Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Managing Editor
ROBERT E. BUTTS
Princeton University
VOLUME 43
METAPHYSICS AND
PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE IN
THE SEVENTEENTH
AND EIGHTEENTH
CENTURIES
Essays in honour of Gerd Buchdahl
R. S. WOOLHOUSE
Reader in Philosophy, University of York
IPhotograph by RSWI
GERD BUCHDAHL
(July 1987)
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ix
1
9
17
45
73
101
133
165
185
213
227
245
265
281
307
327
Vlll
CONTENTS
351
355
PREFACE
The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by
colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original
research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and
philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They
focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific
thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli,
Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico.
Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and those by Robert
Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in
any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a
title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is
central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of
the topics with which that book deals.
In getting these essays together I have benefited not only from the
obvious help of the contributors themselves and the enthusiasm with
which they greeted the project, but also, in particular, from the
encouragement (which always seemed to come when it was most
needed) of Robert Butts and Mary Hesse. I am grateful, too, to Gerd
Buchdahl for supplying his own bibliography. Gratitude, and more, is
due him for the very creation of all the items listed there, of course, as
also for the generous enthusiasm, both intellectual and personal, which
so noticeably mark him out. He is the sine qua non of this collection in
many more ways than one. I hope it will serve as a token of the regard
and esteem due him.
R. S. WOOLHOUSE
ix
1. BIOGRAPHICAL
GERD BUCHDAHL
GERD BUCHDAHL
Induction and Necessity in the Philosophy ofAristotle (London: Aquin Press, 1963).
'Descartes' anticipation of a logic of scientific discovery', in Scientific Change, ed. A. C.
Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963), 399-417.
'The relevance of Descartes' philosophy for modern philosophy of science', British
Journal for the History of Science I (1963), 229-49.
'Minimum principles in science and philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries', Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Science
(Ithaca, 1962) (Paris: Hermann, 1964) I, 299-302.
'Theory construction: The work of Norman Robert Campbell', Isis 55 (1964), 151-62.
'Causality, causal laws and scientific theory in the philosophy of Kant', British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science 16 (1965),187-208.
'A revolution in historiography of science' (review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Towards an Historiography of Science, Joseph Agassi),
History of Science 4 (1965), 55-69.
Review of The Displacement of Concepts, Donald A. Schon, The Philosophical
Quarterly 16 (1966), 86-7.
'Semantic sources of the concept of law', Synthese 17 (1967), 54-74; also in In
Memory of Norwood Russell Hanson, eds. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1967) (= Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 3),
272-92.
'The relation between "understanding" and "reason" in the architectonic of Kant's
philosophy', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 67 (1967), 209-26.
'N. R. Campbell', in Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan,
1967) 2,13-15.
Metaphysics and The Philosophy of Science. The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
'The Kantian dynamic of reason with special reference to the place of causality in
Kant's system', in Kant Studies Today, ed. Lewis White Beck (La Salle IL: Open
Court, 1969),341-74.
'Gravity and intelligibility: Newton to Kant', in The Methodological Heritage of Newton,
eds. Robert E. Butts and John W. Davis (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970),
74-102.
'History of science and criteria of choice', in Historical and Philosophical Perspectives
of Science, ed. Roger H. Steuwer (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1970) (=
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 5), 204-29, 239-45.
'George Berkeley', in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie (New York:
Scribner, 1970)2, 16-18.
'History and methodology' (review of Fact and Theory. An Aspect of Philosophy of
Science, W. M. O'Neil) History of Science 9 (1970),93-101.
'Inductivist versus deductivist approaches in the philosophy of science', Monist 55
(1971),343-67.
'The conception of lawlikeness in Kant's philosophy of nature', in Kant's Theory of
Knowledge, ed. Lewis White Beck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), 128-50; also in
Synthese 23 (1971), 24-46; and Proceedings of the Third International Kant
Congress (University of Rochester, 1970) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 149-71; and
as 'Der Begriff der Gesetzmiissigkeit in Kants Philosophie der Naturwissenschaft', in
GERD BUCHDAHL
Zur Kantforschung der Gegenwart, eds. Peter Heintel and Ludwig Nagl (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 90-121.
'Is science cumulative?', New Edinburgh Review, nr. 13 (1971), 4-11.
'Hegel's philosophy of nature', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 23 (1972),
257-66.
'Methodological aspects of Kepler's theory of refraction', Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science 3 (1972), 256-98; also in Internationales Kepler-Symposium
(Weil der Stadt, 1971), eds. F. Krafft, K. Meyer, and B. Sticker (Hildesheim:
Gerstenberg, 1973), 131-54.
'Hegel's philosophy of nature' (reviews of G. W. F. Hegel (1842), Philosophy of Nature,
tr. and ed. M. J. Petry, and G. W. F. Hegel (1847), Philosophy of Nature, tr. A. V.
Miller), British Joumalfor the Philosophy of Science 23 (1972), 257-66.
Review of Heidegger, Kant and Time, Charles M. Sherover, Isis 63 (1972), 569-70.
'Explanation and gravity', in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science, eds.
Mikulas Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), 167-203.
'Leading principles and induction: The methodology of Matthias Schleiden', in Foundations of Scientific Method: The Nineteenth Century, eds. Ronald N. Giere and
Richard S. Westfall (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973),23-52.
'Hegel's conception of "Begriffsbestimmung" and the philosophy of science', in Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy
of Science (Bucharest, 1971), eds. P. Suppes, L. Henkin, A. Joja, and GR. C. Moisil
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973),943-55.
'Hegel's philosophy of nature and the structure of science', Ratio 15 (1973) 1-27; also
in Hegel, ed. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).
'Transcendental reduction: A concept for the interpretation of Kant's critical method',
Kant-Studien (Special Issue) 65 (1974), 28-44.
'Christian Wolff', in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie (New York:
Scribner, 1976) 14, 482-4.
'Philosophische Grundlagen einer historischen Bewertung der Wissenschaft', in Wiener
Jarbuch for Philosophie, ed. Erich Heintel (Wien: Braumuller, 1979) 12, 16-42.
'The interaction between science, philosophy and theology in the thought of Leibniz',
Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 9 (1979), 74-83.
'Neo-transcendental approaches towards scientific theory appraisal', in Science, Belief
and Behaviour, ed. D. H. Mellor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 1-22.
'The dynamical version of Kant's transcendental method', in Acts of the Fifth International Kant-Congress (Mainz, 1981), ed. Gerhard Funke (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag
Herbert Grundmann, 1981) 1.1, 394-406.
'Reduction-realization: A key to the structure of Kant's thought', in Essays on Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, eds. J. N. Mohanty and Robert W. Shahan (Norman: Univ.
of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 39-98.
'Response to David Bloor's "Durkheim and Mauss revisited: Classification and the
sociology of knowledge', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 13 (1982),
299-304.
'Styles of scientific thinking', in Proceedings of the International Conference on Using
History of Physics in Innovatory Physics Education (Pavia, 1983), eds. F. Bevilacqua
and P. J. Kennedy (Pavia: Centro Studie per la Didattica, Univ. di Pavia, and The
International Commission on Physics Education, 1983), 106-27.
'Conceptual analysis and scientific theory in Hegel's philosophy of nature (with special
reference to Hegel's optics)', in Hegel and the Sciences, eds. Robert S. Cohen and
Marx W. Wartofsky (Reidel: Dordrecht, 1984) (= Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, vol. 64),13-36.
'Zum Verhiiltnis von allgemeiner Metaphysik der Natur und besonderer Metaphysischer
Naturwissenschaft bei Kant', in Probleme der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", ed.
Burkhard Tuschling (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984),97-142.
Transzendentale Beweisfiihrungen in Kanis Philosophie der Wissenschaft', in Bedingungen der Moglichkeit: 'Transcendental Arguments' und transzendentales Denken,
eds. Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 104-14.
'Kant's "special metaphysics" and The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science', in
Kant's Philosophy of Physical Sciences, ed. Robert E. Butts (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1986),127-62.
'Metaphysical and internal realism: The relations between ontology and methodology in
Kant's philosophy of science', in Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress
of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Salzburg, 1983), eds. Ruth
Barcan Marcus et al. (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986),623-41.
'Stadien der begrifflichen Entwicklung von Atomtheorien', in Begriffswandel und
Erkenntnisfortschritt in den Erfahrungswissenschaften, eds. Friedrich Rapp and
Hans-Werner Schutt (Berlin: TUB-Dokumentation Kongresse und Tagungen,
1987),101-30.
