In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 585-587 [Access article in PDF] Chumaru Koyama, editor. Nature in Medieval Thought: Some Approaches East & West. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. xiv + 183. Cloth, $65.00. The subtitle of this volume is misleading. The Japanese scholars represented (Koyama, Y. Iwata, and B. R. Inagaki) were all trained in Western medieval philosophy and are highly (...) respected medievalists. None of the Western contributors is an expert on Eastern philosophy. Even readers familiar with Japan will be hard pressed to find anything characteristically Eastern in any of the contributions.In the forward provided by the editor and in a preface written by W. Kluxen, we are informed that the volume was the product of two international conferences. Western [End Page 585] and Eastern experts on medieval philosophy were assembled to discuss the problem of "how each human being and humanity as a whole will handle nature in the future" (viii). Both Koyama and Kluxen assume that medieval Europeans conceived essential features of the understanding of "nature" now common to the whole world.Judging from the essays in the book, we conclude that the volume represents a beginning. There are connections between some of the essays, but the question remains: can the medieval view of nature offer us guidance on how to deal with our environmental crises? In general, one might expect a congenial relationship between ancient Western organic views and Japanese intuitions about nature. Nevertheless, compromise characterizes technological decision-making in both cultures. The challenge posed by radical environmentalists is the adequacy altogether of anthropocentric environmental ethics to save the planet.The essay by Iwata offers an interpretation of natural teleology that is compatible with mechanism and hypothetical necessity. Iwata suggests that art that pursues its own ends and not as an imitation of nature can be the source of environmental crises. Two papers by Kluxen on ethics, nature, and natural law acknowledge major transformations in the Middle Ages, and the challenge he poses is how to reintegrate reason and nature. K. Riesenhuber challenges recent accounts that claim to find in some twelfth-century authors an autonomous interest in nature. While nature as a discipline did not achieve autonomy in the twelfth century, Riesenhuber detects the stirrings of independence, but knowledge of nature remained subordinate to knowledge of God. L. Honnefelder suggests that guidance for our treatment of nature may lie in developing new models for the combination of the Platonic technomorphic with the Aristotelian biomorphic paradigm. Inagaki's paper on original sin and human nature adopts a stance that conforms to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the human break with nature. Whatever the source of that disintegration, the problem described in this way requires first a healing of human nature. The paper by M. M. Adams considers John Duns Scotus's revision of final causality. Scotus distinguished between the perfection of the being that a thing constitutes and the explanatory function of that achievement. On this account, Scotus revised the analysis to secure one sense in which Goodness explains being. The paper provides an example of the sorts of transformations in the medieval view suggested by several of the other contributors.C. Steel's paper questions the assumptions about the connection between medieval and modern conceptions of nature. Steel adopts a more comprehensive historical perspective. Flawed by its selective reliance on secondary literature, the paper nonetheless represents an important effort to understand our current dilemma from a historical perspective. Steel challenges L. White, Jr.'s now famous claim about the Christian roots of our ecological crisis. Steel overlooks White's appeals to Christian traditions at variance with Christian dualism and to the use of the Bible in the seventeenth century to sanction the study of science as a means to master nature. Steel takes up the vexed question of continuity or discontinuity between medieval philosophy of nature and seventeenth-century science. In the end Steel falls on the side of continuity, yet in a way that can be expressed only dialectically! That is to say, medieval commentaries on... (shrink)

Drawing on a half century of scholarship, of Polish studies of Copernicus and Cracow University, and of Copernicus's sources, this book offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of Copernicus's achievement, and explains his commitment to the ...

