrees of probability: one position was probable, an alternative with modification was more probable, and yet another, perhaps the opposite of the first, most probable. Note here the probabilist language of the theologians cutting into the certitude of conclusions hitherto accepted without qualification in universities throughout Europe. And evenamong the Jesuits there was the competition arising across disciplinary domains: their mathematicians did not always agree with their philosophers, nor the philosophers with the theologians. On some issues emotions ran so high it was easy for dialectical dispute to give way to angry rhetoric, although the tight system of censorship within the Society prevented any of this from erupting into print.
Galileo and the “New Science”
Galileo was imbued with this polemical spirit when he began his own teaching career at the University of Pisa. The professors who had taught him there were conservative Aristotelians, as were those in European universities generally. All shared a grounding not only in Aristotle’s scientific works, but also in his Analytics, his Topics, and his Rhetoric, and perforce they had a good knowledge of classical humanism. This breadth of training is reflected in Galileo’s early dialogue on motion, written at Pisa before he left there for a more lucrative position at Padua. Adept as he was in mathematics and philosophy, but no less in the litterae humaniores, it is not surprising that Galileo could emerge victorious over adversaries who read their science in the text of Aristotle rather than in the Book of Nature. Only when his conclusions ran counter to the Book of Scripture did Galileo run into serious trouble. But even there he persisted in his resolve, skillfully combining scientia, dia-lectica, and rhetorica in his many writings, until finally he had to succumb to the power of the Inquisition.
Without the Renaissance and its preparation in the Late Middle Ages there surely would not have been a Scientific Revolution. To change the thinking habits of men on important issues strongforces had to be at work, forces that impinged not only on men’s minds but on their hearts and instincts as well. Scientific treatises in the mode of the Posterior Analytics—were they available, and at the time they were not—are powerless to effect that kind of change. To be truly persuasive at critical periods in its history, science had to be buttressed with rhetorical argument. We need not get involved here with Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to make this point, but I suspect we will find it borne out in the remaining papers of this symposium.
I leave it to my colleague, Professor Moss, to expand further on the interplay between science and rhetoric in seventeenth-century Italy. But let me conclude with one paradoxical note about Galileo. Expert as he was in rhetoric and dialectic, he ended up a champion of science and the truth and certitude it would ultimately attain. How he did so I lack the time to explain here: suffice it to say that in several works I have argued for a rediscovery, on his part, of the suppositional natural necessity invoked by Albertus, Aquinas, and Buridan in earlier centuries. His masterwork was the Discorsi of 1638, written after his condemnation in 1633, which proposed a nuova scienza—a “new science,” indeed, but one that offered strict demonstrations on the model of Euclid and Archimedes, still using the canons of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. In this he would be followed by Sir Isaac Newton and a host of mathematical physicists tothe end of the nineteenth century. That achievement has so enamored scholars of the twentieth century that we forget the travail involved in the birth of the new physics. Like the medievals, we tend to see science and rhetoric as completely opposed, forgetting that science as we know it would not now exist had rhetoric not played a key role in its genesis and continued growth.
The methodology outlined in the Posterior Analytics was not restricted to the practice of science in the Middle Ages; it extended beyond this period into the Renaissance and well into the early modern period. Harvey, for example, invoked its canons in his work on the motion of the heart and the blood, and Galileo wrote an extensive commentary on it. This commentary has just been published: Galileo Galilei, Tractatio de praecognitionibus et de demonstratione, transcribed from the Latin autograph by William F. Edwards, with an introduction, notes and commentary by William A. Wallace (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1988).
This is the classical concept of rhetoric deriving from Aristotle; its main characteristics are described in a series of essays edited by J. D. Moss, Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), 1986.
Unfortunately the Aristotelian concept is omitted by Arnold Lazarus and H. Wendell Smith in their entry under “Dialectic/’ A Glossary of Literature and Composition (Urbana, 111.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1983), p. 87. This leads them to the following misleading characterization of the use of dialectics in rhetoric, which follows their threefold division of the meaning of the term dialectic: “In rhetoric, an adaptation of (3) [Hegel's concept] in which the writer starts with a thesis, then qualifies it with an opposing (if minor) objection or two, then arrives at a compromise, which is nevertheless close to the original thesis.” Such a description bears no relation whatever to the Aristotelian notions of rhetoric and dialectic being discussed in this essay.
The medieval development is well summarized in Niels G. Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages: The Commentaries on Aristotle’s and Boethius’ “Topics” (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1984).
