The chain of events leading up to Bishop Tempier's condemnation of 1277 is still not entirely clear. According to the historian
Edward Grant, the theologians desired to condemn Aristotle's teachings on the
eternity of the world and the unicity of the intellect. On 18 January 1277,
Pope John XXI instructed Bishop Tempier to investigate the complaints of the theologians. "Not only did Tempier investigate but in only three weeks, on his own authority, he issued a condemnation of 219 propositions drawn from many sources, including, apparently, the works of
Thomas Aquinas, some of whose ideas found their way onto the list." • 49. "That God could not move the heavens with
rectilinear motion; and the reason is that a vacuum would remain."
Assessment , the former site of the
School of Theology and Arts and later associated with the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Paris The long list has often been labelled as not being particularly organised, and that it is "broad in scope to the point of confusion."
Effects 's
St. Thomas Aquinas Confounding Averroës. Tempier investigated the works of both Aquinas and Averroes.
Pierre Duhem considered that these condemnations "destroyed certain essential foundations of Peripatetic physics". Duhem's view has been extremely influential in the
historiography of
medieval science, and opened it up as a serious academic discipline. Historians in the field no longer fully endorse his view that modern science started in 1277. According to the historian of science Richard Dales, they "seem definitely to have promoted a freer and more imaginative way of doing science." Others point out that in philosophy, a critical and skeptical reaction followed on from the Condemnations 1277. Since the theologians had asserted that Aristotle had erred in theology, and pointed out the negative consequences of uncritical acceptance of his ideas, scholastic philosophers such as
Duns Scotus and
William of Ockham (both
Franciscan friars) believed he might also be mistaken in matters of philosophy. They stressed the traditional Franciscan themes of Divine Omnipotence and Divine Freedom, which formed part of Ockham's first thesis. Ockham's second thesis was the principle of parsimony: also known as
Ockham's razor. This developed a new form of logic, based on an empiricist theory of knowledge. "While Scholastic in setting," as David Lindberg writes, it was "thoroughly modern in orientation. Referred to as the
via moderna, in opposition to the
via antiqua of the earlier scholastics, it has been seen as a forerunner of a modern age of analysis." It has been suggested that the new philosophy of nature that emerged from the rise of
Skepticism following the Condemnations, contained "the seeds from which modern science could arise in the early seventeenth century." ==See also==