ABSTRACT
Chapter I presents the argument that the emphasis on science and moral philosophy by the Philosophes was a direct outcome of the debate among individual Scholastics over the roles theology and philosophy played in understanding the world and this led to the development of a science based on reason and evidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
It was the Scholastics who founded the great universities of Europe, and in the process introduced a method of systematic observations via the use of reason and evidence to understand the workings of a rational universe created by the Christian God. For the most part, though, the Scholastics simply accepted the moral philosophy of the Catholic Church, in particular its emphasis on individual salvation. It was left to the Christian Humanists of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries with their emphasis on individuality and their defense of human dignity to expand Christianity’s focus on salvation to include the betterment of humanity. This paved the way for science to be applied to the human condition in what would later be called the “the science of man.”