A fuller analysis of the relationships between dialectic and rhetoric as these were understood in the High Middle Ages may be found in W. A. Wallace, “Thomas Aquinas on Dialectic and Rhetoric,” A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture, Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), pp. 244-254.
The literature on this subject is vast. The pioneering study was that of A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); later works include Steven Marrone, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); David Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); J. A. Weisheipl, ed., Albertus Magnus and the Sciences (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980); and Leo Elders, ed., La Philosophic de la nature de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Rome: Editrice Vaticana, 1982).
For a synthetic treatment, see W. A. Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972-1974), especially Vol. 1. Medieval and Early Classical Science, pp. 1-116.
Some of the difficulties are outlined by Edward Grant, “Celestial Matter: A Medieval and Galilean Cosmological Problem,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13 (1983): 157-186, and R. C. Dales, “The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 41 (1980): 531-530.
In addition to Crombie’s Grosseteste, see Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968); some correctives are introduced in Wallace, Causality, 1:27-64.
For a full account, see W. A. Wallace, “The Scientific Methodology of St. Albert the Great,” in Albertus Magnus Doctor Universalis 1280-1980, eds. G. Meyer and A. Zimmerman (Mainz: Matthias Griinewald Verlag, 1980), pp. 385-407.
The principle is stated by St. Thomas in his Summa theologiae, Prima Pars, q. 86, a. 3; its application to the subject matter of natural science is explained in W. A. Wallace, “Aquinas on the Temporal Relation Between Cause and Effect,” Review of Metaphysics, 27 (1974): 569-584.
In addition to the references in the two previous notes, see W. A. Wallace,
“Albertus Magnus on Suppositional Necessity in the Natural Sciences,” in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences (note 8 supra), pp. 103-128, and the essay cited in note 45 infra.
John Case, an English Aristotelian, reproves Averroes for not allowing the possibility that the human mind can achieve demonstrative knowledge in any subject matter; see his In universam dialecticam Aristotelis (London: 1584), p. 178. Note, in the title of Case’s work (which may be translated into English as “On all of Aristotle’s logic”), that by the end of the sixteenth century the term dialectica had come to designate the entire corpus of Aristotelian writings on logic, not excluding the Posterior Analytics. On Case and his teachings, see C. B. Schmitt, John Case and Aris-totelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston-Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 1983.
Much has been written about the condemnations as they relate to the history of science. For a translation of the principal theses that were condemned and a brief commentary on their significance, see A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant, Cambridge (Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 45-50.
This was also the date assigned by Pierre Duhem as the beginning of modern science; see his To Save the Phenomena, tr. E. Doland and C. Maschler (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Ockham’s views on demonstration are analyzed by Damascene Webering, The Theory of Demonstration According to William of Ockham (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1953). For an appreciation of Ockham’s role in the genesis of modern science, consult Ernest A. Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); for a critical evaluation, see W. A. Wallace, “Buridan, Ockham, Aquinas: Science in the Middle Ages/’ The Thomist, 40 (1976): 475-483, reprinted in idem, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of Galileo’s Thought (Dordrecht-Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1981), pp. 341-348.
“That Uncertain Feeling” was the title of a symposium held at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society at Norwalk, Connecticut, in October of 1983. Portions of this essay are based on the author’s contribution to that symposium, subsequently published as “The Certitude of Science in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 3.3 (1986): 281-291. There he juxtaposes his views to those of Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certitude in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); see also his critique of her work in the Review of Metaphysics, 39 (1985-1986): 374-377.
This development is sketched in C. A. Wilson, William Heytesbury and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960); a comprehensive overview is provided by Edith D. Sylla in her contribution to the Cambridge History of Late Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 540-563, and in her lengthy article on Richard Swineshead, written jointly with
John E. Murdoch, in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie, 16 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970-1980), 13:184-213.
Some of the reasons for this preoccupation are sketched in M. A. Hoskin and A. G. Molland, “Swineshead on Falling Bodies: An Example of Fourteenth-Century Physics,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 3 (1966): 150-182. As far as is known to date, the first author to apply kinematical reasoning to the fall of heavy bodies was Domingo de Soto, who formulated a correct “law” around 1550, considerably before Galileo’s writings. On Soto, see W. A. Wallace, “The Enigma of Domingo de Soto: Uniformiter difformis and Falling Bodies in Late Medieval Physics,” his, 59 (1968): 384-401, reprinted in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 91-109. For Soto’s possible influence on Galileo, see idem, “The Early Jesuits and the Heritage of Domingo de Soto,” History and Technology, 4 (1987): 301-320.
