Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life by Milward Peter;

Author:Milward, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2014-11-20T07:00:00+00:00

Eight

What Is Science?

The original meaning of science, from the Latin scientia, was simply “knowledge.” It stood for the whole object of university education. It is by knowledge both of himself and of the world around him that a student is educated at school, and especially at university. Thus he comes to that knowledge of the truth that, as Jesus says, makes him truly free.

From the foundation of the first universities in the thirteenth century, this object of knowledge included not only what we now call science, but also, and especially, philosophy—leading up to the three professional subjects, theology, law, and medicine. As I have said, the relationship that existed then between philosophy and science is the opposite of what prevails today. We have now come to think of philosophy as a special kind of learning on the fringes of science—or even of literature. Before it was science that was relegated to the inferior regions of philosophy.

In the Middle Ages, when they spoke simply of “the philosopher” they meant Aristotle. It was he who provided the universities with their basic textbooks of philosophy and science. They might equally have spoken of him as “the scientist.” His books covered most of human knowledge: the world of nature, the use of words, the soul of man, and the ideals of morality, of politics, of poetry, and of society.

Of all his books, the one that comes closest to what we think of as science is Physics. Today there is an immense proliferation of divisions and subdivisions within science, physics being but one, admittedly important, part. It is even divided from chemistry, electricity, and mathematics under the more general heading of science. But for Aristotle, and up until the eighteenth century, physics was physical science, the philosophy of nature.

The primary object of science, in its original meaning, was to investigate the world of nature that surrounds us. It studied the nature of everything it found—for nature or natura is in Latin what physics or physis is in Greek. Natura is literally what a thing is born to be, from the verb nasci, “to be born”; physis comes from the verb phyein, meaning “to grow.”

The original concerns of physical science, therefore, were not so much everything outside ourselves in the visible world as all living things—plants, animals, and even human beings. The whole philosophy of Aristotle was concerned with living things, especially the phenomena of life, birth and growth, and then decay and death. He noted how plants and animals come from particular seeds, with distinct powers or potentialities, and how in the course of time they grew to the fullness of their nature, or what he called “fullness in act.” This spirit of wonder at the phenomena of life produced the seed that blossomed into his own living philosophy. Alas, it has been deadened by generations of dull philosophers.

Such was the physical or natural philosophy inherited by the prophets of the new science, Bacon and Galileo, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, instead

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