This paper aims at a partial rehabilitation of E. A. Moody''s characterization of the 14th century as an age of rising empiricism, specifically by contrasting the conception of the natural science of psychology found in the writings of a prominent 13th-century philosopher (Thomas Aquinas) with those of two 14th-century philosophers (John Buridan and Nicole Oresme). What emerges is that if the meaning of empiricism can be disengaged from modern and contemporary paradigms, and understood more broadly in terms of a cluster (...) of epistemic doctrines concerned with the methodology of knowing, it characterizes very appropriately some of the differences between the ways in which late-medieval thinkers both understood and practised the science of psychology. In particular, whereas Aquinas thinks psychology is about reasoning demonstratively to the real nature of the soul from its evident operations (thereby assimilating psychology to metaphysics), Buridan and Oresme, both of whom doubt whether real animate natures can be known empirically, focus on giving detailed accounts of those operations themselves (thereby assimilating psychology to physics). (shrink)

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)