Note 279 — Chapter III · THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY
Reading edition
Till then it had meant Aristotle: the statutes of Queens’ and Christ’s, framed within 50 years of one another, provide for its teaching—“the natural, moral, and metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle”; and even in Fuller’s time these metaphysics were the study of the bachelor of arts: “Let a sophister begin with his axioms, a batchelor of art proceed to his metaphysicks, a master to his mathematicks, and a divine conclude with his controversies and comments on scripture....”
Philosophy, meaning Aristotle, had come in to disturb the peace and the sufficiency of the old ‘seven arts.’