Pierre Duhem rejected unambiguously the strong version of realism that he believed was held by Copernicus. In fact, although Copernicus believed that his theory was clearly superior to Ptolemy's, he seems to have recognized that his theory was at best only approximately true. Accordingly, he recognized that his arguments were not demonstrative in the traditional sense but probable and persuasive. Duhem regarded even the belief in probably true explanations as misguided. Nevertheless, Duhem recognized that, even if metaphysical intuition does not (...) enter into the content of physical theories, the rejection of hypotheses could be explained only by appeal to common sense. Hence, Duhem held a qualified instrumentalism according to which physical theories are not realist, but the terms of ordinary experience and empirical laws are realist. Accordingly, Duhem rejected the complete subordination of science to philosophy as well as the complete separation of science from philosophy. Duhem's history of cosmological doctrines reflects his belief in the origin of the subordination of science to philosophy and of the struggle to achieve the proper balance without being driven to the opposite extreme of their complete separation. (shrink)

As a Franciscan friar, student, teacher, philosopher, theologian, and political theorist, William of Ockham was and remains one of the most stimulating thinkers of the Middle Ages. The one consistent characteristic of his professional output—both as a student and later as an opponent of papal authoritarianism—was the provocative nature of his ideas. In required commentaries on standard theological texts as well as in his later, more independently inspired treatises, Ockham demonstrated a genuine talent for suggesting and sustaining a number of (...) original, unorthodox and, occasionally, even outrageous ideas. Accordingly, Ockham holds the distinction of being the most rejected but influential philosopher-theologian of the fourteenth century, an observation that applies to his views on causality in which, for example, Ockham held the principle of action at a distance in order to save the causal account of some phenomena. One of the more interesting distinctions that he made, however, occurs in his treatment of sacramental theology as part of his account of God's causal activity with respect to the sacraments. (shrink)

ArgumentLudwik Antoni Birkenmajer (1855-1929), following along the paths pioneered by Leopold Prowe, Maximilian Curtze, Franz Hipler, and J. L. E. Dreyer, joined them as trailblazers of Copernican scholarship in the nineteenth century. Educated in the classics and mathematics, Birkenmajer began by examining more closely the Cracow background to Copernicus's development and studying his works and annotations in books he owned or read. Birkenmajer contributed many discoveries that eventually became common knowledge, and his studies loomed over Polish research on Copernicus into (...) the 1970s. Focusing on historical context and his original insights, the essay reminds readers of his contributions (sections 1–2), relates them to discussions of Copernicus's precursors (section 3), to the debate about Maragha precedents (section 4), his reading of theUppsala Notebook(sections 2 and 5), and his account of the origin of Copernicus's heliocentrism (section 6). By means of a more critical assessment of his interpretation, the essay revises earlier accounts, rescuing the original insights that mark Birkenmajer's most important contributions to current debates and his efforts to reconstruct Copernicus's path to heliocentrism. (shrink)

In their commentaries on Peter of Spain’s texts, two professors at the University of Cracow, John of Glogovia and Michael of Biestrzykowa, provided interpretations of consequences and conditional propositions which either rejected the paradoxes of strict implication or placed on them such restrictions as to challenge traditional views about the relation between antecedent and consequent. Nicholas Copernicus may have been inflenced by those discussions.

This article summarizes Ockham's interpretation of Aristotle's categories, showing how his account of connotative concepts introduced a revision in the Aristotelian doctrine about the relation between mathematics and physics. The article shows that Ockham's account influenced William of Heytesbury, John Dumbleton, and Nicholas Oresme to re-interpret disciplinary relations and disciplinary boundaries. They did so, however, in ways compatible with other basic principles of Aristotelian philosophy of nature; nevertheless, their modifications of the Aristotelian account of mathematics stimulated later philosophers to construct (...) robust theories of mathematics compatible with modern mathematical physics. (shrink)

The astronomical traditions on which Copernicus drew for his major works have been well researched. Questions about Copernicus's arguments and his education in logic have been less thoroughly treated. The arguments supplied by Copernicus in his major works are shown to rely to a large extent on well-known dialectical topics or inference warrants. Some peculiar features of his arguments, however, point to sources at Cracow that very likely inspired him to construct arguments based on the requirement of real connections between (...) antecedents and consequents as a condition for the validity of hypothetical conditionals. (shrink)