Blogging about your classes makes you a member of the medievalist blogosphere...

[highlyeccentric]

I've got a few things I've been meaning to blog about my Medieval Cosmology course this semester- mostly the humourous scraps of information which I picked up, like Roger Bacon and the Mirrors of Doom, and "a cosmological explanation for the fact that everyone flirts with Devious Lecturer".
However, from someone who paid more attention, cared a lot more, and thought a lot more about that class than I did, I give you goblinpaladin on Magic In the Scientific Revolution. This is a very well-thought out entry, it has footnotes and everything. He offers some thoughts on the nature of "science" in the modern and medieval periods:

medieval science does not seek to understand merely how natural processes function, which is what modern science does. That would have been pointless to them: what is the use of knowing how this temporal world works when there is a permanent spiritual world beyond? What is important is to take the real world and use it as the metaphor God intended it, so that one can attempt to understand His intentions and will.

Put another way, medieval natural philosophy asked "WHY" something is the way it is. It sought to uncover the mind of God, and discover the purpose for which the natural world was built. Modern science asks "HOW" stuff works. This shouldn't really be regarded as a criticism of either, mind. It's just that they each had different perspectives on what 'truth' is and what they were seeking from the world. To try and look at the medieval world as some sort of 'precursor' to modern science is to completely miss the point. They were looking for different things.

If anyone's interested, I put up some theological musings on the same sort of thing back here. Being a more inquisitive person than I, goblinpaladin gets to thinking about how the change occurs. He might be wrong, for all I know, but it sounds good to me. Go, read.

Comments

[arnimus-prime.livejournal.com]

hi highly, not really anything to do with theological or scientific queries into nature's processes, but Camilla told me that you can go ahead and tell Ringbearer the 'big news'.

Hope you're doing well!
Arni

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

thanks Arni!