On these points see the author’s critique of Moody, note 18 supra; also his survey of the development of the science of mechanics in the Late Middle Ages, “Mechanics from Bradwardine to Galileo,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (1971): 15-28, reprinted in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 51-63.
If motion is not an absolute entity it is not a reality distinct from the body being moved; thus it cannot be a new effect, and, to be consistent with Ockham’s philosophy, it does not require a cause. For details, see Herman Shapiro, Motion, Time and Place According to William of Ockham (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1957), esp. p. 53.
The nuance added by Buridan is that such demonstrations presuppose an order of nature that has been willed by God, wherein regularity and order prevail, and wherein a natural truth and certitude are to be found. The key text is to be
found in Iohannes Buridanus, In metaphysicen Aristotelis quaestiones (Paris: 1518, reprinted Frankfurt a. M.: 1964), fol. 9r, cited in Prelude to Galileo, p. 345 (English tr.) and p. 348 (Latin). Moody misread Buridan when he saw the expression ex suppositione in his writing and argued that after Buridan “an ineradicable element of hypothesis [was] introduced into the science of nature” (Studies in Medieval Philosophy, p. 156); this may have been true of the Ockhamist development in England, but it was not true of Buridan and his followers. See also the following note.
Duhem developed this thesis in his three-volume work, Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci (Paris: A. Hermann & Fils, 1913). It has been much controverted by historians of science, for reasons summarized in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 303-319. A more extensive examination and critique will be found in W. A. Wallace, “Galileo Galilei and the Doctores Parisienses,” in New Perspectives on Galileo, eds. R. Butts and J. Pitt (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 87-138, enlarged and reprinted in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 192-252.
Albert of Saxony, for example, is typical of the fourteenth-century development. In Albert’s time the question whether motion is something distinct from the object moved and from its place was much discussed, and it was customary for nominalists to answer it in the negative and realists in the affirmative. Marsilius of Inghen clearly took the nominalist stance, whereas Buridan took the realist. When Albert came to take up the difficulty in his questions on the Physics, Book 3, he straddled the fence in the following way. In Question 6, considering the problem logically, he concluded in favor of the nominalists, while in Question 7, wherein he further admitted “divine cases,” i.e., those that are supernaturally possible, he concluded with the realists. Following logic alone, therefore, he turned out to be a nominalist, whereas “according to truth and to the faith” he professed himself a realist. See his Acutissime questiones super libros de physica auscultatione (Venice: 1516), fols. 36vb-38ra. These and other texts are discussed in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 64-77.
This revival was effected under the influence of a Scottish master, John Major of Haddington, better known under the French version of his name, Jean Mair. The movement is surveyed in Hubert Elie, “Quelques maitres de l’universite de Paris vers l’an 1500,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, 18 (1950-1951), pp. 193-243.
The secular master, Juan de Celaya, under whom Domingo de Soto studied at Paris, added a subtitle to most of his treatises, explaining that his questions were being presented secundum triplicem viam: beati Thomae, realium, et nominalium. Others added to these the realissimi and the variations among the nominalists—the Ockhamists and the followers of Gregory of Rimini. Fuller particulars may be found in W. A. Wallace, “The ‘Calculators’ in Early Sixteenth-Century Physics,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 4 (1969): 184-195, reprinted in Prelude to Galileo, pp. 78-90, as well as the earlier essay in that volume entitled “The Concept of Motion in the Sixteenth Century,” pp. 64-77.
Apart from Charles Schmitt’s book on John Case (note 15 supra), see M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), and J. E. McGuire and M. Tamny, eds., Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1983, esp. pp. 3-25.
The fifth centenary of Copernicus’s birth in 1973 made a wealth of information available concerning him; see, for example, the essays edited by Owen Gingerich and published with the title, The Nature of Scientific Discovery (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975); also the papers read at the Symposium on Copernicus under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society and published in its Proceedings, Vol. 117, No. 6, December 31,1973.
Robert S. Westman discusses the background of such disputes in his ‘The Copernicans and the Churches,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, eds. D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
The problem was recognized by Aristotle, who discussed it in his Physics, Bk 2, chap. 2, but who nonetheless allowed for the possibility of a “mixed science,” that is, one that achieved true demonstrations by employing principles taken jointly from mathematics and physics. For an analysis of his teaching, see James G. Lennox, “Aristotle, Galileo, and ‘Mixed Sciences,’” in Reinterpreting Galileo, ed. W. A. Wallace (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), pp. 2951. On the notion of a mixed or middle science (scientia media) as this expression was understood by Galileo, see W. A. Wallace, “The Problem of Causality in Galileo’s Science,” Review of Metaphysics, 36 (1983): 607-632, esp. pp. 624-625.
