Edward Grant

Professor Emeritus Edward Grant

This 1997 book views the substantive achievements of the Middle Ages as they relate to early modern science.

Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts

The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

Grant Edward

This book shows how the Age of Reason actually began during the late Middle Ages.

God and Reason in the Middle Ages

This book describes how natural philosophy and exact mathematical sciences joined together to make the Scientific Revolution possible.

From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century

A History of Natural Philosophy

The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687

Planets, Stars, and Orbs

Okyay Kaynak

Ger Honderd

This book is a collection of some of the papers that were presented during a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on "Intelligent Systems: Safety, Reliability and Maintainability Issues" that was held in Kusadasi, Turkey during August 24- 28, 1992. Attendance at this workshop was mainly by invitation only, drawing people internationally representing industry, government and the academic community. Many of the participants were internationally recognized leaders in the topic of the workshop. The purpose of the ARW was to bring together a highly distinguished group of people with the express purpose of debating where the issues of safety, reliability and maintainability place direct and tangible constraints on the development of intelligent systems. As a consequence, one of the major debating points in the ARW was the definition of intelligence, intelligent behaviour and their relation to complex dynamic systems. Two major conclusions evolved from the ARW are: 1. A continued need exists to develop formal, theoretical frameworks for the architecture of such systems, together with a reflection on the concept of intelligence. 2. There is a need to focus greater attention to the role that the human play in controlling intelligent systems. The workshop began by considering the typical features of an intelligent system. The complexity associated with multi-resolutional architectures was then discussed, leading to the identification of a necessity for the use of a combinatorial synthesis/approach. This was followed by a session on human interface issues.

Intelligent Systems: Safety, Reliability and Maintainability Issues

Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world. It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little concerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences were narrowly confined to various computations that did not involve physical causes, functioning totally independently of natural philosophy. Although this began slowly to change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and thereby made the Scientific Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reflects the new relationship. Natural philosophy became the 'Great Mother of the Sciences', which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physical, and biological sciences to maturity, thus enabling them to leave the 'Great Mother' and emerge as the multiplicity of independent sciences we know today.

Grant illuminates how today's scientific culture originated with the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages.

From Aristotle to Copernicus

Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550

John Emery Murdoch

Eleven distinguished historians of science explore natural philosophy and mathematics in the Middle Ages.

Essays in Honour of Marshall Clagett

Mathematics and Its Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages

Provides a description of the major ideas about void space within and beyond the world that were formulated between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution

Much Ado about Nothing

Describes medieval conceptions of the cosmos as understood by scholastic theologians and natural philosophers in the universities of western Europe.

Modern scholarship has exposed the intrinsic importance of medieval science and confirmed its role in preserving and transmitting Greek and Arabic achievements. This Source Book offers a rare opportunity to explore more than ten centuries of European scientific thought. In it are approximately 190 selections by about 85 authors, most of them from the Latin West. Nearly half of the selections appear here for the first time in any vernacular translation. The readings, a number of them complete treatises, have been chosen to represent "science" in a medieval rather than a modern sense. Thus, insofar as they are relevant to medieval science, selections have been drawn from works on alchemy, astrology, logic, and theology. Most of the book, however, reflects medieval understanding of, and achievements in, the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. Critical commentary and annotation accompany the selections. An appendix contains brief biographiesof all authors. This book will be an indispensible resource for students and scholars in the history of science.

Edward Grant

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