Abstract

The paper examines the different uses of and responses to Aristotle’s account of science in the first wave of interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of science and works in natural science and metaphysics in the early 13th century in Roger Bacon and Albert the Great. The author argues that Bacon reduces all the disciplines to mathematics as the most scientific discipline, even as he argues that experimentum is at the center of scientific evidence and conclusions. Albert the Great, by contrast, gives a more strongly analogical account of science, with broader differences between different disciplines as operating according to different intellectual ‘lights’ and methods. Albert champions experimentum in physics in a special way, rejecting a mathematical physics.