Articles on Nicole Oresme and the Spring of Modern Age

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Ulrich Taschow

Die Bedeutung der Musik als Modell für Nicole Oresmes Theorie „De configurationibus qualitatum et motuum“,

in: Early Science and Medicine, Vol. IV, No. 1 February 1999, S. 37-90, Brill, Netherlands

Summary

This essay is dedicated to the search for the origins of our modern quantitative and metric approach to nature which, according to evidence here presented, are to be found in the medieval science of acoustics. The central figure in our argument is Nicole Oresme, whose Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum of ca. 1350 featured novel graphic techniques which figuratively represented intensities of permanent qualities and intensities of qualities and velocities over time in terms of multidimensional functions. Closely related to this method was the development of a qualitative measure of qualities (quantitas qualitatis). This new and purely mathematical view of the problem rendered the century-old debate over the ontological status of qualities (intensio et remissio formarum) quite redundant. It is usually claimed that Oresme's method lacked both an empirical base and a measurable application, that it possessed a merely hypothetical or metaphysical nature and that it was given to figurative symbolism. However, this view is badly mistaken, for it ignores the results presented in Oresme's large section on music. For upon closer scrutiny, Oresme's views on music reveal themselves as the core to his concerns and as our key to the complete re-evaluation of his methodology. His musical doctrines are also of great interest as precursors to the seventeenth century's concerns with the scientific bases of acoustic and Helmholtz' nineteenth-century investigations of sound psychology.

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Ulrich Taschow

Theorie der Wissenschaft und Theorie der Musik in Nicole Oresmes „De configurationibus qualitatum et motuum“

in: Systematische Musikwissenschaft, Towards the 21st Century, 1997, V/2, S. 289-334

Abstract

In this essay it is intended to undertake an investigation into the origins of our modern strategies of quantification and measurement of nature, with a particular focus on the beginnings of a scientific acoustics. Based on an analysis of the Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum of Nicole Oresme (14th century) the text presents new acoustical and musical results in the fields of history of science and musicology. Furthermore the article reveals that - contrary to today‘s self-image of music and science - music was an important model for the development of analytical geometry as well as for the evolution of empirical-metrical intentions, convictions and methods and, thus, for the genesis of the modern natural sciences in general. The history of scientific acoustics must be regarded as having started with Oresme in the 14th century already, who in his approach anticipated Helmholtz‘s overtone-theory etc...

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