The Quaestiones de secretis mulierum of MS Erfurt-Gotha, Universitäts- und Forschungsbibliothek, Dep. Erf., CA 4º 299, ascribed to John Buridan and recently edited for the first time, are an incomplete set of questions on Pseudo-Albert the Great’s De secretis mulierum. The text contains an extensive treatment of the topic of human generation, with a particular focus on male and female roles in reproduction. This essay retraces Buridan’s view on the generative aspects of female physiology as it emerges in his commentary on Pseudo-Albert’s text. By analyzing this unexplored feature of Buridan’s thought, the essay aims to contribute to the growing research on the biological aspects of Buridan’s natural philosophy.

Part III of Gulliver’s Travels stands out from the other voyages: instead of landing Gulliver in a single country, it consists of four, distinct journeys to extraordinary lands. Each of these is peopled by quasi-magical beings and each voyage dramatizes the abuses of the 'modern' learning and political and scientific culture of Swift’s time. In Laputa, the Floating Island, Gulliver encounters fanatical mathematicians whose bodies are as twisted as their mistaken calculations. In Balnibarbi, the literally overshadowed country beneath, barren crops and cockeyed buildings testify to the misapplied science of its Academy of Projectors. In Glubbdubdriub, the Island of Sorcerers, Gulliver meets the ghosts of the heroes and great thinkers of the ancient world who battled tyranny; he also encounters the ghosts both of corrupt modern commentators who distort classic texts and of the syphilitic ancestors of modern aristocrats. The final voyage to Luggnagg features a race of immortals who illustrate the vanity of human wishes as they grow increasingly quarrelsome, discontented and senile forever. As a whole, Part III constitutes a savage satire on the entire Whiggish project of Swift’s contemporary Britain.

If one reads about science, writes about science, or teaches science, one should know about the whats, hows, whens, and whys of science. What is science? How is it done? When is science needed? Science seeks to understand and systematize the natural world. It does so experimentally, using test tubes, computers, and animals (including humans), among other things. Curiosity and necessity drive science. Since ancient times, people have wanted to understand and then manipulate their world. For example, science has provided the means to painlessly and noninvasively look into the human body through the development of X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and scintigraphy (radioisotopes). Electronics and materials science have enabled creation of cell phones. Chemistry has given us therapeutic drugs, Teflon, and Velcro. Physics and engineering have taken us to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. This broad scope of science makes it difficult, but not impossible, to define. This chapter provides a holistic view of science.

This chapter considers the early modern ‘prehistory’ of the Romantic sublime. It considers the sublime as a type of experience of the natural world that far preceded its formal articulation, taking as examples the volcanic encounters of the Scottish traveller William Lithgow (c. 1582–c. 1645) and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). The natural philosopher Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) has often been identified as an originator of the Romantic sublime; this chapter casts him instead as a lynchpin. He was not the first to ‘see’ the great in nature; instead, his theory challenged the theological foundations of many early modern sublime experiences, paving the way for a theory of the sublime that could move beyond the divine. Above all the chapter argues for the value of the vocabulary of sublime experience to describe encounters with the natural world before the Romantic sublime.

When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?-1695) famously described the natural secrets of cooking, she invoked some of the foundational terms of colonial science and society, from Aristotelian paradigms to Columbian acts of claiming. Scholars have long noted the importance of scientific knowledge to Sor Juana and underscore her engagement with Indigenous cultures, languages, and traditions. But few scholars have examined the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and scientific writing in Sor Juana’s ouvre. This chapter, grounded in a reading of classical natural philosophy, as it was expressed in Sor Juana’s Respuesta (1695), represents an effort to bring these research areas into dialogue. By juxtaposing Mayan-language documents from colonial Yucatán with Sor Juana’s masterful defense of knowledge in central New Spain, this chapter analyzes how Indigenous ways of knowing may have shaped one of the most important treatises on knowledge in colonial Mexico, thus suggesting. ways in which colonial letters both mark and help to promote critical transitions in the meaning of knowledge, epistemological categories, and the nature of knowledge production itself.

The treatise On Generation and Corruption (GC) consists of a general account of generation and corruption (offered in the first book) plus an elemental theory (advanced in the second book). This introduction explores the relation between these two pieces. The upshot of this exploration is that the unity of the treatise is stronger than it is often thought. Far from being a suboptimal amalgam of various pieces, the treatise is the best and most efficient way to fulfill the promise made at the outset, where an account of the nature and causes of generation and corruption is announced, including how they differ from other natural processes such as alteration and growth.

This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.

The ant in Robert Hooke’s compendium and celebration of microscopy in Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665) uniquely resists scientific scrutiny: moving about when alive, too-easily crushed when dead, the ant proves to be insistently difficult to study under a microscope. Through an extended allusion to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Hooke links the unruly ant to the colonial economy of enslaved Africans in Barbados, a place that Ligon understands through sugarcane, enslaved Africans, and saltwater slavery. The story of Hooke’s ant in Micrographia uncovers what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacy” of modern, Western liberalism and the global conditions upon which it depends. In this case, Hooke’s ant reveals the intimacy of early scientific practice and the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery, exposing in the process that a small thing can reveal vast scales of geography and their networks of exploitation.

The introduction explains the significance of the study’s topics, efficient causation and causal powers. It explains why a study on Aquinas’s views of these topics is needed. It also describes the methodology for reconstructing Aquinas’s views and the organization of the book.

