1. Origins at Oxford. Aristotle's science and his
methodology could not be appreciated until his Physics
and Posterior Analytics had been read and understood
in the universities. Among the earliest Latin commen-
tators to make the works of Aristotle thus available
was Robert Grosseteste, who composed the first full-
length exposition of the Posterior Analytics shortly after
1200. This work, plus a briefer commentary on the
Physics and the series of opuscula on such topics as
light and the rainbow, served as the stimulus for other
scientific writings at Oxford. Taken collectively, their
authors formed a school whose philosophical orienta-
tion has been characterized as the “metaphysics of
light,” but which did not preclude their doing pioneer
work in experimental methodology.
The basis for the theory of science that developed
in the Oxford school under Grosseteste's inspiration was
Aristotle's distinction between knowledge of the fact
(quia) and knowledge of the reason for the fact (propter
quid). In attempting to make the passage from the one
to the other type of knowledge, these writers, implic-
itly at least, touched on three methodological tech-
niques that have come to typify modern science,
namely inductive, experimental, and mathematical.
Grosseteste, for example, treated induction as a dis-
covery of causes from the study of effects, which are
presented to the senses as particular physical facts. The
inductive process became, for him, one of resolving
the composite objects of sense perception into their
principles, or elements, or causes—essentially an ab-
stractive process. A scientific explanation would result
from this when one could recompose the abstracted
factors to show their causal connection with the ob-
served facts. The complete process was referred to as
“resolution and composition,” a methodological expres-
sion that was to be employed in schools such as Padua
until the time of Galileo.
Grosseteste further was aware that one might not
be able to follow such an orderly procedure and then
would have to resort to intuition or conjecture to
provide a scientific explanation. This gave rise to the
problem of how to discern a true from a false theory.
It was in this context that the Oxford school worked
out primitive experiments, particularly in optics, de-
signed to falsify theories. They also employed observa-
tional procedures for verification and falsification when
treating of comets and heavenly phenomena that could
not be subjected to human control.
The mathematical component of this school's meth-
odology was inspired by its metaphysics of light. Con-
vinced that light (lux) was the first form that came to
primary matter at creation, and that the entire struc-
ture of the universe resulted from the propagation of
luminous species according to geometrical laws, they
sought propter quid explanations for physical phe-
nomena in mathematics, and mainly in classical geom-
etry. Thus they focused interest on mathematics as well
as on experimentation, although they themselves con-
tributed little to the development of new methods of
analysis.