'Philosophy of science: Its historical roots', in Les relations mutuelles entre la philosophie des sciences et l'histoire des sciences, in Archives de I'institut international des
sciences theoriques (Bruxelles: Office International de Librairie, 1987), 39-56; also
in Epistemologia 10 (1987), 39-56.
'Inductivist versus deductivist approaches in the philosophy of science as illustrated by
some controversies between Whewell and Mill', in William Whewell: A Composite
Portrait, eds. Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1988) (forthcoming).
'Realism and realization in a Kantian light', in Reading Kant: Critique and Transcendental Arguments, eds. Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988) (forthcoming).
'Oas Problem des Wissenschaftesrealismus in Kantischer Sicht', in Tradition und
Innovation, ed. Wolfgang Kluxen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988), 110-34.
Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) (forthcoming).
'Reductive realism and the problem of affection in Kant', in An Intimate Relation:
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, eds. 1. Brown and 1. Mittelstrass
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989) (forthcoming).
ROBERT E. BUTTS
I cannot remember the exact date, but it was one day in autumn 1962
that I went to meet Gerd Buchdahl in his office in Free School Lane,
Cambridge. Those who have come to know me in more recent times
will think I am joking when I say that I entered the offices of the
Department of History and Philosophy of Science in an uneasy and
hesitating state of mind. After teaching for eight years in isolated liberal
arts colleges in the United States I was in awe of Cambridge and its
academic "stars", which led me to be circumspect. Gerd seemed sensitive to my caution and I soon felt completely at ease. I had sent him
reprints of two of my papers on Kant's theory of hypothesizing. He
remarked that he liked my articles, but that he "saw these matters in a
quite different way". (Of course he did! There was a major blunder in
those papers, one that his own "looseness of fit" interpretation of Kant
would expose, and one that I hope to have decisively eliminated in later
work.) He talked about that "way", one that was subsequently to
energize his important and path-breaking work on Kant. We talked
about how my work on the Whewell papers was progressing and about
academia on both sides of the Atlantic.
At that first meeting Gerd presented features of himself that have
been reconfirmed at each subsequent meeting. One is struck by his
immense learning and his deep scholarship - his ability to direct us to
apt pieces of text provides a model for exact work in the history and
philosophy of science, One is struck by his intellectual energy and by
the lively way in which he presents his ideas. The strategy is Humean:
by sheer force of presentation he seeks to convert an initially dull idea
into that which has the persuasive power of a lively impression. One is
struck by the boldness of his interpretive schemes, schemes that so
often go against historical and philosophical readings thought to be
sacrosanct. Gerd projects a kind of methodology for "living" history
and philosophy. It is not just a matter of appraising arguments and
getting the textual facts straight. In person (if not in his writings) Gerd
behaves as if fruitful ideas are to be communicated in a way analogous
to the way in which diseases spread. He seeks to infect us with his ideas
through contagion.
9
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 9-16.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
10
ROBERT E. BUTTS
11
12
ROBERT E. BUTTS
13
philosophy displays as having a life of their own that is quite independent of Kant's contemporary scientific situation. Well, not only a life of
their own, but indeed an immortality, since it is part of the philosophical folk wisdom that each new generation needs to find its own way of
expressing and addressing the problems of theory of knowledge. After
all, the science of Kant's day has been superseded or discarded. Not so
the philosophy of his day (his philosophy) - we may even be able to
show that Kant's solutions to the key problems of theory of knowledge
are immortal. We cannot do this, of course, if we see these proposed
solutions as closely tied to scientific ideas now thought to be false or in
need of serious qualification.
Buchdahl's chapter on Kant in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Science changed these attitudes towards Kant's views on science in
decisive ways. After Buchdahl's contributions had been absorbed by a
group of younger scholars who were more than well versed both in the
ways of science and the ways of philosophy, it became more difficult to
regard the Kantian epistemology as importantly separate from his
philosophy of science. That is what Buchdahl proved to us: Kant had a
philosophy of science. Brittan's 1978 book followed the lead; his
subsequent work also acknowledges the influence of Buchdahl. More
recently, the extremely important work on Kant's philosophy of science
offered by Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher has acknowledged its
debt to Buchdahl.
What is it about Buchdahl's reading of Kant that comes to have such
an important place in recent studies of Kant's philosophy of science?
