The Unity of Natural Philosophy and the End of Scientia

The dominant model of the unity of natural philosophy in the Middle Ages, namely scientia, collapsed in the early modern era, and the unity of natural philosophy was rethought in the seventeenth century in terms of a reductionist and foundationalist notion of common causation. I want to argue that, if we can identify the reasons for the collapse of the notion of scientia, then we can get a better sense of what was demanded of its successors, and that this will help us in understanding the subordination of all cognitive values to scientific ones so distinctive of the modern era.