Renaissance Idea of Natural Law

2008

2009

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2019

This paper's aim is to explain the transition that occurred during the Early Modern period, from Principles of Nature to Laws of Nature. Natural Principles are taken to be innate to substances and arise from their natures, while Laws of Nature are external and imposed from without. The paper takes the view that to explain this transition, one needs to examine the history of philosophical theories of substantial action. It argues that during the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern era, philosophers began to disentangle substantial actions from the nature of substances. This process of disentangling action eventually led to the concept of Laws of Nature, according to which laws compel a body to act in a certain way even though its nature does not.

Many historians of science consider laws of nature a modern category. Some, however, claim for the consolidation of a nomic conception of nature in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The first time that specific laws were formulated in medieval texts was in the scientific works of Robert Grosseteste (c.1175–1253), who stated the law of refraction and the law of reflection of light rays, and of Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292/1293), who added the law of the gravity of water and the law of universal nature. It is probable that Bacon’s concept of optical law had reached the modern times before Descartes. The nominalists-voluntarists of the fourteenth century, and most prominently William of Ockham (1288– c.1348), may have had an important part in the emergence of the concept of laws too. They rejected the realism of forms and immanent factors and stressed the sovereignty of God in creating and the contingency of his imposed decrees. This philosophy of nature provided a context within which the idea of a law of nature was comprehensible and natural. It had reached seventeenth-century scientists through Martin Luther (1483–1546).

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2010

Contemporary scholars set the Greek conception of an immanent natural order in opposition to the seventeenth century mechanistic conception of extrinsic laws imposed upon nature from without. By contrast, we argue that in the process of making the concept of law of nature, forms and laws were coherently used in theories of natural causation. We submit that such a combination can be found in the thirteenth century. The heroes of our claim are Robert Grosseteste who turned the idea of corporeal form into the common feature of matter, and Roger Bacon who described the effects of that common feature. Bacon detached the explanatory principle from matter and rendered it independent and therefore external to natural substances. Our plausibility argument, anchored in close reading of the relevant texts, facilitates a coherent conception of both 'natures' and 'laws'.

Shells and Pebbles: Interesting finds on the shores of the history of science

As historians, we historicize. Indeed, it is our firm belief that everything in our world is open to historical analysis and that, in the case of a job well done, the result will invariably be a deeper understanding of the object of our study. In fact, the more timeless and placeless this object appears to be, and therefore the more immune to historical analysis, the more interesting the outcome has often proved to be. We now have histories of ‘the modern fact’, ‘objectivity’, and of ‘truth’, that is to say precisely those aspects of science that one tends to see as universal and timeless. In this essay I would like to advocate a similar approach with regard to another notion that most scientists tend to take for granted, that of the ‘laws of nature’. To be more precise, I want to suggest three possible lines of attack that may deepen our understanding of this crucial concept, and therefore of science itself. The first aims at a conceptual history of the term, akin to what the Germans call ‘Begriffsgeschichte’; the second is a study of the ‘biography’ of specific laws, and the third looks at the distribution of such laws across the various disciplines. Strangely enough, many of these topics have so far barely been addressed by historians of science.

Interacting Minds in the Physical World, 2022

The thesis of this chapter is that the notion of ‘laws of nature’ has Christian origins, and that modern science and philosophy have adopted it while eviscerating it of its theistic roots, thereby bequeathing to us the almost tyrannical ideology of laws without a lawmaker and thus without exceptions.

2018

The Article describes the main natural theories in the Middle Age.