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THE CASE FOR COSMOLOGY 15

ABSTRACT OF COMMENTSWere There Significant DifferencesBetweenMedieval and Early Modern ScholasticNatural Philosophy?Contentand ProceduresEDITH DUDLEY SYLLA

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY, RALEIGHVery broadly speaking, there are two ways in which early modernscholastic natural philosophy might have differed from the previousAristotelian tradition. First, early modem scholastics might haverejected or modified specific doctrines held by medieval scholasticAristotelians. Second, early modem scholastics might have beenunlike their medieval predecessors in their approach to Aristotle ingeneral, for instance, in exhibiting greater diversity and independenceamong themselves or in being more open to the accommodationof non-scholastic or non-Aristotelian input. In his paper ProfessorEdward Grant takes the specific doctrine of the incorruptibility ofthe heavens as a case study for differences between medieval andearly modern scholastic natural philosophy and finds that a signifi-cant number of early modern scholastics, under the influence ofthe astronomical work of a Brahe or a Galileo, came to accept celestialcorruptibility.At the beginning of his paper Professor Grant cites the com-mon perception of Aristotelianism as a single, unchanging, monolithicentity stretching from the Middle Ages through the Renaissanceand contrasts this to Charles Schmitt s recent assertions that therewas a very great diversity of attitudes and methods among theAristotelians of the Renaissance, that Renaissance Aristotelianismwas no mere blind continuation of medieval Aristotelianism, andthat Renaissance Aristotelianism continued to develop in a pro-gressive way, frequently influencing positively key and forward-looking thinkers of the period.While not disagreeing with Schmitt s characterization ofRenaissance Aristotelianism, I would want to add the observationthat neither was medieval scholastic Aristotelianism the monolithicand unchanging entity it is sometimes supposed to have been. Ifin the early modern period scholastic Aristotelians held a spectrumof views about the incorruptibility or corruptibility of the heavens,so in the medieval period Aristotelians held a spectrum of ideasabout the nature of the heavens, disagreeing, for instance, concern-ing the matter of the heavens: do the heavens contain matter, and,

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