A Matter of Method: British Aristotelianism and the New Science

Since long, the origins of modern science have been a topic of debates and controversies between continuist and discontinuistic historical approaches. Despite their differences, these approaches shared the emphasis on scientific methodology. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, historians and philosophers of science proposed critical approaches to methodology which radically altered the debate on the origins of modern science. Two historians, Steffen Ducheyne and Marco Sgarbi have recently offered a reappraisal of the traditional continuist theses, with respect to the influence of British Aristotelianism on Newton and early modern Empiricist philosophers. This paper aims to evaluate their impact on current historiographical debates, and will also offer some criticism of their main theses.