Ashton B. Carter, who built upon academic specialties in medieval history and theoretical physics to become the Pentagon's top expert on budgets and weapons, announced Thursday that he was retiring as deputy defense secretary.
While poison trials dated back to antiquity, they tended to be described in medieval texts as theoretical possibilities rather than empirical tests that had already occurred.
The conservatori were thus the first secular institutions equipped for training in practical music (the choir schools of the Middle Ages were attached to churches, and music in medieval universities was a theoretical subject comparable to mathematics).
The new, modern link between historical self-understanding and curiosity is a turn against medieval Christian disqualifications of theoretical curiosity.
For example Catarina Dutilh Novaes (2007, 6) makes a detailed defence of the view that obligationes present "a remarkable case of conceptual similarity between a medieval and a modern theoretical framework".
Some late-medieval authors claimed that the theoretical basis for obligationes came from two passages in Aristotle (Prior Analytics I.13.32a18 20, Metaphysics IX.4.1047b10 12), both of which say merely that when something possible is posited, nothing impossible results.[4] But these Aristotelian texts may be the historical origin of the obligationes literature only in a very indirect manner.
She has published on medieval legal history, cultural history and theoretical history in Zeitschrift der savigny-stiftung fur rechtsgeschichte, Ethical Perspectives, The Journal of the History of International Law, with CUP and with other journals.
The work is an appendix to his work on the Art of War, which has not survived; I suspect the interesting "stories" appealed far more to medieval copyists and readers than the deeper theoretical work: it's a great pity.
Yet they're built on a rigorous system of real-world information, ranging from theoretical physics and molecular biology to medieval alchemy and classical philosophy.
Mr. Carter, who holds a bachelor's in physics and medieval history from Yale University and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, tells of his most recent visit to Afghanistan, where he watched as MRAPs destined for disposal were chopped up.
