In his first work, the Dialecticae Institutiones of 1543, Peter Ramus urged those who wanted to learn the truth about the world not to approach scholars, but vineyard workers. “From their minds, as...

Recent students of late medieval intellectual history have treated Oxford theologians' Sentences lectures from the 1320s to 1330s as revealing the interface of the theological, logical, and scientific thinking characteristic of a historically momentous ‘New English Theology’. Its conceptual achievement, historians generally concur, was the casting off of the speculative metaphysics of such thirteenth-century authors as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon; its methodological novelty made it akin to twentieth-century analytic philosophy and seminal for the early Scientific Revolution. Yet the metaphysically (...) cast thirteenth-century sciences of perspectiva and astrologia persisted among scholars long into the early modern period. To show how this apparent paradox may be dissolved, this article details the intersection of thirteenth-century metaphysics and fourteenth-century analysis in the lectures of a controversial and influential proponent of the Oxford theology of the 1330s. (shrink)

Prof. Pasnau’s remarkable book offers an exciting integration of medieval and early modern philosophy. It begins, however, in mediis rebus and so downplays the role that a particularly Nominalist tradition plays in explaining the abandonment of substantial form rise of the mechanical philosophy. This paper attempts to sketch some of that role.