Monsters, laws of nature, and teleology in Late-Scholastic textbooks

SILVIA MANZO

Contingency and natural order in early modern science

Springer

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2019; p. 61 - 92

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ?monsters? or individuals withphysical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required specialexplanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern withmonsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholasticauthors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of thetreatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question asto how their accounts conceived nature?s regularity and teleology. It shows that theydeveloped a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanationsusually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This generalpoint does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the viewsemerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relativelyautonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. Inthis connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developedby the new science ? as exception less regularities?transferred to nature?s regularitythe ?strong? character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that thedecline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitantfactor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature.