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Although I had been accepted into the history graduate program at U.C.L.A. for the following year, I deferred my admission so that I could teach mathematics in a Los Angeles juvenile probation camp.  My students ranged in age from fourteen to eighteen, and in offenses from burglary to murder.  While the level of achievement in mathematics (and for that matter, in most other fields) was shockingly low, the experience was one of the most satisfying that I have had in my teaching career, in part because of the challenge, and because several students ultimately changed their destructive behavior patterns. 

At U.C.L.A., I found four mentors whose work and example shaped my own approaches to historical studies.  Amos Funkenstein became the supervisor of my dissertation, and his broad and deep knowledge of intellectual history and the history of science, as well as his integrative approach to many fields provided a model that I chose to emulate.  From Robert Westman I acquired a knowledge of and interest in the Scientific Revolution and its historical foundations.  Richard Rouse provided me with the scholarly tools of paleography, codicology, and investigations into textual transmission that I have used throughout my career.  Marilyn McCord Adams inspired an interest in the philosophy of the middle ages, and Ockham and his contemporaries in particular. 

My dissertation, “Metabasis: The Interrelationship of the Sciences in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” focused on the definition and modification of scientific disciplines during the late middle ages. In several of his works, Aristotle had forbidden the application of techniques from one science in the domain of another.  Aristotle had concluded that scientific demonstrations may not pass from one genus to another, for in so doing, one violates the requirement that terms must be applied essentially and particularly.  Yet at the same time, Aristotle's injunction against metabasis, or cross-disciplinary proofs, carried with it the hint of an exception, the so-called subalternate sciences (e.g. optics and astronomy).  In the dissertation, I observed that while generally upholding the underlying perspective of Aristotle’s prohibition, medieval commentators on Aristotle revised and frequently extended the applications of the subalternate sciences.  Part of the dissertation research was supported by a Bertrand Russell fellowship and a University of California travel fellowship (both awarded in 1978), which permitted my use of manuscript sources in European libraries.  Before completing my degree in 1982, I published two articles, one on the definitions employed by William of Heytesbury in his Regule solvendi sophismata [Comitatus 10(1979) 9-20], the other, co-authored with Richard Rouse, on an early medieval astrological text known as the Liber Nimrod [Traditio 37(1981) 203-266].

In 1982, I accepted a position as assistant professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma.  In 1988, I received tenure and was promoted to associate professor; in 1995, I was promoted once again to full professor.  From 1994 until 1997, and again since 1999, I have been chair of the Department of the History of Science.  Within the department, I have taught courses at all levels, ranging from sophomore entry-level surveys to graduate seminars in medieval science.  Two students have completed PhDs under my direction, the first with a dissertation on the philosophical foundations of Ptolemy’s Almagest, the second on the early foundations of European earth sciences.

Simultaneously, I began to address the topic by tapping a different source of evidence, late-medieval commentaries on a theological text, Peter Lombard's Sentences.  In part because theology since the twelfth century had been developing along the lines of a scientific enterprise, theologians commonly devoted the prologues to their commentaries on the Sentences to such questions as whether theology was genuinely a science.  Frequently, these questions include a discussion of the unitary nature of science and the issue of subalternation of the sciences.  One of the most extensive treatments of these issues in the fourteenth century can be found in a commentary written by the English Franciscan, John of Reading (ca. 1270-1346).  The significance of this commentary is that John seems to have been among the earliest, if not the first, lecturers to have responded to Ockham, whose position I discussed in an earlier article [British Journal for the History of Science 18(1985) 127-145].  My first book [published in 1989 by E.J. Brill] centers around the critical edition of questions 6, 7, and 10 of Reading's prologue.  The text is preceded by an introduction organized into three chapters, the first dealing with Reading's career and a discussion of the surviving manuscript and sources of the text, while the second and third provide background to and analysis of Reading's positions on the subalternation and unity of sciences, respectively.

My examination of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commentaries on the Sentences provided the basis for two other editions and studies of the nature of subalternation, disciplinary structures, and certitude of knowledge in the late middle ages.  My article in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale [61(1994) 236-272] presents the position of John of Reading's contemporary at Oxford, Robert Graystanes.  My second book, published in 1994 by the American Philosophical Society, provides a partial edition and examination of fifteenth-century commentaries on the Sentences and the Posterior Analytics written by Antonius de Carlenis O.P..  These two texts display several elements of late-medieval eclectic approaches to the subject.  At the same time, I was led to an interesting argument that related questions of divine omnipotence to the issue of subalternation.  It seems to have been most popular at the University of Paris, but was also transplanted at the University of Vienna in the late fourteenth century.  The paper that resulted from this research was presented in different versions at the twenty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies and a CNRS seminar in Paris; it will be published in a collection of essays in memory of Amos Funkenstein.

I would suggest that the value of such work rests in two areas.  On the more basic level, much of my work has resulted in the editions of several texts around the central issue of disciplines.  My own editions of John of Reading, combined with those of Gedeon Gál, Gerard Etzkorn, and Josip Percan, have meant that we now have a significant, if still small part of Reading's text available for future use.  The same is true of Robert Graystanes: to my knowledge only Leonard Kennedy and I have edited his work, which William Courtenay has suggested is a significant resource for positions in circulation in the early fourteenth century.  The texts by Antonius de Carlenis present the material on subalternation from the philosophical and theological works of the same author, and suggest that the Thomist interpretation was not entirely monolithic in the late middle ages.

These studies have approached the problem from several perspectives, because I do not find a single approach either satisfying or compelling.  The shifts that I have detected in attitudes toward Aristotle's prohibition of metabasis suggest an additional case for the subversion, if not destruction of Aristotelian science in the late middle ages; by providing more general conditions for linking disciplines, medieval scholars had removed the stronger injunction upon which Aristotle had insisted.  The interest in subalternation of sciences displayed by medieval philosophers and theologians provides an additional case study for this central feature of late medieval intellectual history, and shows that questions of divine omnipotence could be applied not only to the content of science, but also to the epistemological underpinnings of disciplinary structures.  Since the time of Anneliese Maier, historians of science have examined questions of certitude, induction, and reliance upon experience for understanding the natural world.  The injection of God's omnipotence into discussions of subalternation suggests that even if one could trust the senses for information about nature, the scientific status of organizing propositions in science might still be questioned.

My work has been supported by a number of grants and fellowships.  In 1988-89, I held a Fulbright Research Fellowship at Oxford University.  In 1993-94, with funding from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, I was Directeur de recherche associé at the Université de Paris I (Sorbonne).  I have been awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation, the first in 1987-88, the second from 1988 to 1990.  In 1998-99, my research in Paris was supported by a Fellowship from the NEH.  Several agencies or foundations have supported travel to collections: the National Foundation for the Humanities (1985), the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities (in 1985, twice in 1990, and 1992), the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship Program at St. Louis University (in 1985, 1990, and 1997), the American Philosophical Society (1986), the American Council of Learned Societies (1987), the Southwestern Bell Foundation (1990), and the Neil Ker Memorial Fellowship Program of the British Academy (1994-95).  Since 1983, I have received seventeen grants from the University of Oklahoma in support of my scholarly research and teaching initiatives.