ABSTRACT
Philosophy and true philosophy Introduction
Natural philosophy, both as a practice and as a subject-area, was created in early thirteenth-century Christian Europe. The natural philosophy that we are concerned with in this book was created by thirteenthcentury Christians in order to serve as a weapon to defend Christianity against the threats that they perceived it was then facing, and to promote particular Christian religious practices. It was produced by amalgamating in certain ways Greek philosophy (especially that of Aristotle) with Christianity. Thus to understand the nature of the natural philosophy of the friars and others in the thirteenth century, it is necessary for us to look first at Greek philosophy and at Christianity, and at the role of the study of nature and the natures of things within them. This will also help make clear the identity of philosophy (of which natural philosophy was in the medieval centuries a part) and thus distinguish it from 'science' as we know and practise it today.