^For details of Piccolomini’s attack, consult G. C. Giacobbe, “I Commentarium de certitudine mathematicarum disciplinarum di Alessandro Piccolomini,” Physis, 14 (1972): 162-193. Other works dealing with this problem are cited in Galileo and His Sources (note 3, supra), p. 136, n. 120.
The best history of Second Scholasticism to date is that of Carlo Giacon, La seconda scolastica, 3 vols. (Milan: 1944-1950); a survey of the movement is given in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 12:1153, esp. 1158 and ff.
For the distinguishing characteristics of these systems of thought, see the respective entries in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Banezianism, 2:48; Molinism, 9:1011; and Suarezianism, 13:754.
This mediation took place at the famous Congregatio de Auxiliis held in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century; again see the New Catholic Encyclopedia for details, 4:168.
^Benjamin Nelson has surveyed this situation in his ‘The Quest for Certitude and the Books of Scripture, Nature, and Conscience,” in The Nature of Scientific Discovery (note 30 supra), pp. 355-372, followed by a discussion, pp. 372-391.
Galileo makes much of this exalted status of theology as a science in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, translated by Stillman Drake in his Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957).
The sources of Galileo’s early writings have eluded scholars for centuries, and only recently have they been identified as reportationes of lectures given by Jesuit professors at the Collegio Romano, which apparently came into Galileo’s hands through the good graces of Christopher Clavius, the eminent Jesuit mathematician on the faculty of that institution. Much of the documentation on which this discovery is based is given in Galileo and His Sources (note 3 supra), pp. 3-96.
Thus Ludovicus Rugerius, who taught the De caelo at the Collegio Romano in 1591, summarized his views on the corruptibility of the heavens in three conclusions, as follows: (1) “It is not yet completely improbable that the heavens are gener-able and corruptible through mutual transformation with lower bodies”; (2) “Much more probable is it that the heavens are generable and corruptible, but only through substantial transformation with other celestial parts”; and (3) “It is most probable that the heavens are ingenerable and incorruptible, though this cannot be positively demonstrated.” On this and other representative teachings, see W. A. Wallace, Galileo’s Early Notebooks: The Physical Question (Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 268-269, 325-330.
Records of such censorship are still available in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus; some instances are cited in Galileo and His Sources, pp. 17, 53, and 147, n. 156.
For complete analyses of Galileo’s rhetorical techniques in the face of ecclesiastical opposition, see the following works by Jean Dietz Moss: “Galileo’s Letter to Christina: Some Rhetorical Considerations,” Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (1983): 547576; “Galileo’s Rhetorical Strategies in Defense of Copernicanism,” in Novita Celesti e Crisi del Sapere, ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Florence: G. Barbera Editore, 1984), pp. 95-103; and “The Rhetoric of Proof in Galileo’s Writings on the Copernican System,” in Reinterpreting Galileo (note 33 supra), pp. 179-204.
The first edition of this work was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1962, and a second edition, revised and enlarged, appeared in 1970. In it Kuhn argued against the view that there is a cumulative growth of knowledge over the centuries, and even questioned whether truth is the goal of the scientific enterprise. While he makes many good points relating to the sociological conditioning of scientists in recent times, his thesis has been regarded by most philosophers as too extreme, for in effect it reduces science to dialectics, in the sense in which both these terms have been used in this essay. Much of current science, indeed most of it, reaches conclusions that are only probable and on this account are revisable. To concede that point, however, one need not banish all truth and certitude from science in the past, or to claim that it is impossible of attainment in the future. This is effectively what Kuhn has done, perhaps unwittingly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In subsequent essays, some of which appear in his The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), he has revised his early thesis to answer criticisms such as these.
Apart from Prelude to Galileo, Galileo and His Sources, and Reinterpreting Galileo, see the author’s essay entitled “Aristotle and Galileo: The Uses of Hupothesis (Sup-positio) in Scientific Reasoning,” in Studies in Aristotle, ed. Dominic O’Meara (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1981), pp. 47-77.
Source: Rhetorica, Vol. 7, No. 1, Symposium on the Rhetoric of Science (Winter, 1989), pp. 7-21Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20135200Accessed: 15/01/2010 02:24
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