This chapter provides an introduction to Aquinas’s views on efficient causation and causal powers, as well as some background and context necessary for appreciating his views. The chapter first introduces Aquinas’s views on the nature of the relationship between an efficient cause and its effect and the various elements involved in paradigm cases of efficient causation. After presenting an overview of Aquinas’s theories, the chapter next contrasts Aquinas’s views with competing historical theories of causation. Comparison with these other theories helps to highlight what is philosophically significant in Aquinas’s theories. The chapter also discusses Aquinas’s sources and situates his views relative to medieval debates about causation. This background provides some context for appreciating what is original or controversial in Aquinas’s theories. Finally, the chapter includes an introduction to the technical terminology that Aquinas uses to express his views on efficient causation and causal powers.

This chapter examines natural philosophy in the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800), focusing on three areas: 1) the so-called mechanisation of nature, which presents a rival understanding of the natural order to that of medieval Aristotelianism; 2), the rise of experiment and laws of nature as tools for the knowledge of nature; 3) the emergence of new theologies of nature and new methods of biblical interpretation, which develop in concert with wider changes in natural philosophy. The chapter demonstrates how early modern thinkers inherit and transform the natural philosophy of the medieval Latin tradition, producing new philosophical and theological accounts of nature that are sufficiently comprehensive to rival the Christian-Aristotelian framework of the Middle Ages.

Plato’s philosophical thinking begins from views and assumptions that he presupposes in his readers or in himself, whether or not he states them explicitly. This chapter surveys the following influences: (1) Homer. (2) Political developments and the moral questions they raise. (3) The interactions of natural philosophy (‘Presocratic’ philosophy) and religion. (4) The epistemological questions arising from natural philosophy. (5) Sceptical tendencies in naturalist epistemology. (6) Sophistic and rhetoric and the intellectual and political tensions connected with them. (7) Plato’s reactions to natural philosophy, sophistic and rhetoric. (8) Socratic inquiry and its sources in drama and forensic oratory.

Modern historians of science often discuss the twelfth-century “discovery of nature” as a milestone in our relations with the environment. This article explores medieval scientific, literary, and theological writers who contributed to this distinctive set of attitudes even as it documents the significant continuities between these writings and those of classical and late antique authorities on the natural world. It traces how the encyclopedic imagination provided a hierarchical framework for understanding the world, and how this ontological scaffolding, in turn, underpinned the twelfth-century revival of Neoplatonic thought, as medieval Christian writers would enthusiastically adopt an earlier tradition of personifying nature. In the thirteenth century, this magisterial Natura came to reflect advances in the “new” Aristotelian science that would become the foundation of the medieval university curriculum. While the synthesis of Christian Neoplatonism and Aristotelian physis would remain the predominant model of nature for several centuries, it also occasioned polemical debates over how God related to the universe that he created and how knowledge of the natural world was to be valued and instrumentalized. This medieval vision of a human-scaled, personified nature would prove philosophically durable up to the Scientific Revolution.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. It is argued, however, that modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature, pointing to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention whilst avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

The estrangement and frequent mutual incomprehension existing between theology and the sciences today reflects chiefly cultural phenomena, arising from particular methodological determinations reached by both disciplines in early modernity that, over time, mutated into irreconcilable metaphysical visions. What had been distinct modes of inquiry within a unified intellectual pursuit of a single comprehensive transcendent truth now came to be understood as entirely unrelated bodies of factual knowledge pursuing separate ends. This change, however, involved several logically unsustainable revisions of previous categories: ‘revelation’, ‘science’, and ‘nature’, for instance, and ‘causality,‘ in particular. Yet these developments imposed limits upon both theology and the sciences that inhibited the power of either to understand many of its own claims. Lately, in physics and the life sciences especially, there has been a healthy movement away from purely mechanical models of causality. Whether theology can recover a dimension of scientifically informed natural philosophy is yet to be seen. But if the two cultures can be disencumbered of their early modern metaphysical prejudices, they might find that they naturally converge upon a shared horizon of ultimate explanation that provides each with its animating logic and reveals each to be only a limited mode of that final wisdom.

This chapter investigates the conditions for dialogue between science and religion, and asks what makes dialogue possible or desirable. Sometimes, dialogue has simply amounted to theology and religion accommodating themselves to the sciences, and this can serve to reinforce unhelpful ways of categorising science and religion. Different models for dialogue are suggested by past relations between natural philosophy and religion, understood as formative practices (rather than proposition-generating activities). An alternative approach is also suggested by the problem of incommensurability, initially applied in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alasdair MacIntyre to the relations between competing scientific frameworks, but which is also applicable also to science–religion relations. Thinking of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in terms of historical traditions, to use MacIntyre’s expression, leads to a different understanding of their possible relationships. Historical and sociological descriptions of scientific and religious practices, in short, should play a more prominent role in our understandings of sciences, religions, and their relations.

Material for alternative framings of science is sought in the context of high medieval natural philosophy. The chapter reviews the work of thirteenth-century English scholar Robert Grosseteste on light and colour, as well as his reflective comments on a theological teleology of science, with additional reference to his patristic and early medieval sources. The visual metaphor of insight and imagination, and the restorative and reconciliatory purpose of engaging with nature, emerge strongly. A concluding section discusses which aspects of such a pre-modern framing might still inform a theology of science today, and reflects on other contributions in this volume from that perspective taken together with a personal experience of pursuing science