Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-345) and index.

Ancient Egypt to Plato. The preliterate beginnings ; Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia ; Early Greek natural philosophy and medicine ; Plato -- Aristotle (384-322 BC). Life ; Works : Aristotle's writings and their preservation ; Aristotle's achievements ; Aristotle's cosmos and natural philosophy ; The scope of Aristotle's natural philosophy -- Late antiquity. Neoplatonism and its approach to Aristotle -- Islam and the eastward shift of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The translations ; The fate of natural philosophy in Islam -- Natural philosophy before the Latin translations. Roman authors ; The Latin encyclopedists : European learning to the ninth century ; The twelfth century and its immediate antecedents ; Hostile reception of the new theology ; Natural philosophy in the twelfth century -- Translations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; The world of the translators ; Translations from Arabic and Greek in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; How trustworthy are Aristotle's translated texts? ; Pseudo-Aristotle : works falsely attributed to Aristotle -- Natural philosophy after the translations : its role and place in the late Middle Ages. The medieval university ; The impact of Aristotelian natural philosophy in the early thirteenth century to 1240 ; University lectures on natural philosophy ; The classification of the sciences and the subject of natural philosophy ; Anonymous fourteenth-century treatise on natural philosophy ; The occult sciences and natural philosophy -- The form and content of late medieval natural philosophy. John Buridan : On the possibility of other worlds ; The substantive nature of natural philosophy in the late Middle Ages ; Thought experiments and the role of the imagination ; Beyond Aristotle ; Was Aristotelian natural philosophy science? -- The relations between natural philosophy and theology. The disciplinary relations between natural philosophy and theology ; Did God and theology play an integral role in medieval natural philosophy? ; How a few significant natural philosophers viewed the relationship as reflected in the questions and commentaries on the works of Aristotle ; Did natural philosophy influence medieval theology? -- The transformation of medieval natural philosophy from the early modern period to the end of the nineteenth century. The fate of medieval natural philosophy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; The new natural philosophy of the seventeenth century ; The relations between natural philosophy and science in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries ; The revolution in natural philosophy from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century ; The continuity of history and the problem of names and terminology.