First and foremost, Buchdahl revived the emphasis of the Marburg
School on Kant's own explicit insistence that his major work in
foundations of science - the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science - provides the speCUlative science that instances the table of
the categories of the first Critique. If the link between these two works
is understood as Kant intended, then the Critique itself must be read as
providing a theory of scjence, and the major emphasis of that work is
now seen as a philosophical attempt to find the right assessment of
Newton's achievement against the background of Kant's continuing
acceptance of certain features of Leibniz's metaphysics. If we read the
great Critique in this way every important ingredient of that work
requires a new understanding.
Most importantly, the relationships Kant thought to have established
between reason and understanding, and between conceptual formalism
14
ROBERT E. BUTTS
15
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ROBERT E. BUTTS
guarantee for the privileged and unique status of the system of categories. Some of us are no longer sure that Kant, and Buchdahl, can
have it that way.
I have here provided only the barest outline of major features of
Buchdahl's rich and energetic interpretation of Kant's philosophy and
metaphysics of science. I think he would welcome the suggestion that
those who would pay him tribute should not dwell on my words, but
should return to his texts themselves. Such a tribute will be lasting and
widespread: no-one who would understand the Kantian philosophy in
its fullest extent can ignore the writings of Gerd Buchdahl. One can
make a bolder claim: no-one who would understand the history of
classical modern philosophy and its connection with science can ignore
the writings of Gerd Buchdahl. This is more than reason enough for his
friends, students and colleagues to offer him the present volume of
essays.
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
Abstract. The essay traces the development of the concept of nature in the Renaissance
against the background of a philosophical tradition that has its origins in classical times
and with special emphasis on views of nature in natural philosophy. The point of
departure is the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata which within
the context of Western philosophy involves elements of both Aristotelian and Platonic
theories of nature. Additional matters of concern are the relation between art and
nature (particularly in Cusanus), the concept of machina mundi in the astronomical
tradition and the so-called mechanization of the world-picture. The final decline of an
Aristotelian concept of nature occurs within the context of Boyle's mechanized concept
of nature. The individual stages of this development are extensively documented.
18
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
The statement that nature is what we have not made, which can already
be found in Aristotle, is compatible with the idea that nature becomes
intelligible only because it can itself be conceived of as a system of
producing processes. (Since the Aristotelian term 7rot1]at~ means a
producing or manufacturing activity, I shall call this system, throughout
my essay, a poietic system and the producing or manufacturing activity
a poietic activity.) What comes into being and how it comes into being
is explained by the way in which it is brought about or brings itself
about. 2 Nature reveals itself to be an interacting ensemble of natural
agents which, according to Aristotle, have one principle of motion and
rest in themselves (Phys. Bl. 192b13-14). Man and nature have the
same structure, that is, they have a poietic structure. The same is true
with respect to natural and artificial processes.
No one has expounded this idea more clearly than Aristotle himself.
In his Physics, which is nothing other than the theory of his "poietic"
concept of nature, he says:
if a house were a thing created by nature, it would have been created in a way similar to
that in which it is created by art. So if things by nature were to be created not only by
nature but also by art, they would have been created just as they are by nature disposed
to be created. Also in nature they would have been created according to the order of
means and aims. In general, in some cases art completes what nature cannot carry out
to an end, in others, it imitates nature (Phys. B8.199a 12-17).
19
20
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
21
22
rORGEN MITTELSTRASS
Cusanus is not the only philosopher who, on the edge of a new age,
turned towards the new vision of nature. The nature philosophers of the
Italian Renaissance followed in his footsteps. They fall into two main
groups:
First, there were those like Cardano, Scaliger, and Patrizzi who were impressed by the
flourishing mathematical sciences, and themselves worked intensively in them. For them
nature was ultimately a vision of mathematics. They were attracted by the mathematical
Platonism of Cusanus, and by the more Pythagorean elements of the Platonic tradition
revived by the humanists. Secondly, there were those who, like Fracastoro, Telesio, and
Campanella, took seriously the Aristotelian insistence on observation and experience,
so seriously that they turned it against Aristotle's own interpretation of experience
([86J 198).
