After about the year 500, Greek philosophy and science were with a few exceptions lost to Europe.
Among the losses were nearly everything Aristotle wrote, most ofPlato, and practically all of Democritus, Hippocrates, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Skeptics, Ptolemy, and Galen. The rise of Christianity sent the pagan values that gave philosophy prestige in the ancient world into decline, including Aristotle’s idea of science, and no motive remained to investigate nature.
A sixth-century commentator expressed his indifference to inquiry when confronted with the, to him incomprehensible, evidence of the procession of the equinoxes. “Who would be able to state the causes of these things? No more could any human being give an account of the number of stars, their position and order, and the difference in magnitudes and colors. This only so all believe, that God has made everything as well as is needed, neither more nor less. Altogether we know the causes of few things. If therefore people cannot give the natural cause of things that are apparent, they should not keep asking for the cause of things that are not apparent.”1That attitude began to change with the recovery of Aristotle’s works in the universities, especially at Paris and Oxford, from the twelfth century. Two moments of this later medieval intellectual history are important for my argument. One is rising enthusiasm for the new idea of scientia, Aristotle’s episteme, in response to the newly available works of Aristotle. In Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon we see Europe’s first effort to puzzle out the logic of experiments. A second salient is the later medieval period after 1350 that received and absorbed the ideas of William Ockham. His combination of austere empiricism and orgiastic nominalism lays down principles for modern empiricism. What made empiricism at the end of the nineteenth century “radical” is a more consistently empirical departure from this nominalist legacy.
The scholastics’ modest experiments with the logic of experiment are not the right context for understanding Galileo and his experiments. For that we have to look beyond the schools, to astrology, magic, alchemy, and secret societies pursuing forbidden knowledge.
Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001.