An Introduction to Nicole Oresme's Natural Philosophy

The focal point of this essay is the later Middle Ages in France, in particular the philosophical undercurrents of late scholasticism at the Paris University in the mid-thirteenth Century. Today, we would probably prefer the term ‘science’ to cover the meaning of what was then known as ‘natural philosophy’. Preceding the Renaissance, this kind of natural philosophy was represented by numerous French scholars. I will focus more closely on one of these scholars, Nicole Oresme, whose name continually appears in the literature on the later Middle Ages “scientific life” taking place at the new educational institutions of that time: the universities. Parts of this article may be well-known to some readers, especially the introductory paragraphs about the medieval universities and Aristotelian cosmology.