As we look back on the history of science, it seems that a strong case can be made for the assumption that the emergence of modern science was in some significant and meaningful sense dependent on the existence of a well-developed natural philosophy. To establish this thesis, we must first go back to the late Middle Ages, when natural philosophy reached its mature development after it became a required subject in the medieval universities. Did this mature and institutionalized natural philosophy possess the requisite characteristics that would enable science in general, and the particular sciences that comprise it, to emerge in the centuries to follow?

Is this perhaps a pseudo-issue? Was it not true that during the late Middle Ages exact, or “middle,” sciences, such as astronomy, optics, and mechanics, already existed independently of, but concurrently with, natural philosophy? In truth, these exact sciences had themselves once been a part of natural philosophy as far back as the period just before Aristotle. In his classification of theoretical knowledge, Aristotle classified the exact sciences as independent of natural philosophy, because they were seemingly as much mathematical as they were natural philosophy; but they were neither mathematics nor natural philosophy. Nor were they sciences in the later modern sense. Why is this so? Precisely because they were mathematical disciplines that were only supposed to focus on limited problems that could be resolved only by mathematics but were not to be resolved by natural philosophy.