2. Paris and the Spanish Universities. The Paduan
school exerted considerable influence throughout
northern Italy; it also stimulated a renewed interest
in Mertonian ideas at the University of Paris at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The group in which
this renewal took place centered around John Major
(or Jean Mair), the Scottish nominalist, who numbered
among his students John Dullaert of Ghent, Alvaro
Thomaz, and Juan de Celaya. Dullaert edited many
of the works of Paul of Venice, while he and the others
were generally familiar with the “calculatory” writings
of Paul's students. Major's group was eclectic in its
philosophy, and saw no inconsistency in making a
fusion of nominalist and realist currents, the former
embracing Oxonian and Parisian terminist thought and
the latter including Thomist and Scotist as well as
Averroist views. The Spaniard Gaspar Lax and the
Portuguese Alvaro Thomaz supplied the mathematical
expertise necessary to understand Bradwardine's,
Swineshead's, and Oresme's more technical writings.
Several good physics texts came out of this group;
especially noteworthy is that of Juan de Celaya, who
inserted lengthy excerpts from the Mertonians and
Paduans, seemingly as organized and systematized by
Thomaz, into his exposition of Aristotle's Physics
(1517). Celaya treated both dynamical and kinematical
questions, as by then had become the custom, and thus
transmitted much of the late medieval development
in mechanics (statics excluded) to sixteenth-century
scholars.
Celaya was but one of many Spanish professors at
Paris in this period; these attracted large numbers of
Spanish students, who later returned to Spain and were
influential in modeling Spanish universities such as
Alcalá and Salamanca after the University of Paris. An
edition of Swinehead's Liber calculationum was edited
by Juan Martinez Silíceo and published at Salamanca
in 1520; this was followed by a number of texts written
(some poorly) in the “calculatory” tradition. Theolo-
gians who were attempting to build their lectures
around Thomist, Scotist, and nominalist concepts soon
complained over their students' lack of adequate prep-
aration in logic and natural philosophy. It was such
a situation that led Domingo de Soto, a Dominican
theologian and political theorist who had studied under
Celaya at Paris as a layman, to prepare a series of
textbooks for use at the University of Salamanca.
Among these were a commentary and a “questionary”
on Aristotle's Physics; the latter, appearing in its first
complete edition in 1551, was a much simplified and
abridged version of the type of physics text that was
used at Paris in the first decades of the sixteenth cen-
tury. It reflected the same concern for both realist and
“calculatory” interests, but with changes of emphasis
dictated by Soto's pedagogical aims.
One innovation in Soto's work has claimed the at-
tention of historians of science. In furnishing examples
of motions that are “uniformly difform” (i.e., uniformly
accelerated) with respect to time, Soto explicitly men-
tions that freely falling bodies accelerate uniformly as
they fall and that projectiles (presumably thrown up-
ward) undergo a uniform deceleration; thus he saw the
distance in both cases to be a function of the time of
travel. He includes numerical examples that show he
applied the Mertonian “mean-speed theorem” to the
case of free fall, and on this basis, at the present state
of knowledge, he is the first to have adumbrated the
correct law of falling bodies. As far as is known, Soto
performed no measurements, although he did discuss
what later thinkers have called “thought experiments,”
particularly relating to the vacuum. An extensive sur-
vey of all physics books known to be in use in France
and Spain at the time has failed to uncover similar
instance of this type, and one can only speculate as
to the source of Soto's examples.
