Causality and Scientific Explanation. Vol. I: Medieval and Early Classical Science by William A. Wallace (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 393 space in lecture format to seek to establish the necessary complementarity between reason and faith. Time ought to have been allotted to set in perspective the relationship between Biblical and natural ethics. In sum, one has no doubt that Dr. Anderson sees the broader dimensions of the topics he has chosen to put before us. If the reader lacks his perspecuity, he may be bored or deceived by his book's avoidance of more fundamental questions. Providence College Providence, R. I. ALAN MILMORE, 0. P. Causality and Scientific Explanation. Vol. I: Medieval and Early Classical Science. By William A. Wallace. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972. Pp. 294. $12.00. Rapidity of change in the philosophy of science is illustrated by the fact that twenty years ago-in the heyday of the " logical empiricist " or "logical positivist" movement-it would have been considered misleading to speak of causality and scientific explanation in the same breath of voice. It was then assumed that the task of the philosopher of science was the formal representation of scientific theories in general, leaving to the practicing scientist the job of confronting his conclusions with actual scientific procedure. Philosophy of science, thus disengaged from the specific tenets of particular scientific theories, was thought to be immune from the vicissitudes of change and the overthrow of current beliefs. Since the philosopher of science could, in principle at least, outline the characteristics of all possible explanations, he could, by the same stroke, give the formal characteristics of all future explanations. Unfortunately, this attractive program has shown itself grossly inadequate, and it is now generally recognized that, in their concentration on technical problems of logic, logical empiricists lost contact with real science. If it was simplistic to read the past as the record of great men throwing off the shackles of dark inheritance and heralding the dawn of scientific objectivity, it was equally naive to assume that the concept of " explanation " in science can be divorced completely from a consideration of the history of scientific explanations. In this post-positivistic climate Fr. Wallace's excellent survey of the progress of scientific explanation from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century becomes a fashionable book, which will appeal to a large audience beyond the circle of medieval scholars. Fr. Wallace sets forth the characteristics of medieval science at Oxford, Paris, and Padua with a penetration and fairness which could hardly be 394 BOOK REVIEWS bettered, and he argues very persuasively for the provocative thesis that Aristotle provided the seventeenth century with its "new " scientific method. In this brief review, I shall focus on this latter aspect of Fr. Wallace's important book, and I shall choose to examine his contention that the early modern period of classical science " for all the protestations of reaction against late scholastic and Renaissance methods, was dominated by the same search for causes and thus was in recognizable methodological continuity with the medieval period. " (pp. 22-23) Fr. Wallace shows that from the thirteenth century, when Aristotle's philosophy was once more reaffirmed in the West, his methodogical canons were generally taken for granted. Robert Grosseteste, although a Ncoplatonist in his metaphysic, felt he had to adhere to the methodology defined by the Posterior Analytics, and he sought to cast his work into this mold. Four centuries later, courses on scientific method still centered around the four causes discussed by Aristotle. However much his latter-day opponents attacked him, they still retained more of his views than they would have been fond of admitting. Fr. Wallace justly points out that Galileo's running argument against Aristotle can obscure the fact that he agreed with him in holding that there is a literally and uniquely true physical theory, that it can be discovered, and that alternative theories are consequently false. I doubt, however, whether this warrants the claim that " there seemed to be, at the close of the Renaissance, despite the continued presence of numerous and vexing substantive problems, a general feeling that the methodological canons were well in hand. " (p. 155) One has to ask not only about specific methods but about the expectations that underlie these methods. There...