Abstract

NASCIMENTO JUNIOR, Antônio Fernandes. Fragmentos da história das concepções de mundo na construção das ciências da natureza: das certezas medievais às dúvidas pré-modernas. Ciência educ. [online]. 2003, vol.09, n.02, pp.277-299. ISSN 1516-7313.

The philosophical concept of world thought begins with the Greeks, synthesized by Plato and Aristotle. For Plato the one physical world is apparent and, to reach the truth, it is necessary to remember the original ideas that determine its meaning. For Aristotle, material things are guided by ideas and logic is needed to understand them. During the Hellenistic period, the school of Alexandria elaborated Neo-Platonism, the base of Patristics. After the fall of Rome, the Byzantine philosophers kept the classic inheritance. The Church built a Neo-Platonic vision of Christianity, Scholastacism. In the east the Persians also came under Greek influence. Among the Arabs of the East Neo-Platonic thought guided philosophers and religious people so that for them reason and faith were not separated. At this point sciences grew: physics, alchemy, botany, medicine, mathematics and logic, until they were overtaken by the conservative doctrine of the Ottomans. In Muslin Spain, without the restrictions of theology, Aristotle's philosophy was better understood than in the rest of Islam. All the sciences also grew fast there. But Spain succumbed to the Christians. Arabs and Jews introduced Aristotle to Western Europe and elaborated Christian Aristotelian thought. Mathematics, experimental physics, alchemy and medicine of the Arabs intensively influenced the Occident. Artisans built more and more precise instruments, navigators built more and more efficient ships and meticulous maps, armourers calculated the launch form and aim of their weapons better and surveyors better elaborated the measures for their mapping of area. Artists, mainly Italian, starting from the Greek and Arab, created perspective in drawing, making possible the mathematization of the space. The Portuguese, with Arab scientists, Jews and Italians, concluded a project of naval expansion and they enlarged the horizons of the world. Italian thinkers, as a reaction to Scholastic thought, built a humanistic thought influenced by the original classical Greek thinking and the last Byzantine philosophers. Through all these changes the construction of a new universe and a new method begins which would flourish some decades later.

Keywords : Epistemology and Nature; Classic and Medieval Epistemology; Philosophy of the Sciences of Nature.

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