  In the Middle Ages, the theory of demonstration, developing the theory found in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, was considered the culmination of logic, bringing all the other parts of the discipline to bear on the task of developing scientific knowledge.  Elaborated largely in commentaries and discussions of the Posterior Analytics itself, but also sometimes in independent opuscula on specific problems, or in discussions of the knowledge of God in commentaries to the prologue of the Sentences, this body of philosophical literature corresponds to modern Philosophy of Science. In particular, the problems how we come to know causal laws, how scientific knowledge differs from other sorts of cognition, how mathematical knowledge differs from other sorts of scientific knowledge, and why mathematical knowledge is more certain, are explored in this literature. Although the discussion followed Aristotle's views closely, each interpreter read his views in a way that would square them with his own metaphysical system, so that the most important Aristotelian writers of the thirteenth century, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome, revised the initial, Augustinian, reading of Robert Grosseteste's commentary. Aristotle himself was obscure on a number of points, and so radical Aristotelian authors fell into disputes among themselves over the exact character of the “highest sort of demonstration” (demonstratio potissima), and the nature of the scientific knowledge resulting from it. These disputes were rooted in part in earlier disputes among the Arabic commentators, as reported in Averroes's commentaries. Ockham and his followers developed yet another reading of the science of demonstrations to fit their nominalist metaphysics in the fourteenth century, and in the later Middle Ages their views and those of Aquinas dominated the scene. In later Terminist commentaries, such as that of Antony Coronel in 1510, it is assumed that scientific knowledge is a natural form caused in the mind by knowledge of the premisses of a demonstration, and it is treated as a subject of puzzles concerning beginning and ceasing, and the like, typical of the sophismata discussed in that school. In the sixteenth century other controversies moved to the fore, over the application of the “Science of Demonstration” to mathematics, and concerning the manner of discovery of a demonstration through “analysis and synthesis.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the new Platonisms, the anti-Aristotelian bias of the new science, and developing empiricism, the theory of demonstration came to be ignored in mainstream philosophy, although it persists as an element of Thomism. Moreover, though the theory disappeared, much of the new Empiricist viewpoint in fact carries over from the Ockhamist version of it.