23
24
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
25
omy, this situation does not change until Giordano Bruno. In his
metaphysics of the infinite (influenced again by Cusanus) Bruno leaves
the medieval universe - and, unfortunately, often also the limits of
intelligibility. But here again his adherence to the architectonic metaphor is noteworthy. He calls the universal intellect, which, according to
him, determines all natural causalities, the organ of the world soul 52
and identifies it with a Platonic architect. 53 It is "the intellect of the
world which produces all things" 54 or the "inner craftsman",
because it forms matter and shapes it from within, just as it draws out and unfolds the
trunk from within the seed or root, pushes out the branches from within the trunk,
forms the twigs from within the branches, and the buds from within these, forms,
shapes and interweaves the leaves, flowers and fruits from within as if from an inner
life. And at certain times, as from within, the sap is led back from the leaves and fruits
to the twigs, from the twigs to the branches, from the branches to the trunk, and from
the trunk to the root. 5S
The expression machina mundi, or the world machine, reflects the idea
that nature itself has a poietic structure. We can already find it in
Lucretius,57 but it also occurs in Caleidius's58 Timaeus-commentary,
which was still used, as already mentioned, by Fieino. Like the expression systema mundi (system of the world) used, for example, in
Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and in
Newton's De mundi systemate (1728),59 it denotes a particular part of
the world, the celestial world. As Edward Phillips states in his New
World of Words (1706), this expression
is taken for the general Fabrick, Constitution and Harmony of the Universe, or any
orderly Representation of it according to some noted Hypothesis, in which the
Heavenly Bodies are so dispos'd among themselves, as their Situation, Order, Motions
and Properties may in such an Author's Opinion best answer Appearances and
Philosophical Demonstrations.60
26
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
The expression systema mundi (system of the world) means here the
world order as represented in an astronomical model, while the expression machina mundi (world machine) refers to the idea that this order
is a "mechanical" one. The Latin word machina renders the Greek
word f,lTJXavij (or f,laxava) which originally meant artifice or craft, but
then came to mean also the skilful use of tools and, eventually, tool
itself ([53]). Unlike l.i(>Yavov, which means "atomic" tool, f,lTJXavij, as a
rule, is used to refer to compound tools (examples are war machines or
theatre machines).61 The expression machina mundi thus emphasises
the "technological" or, again, the poietical character of the notion of
nature, without attributing to it the idea of a spiritless (or dead)
mechanism.
I have already mentioned the use of the expression machina mundi
in Pico; it is also used in Cusanus (see note 27) and Grosseteste.62 It is
safe to assume that this terminology above all was introduced into
medieval and Renaissance thought by Sacrobosco in his Sphaera
(around 1220).63 This textbook of astronomy was republished and
commented upon even in the seventeenth century.64 According to
Ch.-F. Abra de Raconis (author of a system of philosophy published in
several editions)65 it also ranks in the seventeenth century as an
important textbook of astronomy.66 Galileo, for instance, used it in his
Paduan lectures.67 In a commentary on the peripatetic book on
Mechanical Problems (Quaestiones mechanicae), published in 1599,
the world is moreover described as the greatest, most productive, most
stable and best designed of all machines. The commentary also states
that this machine, as the composition of all bodies, is God's instrument.68 Referring explicitly to Genesis and Timaeus, J. Hevelius, the
founder of lunar topography, still calls God the artificer of the machina
mundi or the universa machina mundana.69
Of course, Copernicus also uses the expression machina mundi. As
he says in the preface of his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres (1543), it ''was created for us by the best and most systematic
craftsman of all" ([23]5). According to Copernicus, astronomy, "divine
rather than human",7 is the search for the order this craftsman
created.71 At the same time he reminds the reader that natural
philosophers call the celestial part of the universe a "living God".72 On
the other hand, he expressly dissociates himself from the "quarrel of the
natural philosophers" (by referring to the question whether the universe
is finite or infinite in space).73 Notions about the machina mundi, which
27
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JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
effective for terrestrial bodies (particularly in the framework of ballistics), Newton transforms Kepler's efforts toward causal hypot,heses
into a uniform mechanical explanation. Now there is a dynamic and not
just a kinematic explanation of the structure and mechanism of the
machina mundi. In its orientation towards "celestial issues", the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turns out to
be a gift of heaven. Nevertheless, it takes place on earth (in the
framework of a theory of falling bodies).
