On the Usefulness of Music: Motion, Music, and the Thirteenth-Century Reception of Aristotle's Physics

On the Usefulness of Music: Motion, Music, and the Thirteenth-Century Reception 'of Aristotle's Physics." Nothing, Augustine had said, can be understood without music. Medieval education, culminating in the formation of the university within the early years of the thirteenth century, took Augustine at his word. Music, an analogy discipline within the material, measurable, mathematical sciences, was the "ministry" discipline, on hand within the sciences for the express purpose of making obscure things manifest. Music, the science that made concepts plain, had brought out the essential component of every philosophical discussion for several hundred years by the time Robert Grosseteste, for example, explained revolutionary new concepts of nature, material, and motion in the early thirteenth century. This study presents the key principle, set forth as most important by Aristotle in the Physics, that is, the concept of theoria, translated into the Latin ductus and the early commentary treatments of this principle by Philip the Chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon; and shows how music, indeed, was essential to the understanding of this principle, the example of the conductus.