Nicholas Oresme Quotes on Knowledge
Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382), bishop of Lisieux and one of the most original natural philosophers of the late Middle Ages, gave fourteenth-century Latin science several of its most ambitious works — the Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions, the Treatise on the Heavens and the Earth, and the early treatise on currency. The framework develops a geometric representation of qualitative variation that anticipates by centuries the graphical conventions of later mathematical physics, and the Heavens and Earth argues that the diurnal rotation of the Earth is at least as defensible philosophically as the geocentric alternative — though Oresme finally retains the latter on what he treats as scriptural rather than rational grounds.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nicholas Oresme:
“It is mathematically as reasonable to suppose the Earth turns daily as to suppose the heavens do.”
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Attributed to Nicholas Oresme:
“Quantities of any kind may be represented by lines and surfaces.”
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Attributed to Nicholas Oresme:
“Many natural marvels can be explained by ordinary causes, if we examine them with care.”
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“Since money belongs to the community … it would seem that the community may control it as it wills, and therefore may make as much profit from alteration as it likes, and treat money as its own property.”
Ch. 22: Whether the community may alter money. -
“Ch. 22: Whether the community may alter money.”
Since money belongs to the community … it would seem that the community may control it as it wills, and therefore may make as much profit from alteration as it likes, and treat money as its own property. -
“Book II, Ch. 2, p. 279.”
God in His infinite grandeur without any quantity and absolutely indivisible, which we call immensity, is necessarily all in every extension or space or place which exists or can be imagined. -
“The heavenly bodies move with such regularity, orderliness, and symmetry that it is truly a marvel; and they continue always to act in this manner ceaselessly, following the established system, without increasing or reducing speed and continuing without respite, as the Scripture says: Summer and winter, night and day they never rest.”
Book II, Ch. 2, p. 283.