Natural Philosophy in the Historical Collections of the University Library of Letters and the Saint Charles Library
Exhibition organized by the Humanities Library
Dates:February 10–March 13, 2014
Schedule:
Location:R. Llull Library
The historical collection of the Humanities Library, housed in the Special Collections Department, comprises 5,671 printed works fromthe 16thto the 19th centuriesin a wide range of disciplines: geography, history, theology, social sciences, the arts, general literature and linguistics, as well as 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, helping us understand what natural philosophy (philosophia naturali) refers to.
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 starting inthe 13th centuryand transmitted in all its variations until the end ofthe 16th century, natural philosophy thus covers a broad spectrum of disciplines: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, the theory of the 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 the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, physics was, along with logic and ethics, 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 the natural sciences) derive their foundation from it and are subordinate to it (hence the term second philosophy).
In the Middle Ages, philosophy (ethics, physics, logic) served as the foundation 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 founded inthe 13th centuryencompassed the entire range of natural sciences, according to an academic corpus 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 ethics.” 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 influential scientist of that era, Isaac Newton, developed differential and integral calculus together with Leibniz. Hisbook *Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica*(1687)—of which the University Library’s Humanities Collection holds a 1739 edition—was regarded as the model for scientific theory until the early20th century. His influence inspired many philosophers, including Voltaire, David Hume, and Saint-Simon.
But with the development of experimental science (Galileo and Newton), physics broke away from metaphysics and established its independence. From that point on, the gap between science and philosophy continued to widen. Following the example of physics, the other sciences gradually broke free from their philosophical roots, one after another. Chemistry took this path with Lavoisier inthe 18th century, and 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 from the Faculty of Montpellier) illustrate the evolution of the concept of natural philosophy into the concept of science as it emerged in the 19thecentury and as we know it today.
Photo credits: University of Montpellier / SCDI Montpellier – Photography Department