Natural philosophy in the historical collection of the BU Lettres and the Bibliothèque Saint Charles
Exhibition organized by the Arts Library
Date:February 10 to March 13, 2014
Hours:
Location:R. Llull Library
The BU Lettres' historical collection, kept in the Reserve, comprises 5,671 printed works fromthe 16thto the 19th centuryin a wide variety of disciplines: geography, history, theology, social sciences, arts, general literature and linguistics, German, English, French, Romance, classical, and Slavic languages and literatures.
"Let no one enter here who is not a geometer": with this inscription adorning the pediment of the Academy, the school he founded in Athens, the Greek philosopher Plato hints at the historical link between philosophy and science, allowing us to understand what natural philosophy (philosophia naturali) means.
From antiquity to the end ofthe 16th century, the term science was synonymous with knowledge or study. When the subject of this study was nature and the physical universe, the term natural philosophy was used. Developed from the13th centuryonwards and transmitted in all its variants until the end ofthe 16th century, natural philosophy therefore covers a wide spectrum of disciplines: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, the theory of elements, cosmology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology. It is distinct from moral philosophy (morality and ethics), the theory of knowledge, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics.
Science and philosophy emerged at the same time among the Greeks more than two thousand five hundred years ago. For Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, physics, along with logic and ethics, was one of the three branches of philosophy. Philosophy (first philosophy, later called metaphysics) represents the supreme science, that of "first principles and first causes" (Aristotle), while the other sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, physics, and natural sciences) derive their foundation from it and are subordinate to it (hence the name second philosophy).
In the Middle Ages, philosophy (ethics, physics, logic) was the source from which the liberal arts emerged, corresponding to the seven fundamental sciences (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). The chairs of natural philosophy established in the ancient universities created inthe 13th centuryencompassed all the natural sciences, according to a university curriculum based on Aristotle's philosophy.
At the dawn of the modern era, Descartes still compared philosophy to "a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are all the other sciences, which can be reduced to three main ones: medicine, mechanics, and morality." René Descartes initially pursued a career as a scientist (working in analysis, geometry, and optics). Blaise Pascal made discoveries in mathematics and fluid mechanics.
The most important scientist of this era, Isaac Newton, invented differential and integral calculus alongside Leibniz. Hisbook Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica(1687), of which the University Library of Arts and Sciences owns the 1739 edition, was considered the model of scientific theory until the early20th century. His prestige influenced many philosophers, including Voltaire, David Hume, and Saint-Simon.
But with the development of experimental science (Galileo and Newton), physics separated from metaphysics and gained its autonomy. From then on, science and philosophy grew increasingly distant. Following the example of physics, other sciences gradually freed themselves from their philosophical roots. Chemistry took this direction with Lavoisier inthe 18th century, biology inthe 19th centurywith Lamarck and Claude Bernard.
The works on display by Aristotle, Raymond Llull (after whom the University Library of Letters is named), Descartes, Newton, and others (Jean Sauri, professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier; François Bernier, doctor of medicine at the Faculty of Montpellier) illustrate the evolution of the concept of natural philosophy to the concept of science as it emerged in the 19th century.ecentury and is known today.
Photo credits: University of Montpellier / SCDI Montpellier – photography department