This becomes clearer if one realizes that up to this point mechanics
has not been part of a theory of nature. According to the meaning of
f.1:YJXaV'fJ, mechanics in its Greek sense is the theory of (the mechanics
of) compound tools. As a "mechanical art" (f.1:YJxavtxf! 1:EXVIJ) mechanics
is not a theory of (the mechanics of) natural bodies but a theory of
artifacts designed to achieve what nature in fact is unable to achieve
(e.g., lifting heavy bodies). To put it into an Aristotelian terminology:
unlike physics (in its Aristotelian sense) mechanics in this tradition
deals not with natural motions but with motions contrary to nature. Its
application (e.g., in irrigating plants) does not explain nature but the
work of man. This idea is already succinctly expressed in the introductory remarks to the Quaestiones mechanicae (probably the peripatetic
extension of a work by Aristotle, ct. [54] 13ff):
Our wonder is excited, firstly, by phenomena which occur in accordance with nature
(xaTd qiVUtv) but of which we do not know the cause (aiTtOv), and secondly by those
which are produced by art (dtd TEXVTJV) despite nature (.na(>d qJVotv) for the benefit of
mankind. Nature often operates contrary to human expediency; for she always follows
the same course without deviation, whereas human expediency is always changing.
When, therefore, we have to do something contrary to nature (.naed qiVatv), the
difficulty in doing it causes us perplexity and art (TtXVTJ) has to be called to our aid. The
kind of art which helps us in such perplexities we call mechanical skill (ftTJXavfJ).80
29
natural science for the first time. Galileo speaks legitimately here of an
entirely new science.83 The programme to explain all natural processes
in a mechanistic way,84 determining now the further course of science,
marks the final turning-point between the Aristotelian and the modem
science of nature - not only in the light of a new theory but also with
respect to the prevailing concept of science. In retrospect, the progress
in physical theory was not on the side of "physics" in its Aristotelian
sense but on the side of peripatetic "mechanics" which, according to the
former concept of science, was not regarded as a science at all. From
the viewpoint of an eighteenth-century physicist this looks as follows:
To the art of mechanics is owing all sorts of instruments to work with, all engines of
war, ships, bridges, mills, curious roofs and arches, stately theatres, columns, pendent
galleries, and all other grand works in building. Also clocks, watches, jacks, chariots,
carts and carriages, and even the wheel barrow. Architecture, navigation, husbandry,
and military affairs, owe their invention and use to this art .... Without mechanics, a
general cannot go to war, nor besiege a town, or fortify a place. And the meanest
artificer must work mechanically, or not work at all. So that all persons whatever are
indebted to this art, from the king down to the cobbler. H5
30
JORGEN MITTELSTRASS
31
Plato's flight from modern physics, which has taken the place of the old
building, is limited, however, to its own empiricist understanding of
itself. With regard to former and still prevailing views about nature this
does not (yet) happen. These views remain "pious" and, therefore, if
one takes into account the history of Platonism and its influence on the
concepts of machina mundi and systema mundi, Platonic. Even for
Newton the aim of physics consists in talking in its own way about God,
i.e., a divine mechanic. 95 An additional entry on "nature" in the second
volume of John Harris' influential Lexicon Technicum (1710), which
opens with a detailed statement about Newtonian mechanics, gives
expression to this fact. Harris calls nature "this vast Machine of the
Universe, the wise Production of Almighty God, consisting of a great
number of lesser Machines, every one of which is adjusted by the same
Wisdom in Number, Weight and Measure".96 The programme of
rational mechanics to base physics upon length, time and mass (or
force), is linked here without gaps to the historical view of the world as
machina mundi. We can find much the same written at the same time
in Vico, who interprets the now achieved "mechanization of the worldpicture" 97 as the culmination of the architectonic views of former
philosophy of nature: "Like us", he writes in his On the Study Methods
a/Our Time (1709),
the Ancients utilized geometry and mechanics as instruments of research in physics, but
not as a constant practice. We apply them consistently, and in better form .... Modem
scientists, seeking guidance in their exploration of the dark pathways of nature, have
introduced the geometrical method into physics. Holding to this method as to Ariadne's
thread, they can reach the end of their appointed journey. Do not consider them as
groping practioners of physics: they are to be viewed, instead, as the grand architects of
this limitless fabric of the world: able to give a detailed account of the ensemble of
principles according to which God has built this admirable structure of the cosmos
([95J9f).
32
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
world order agrees with a mechanistic physics which tries to reduce the
world to a set of universal causal relationships. Apparently, the fascination resulting from the propagated insight into the principles of
construction and effects of God's machina mundi was greater than the
idea that man now had to accommodate himself in an automaton. The
mechanics of gravitational motions (Newton) now not only becomes
the paradigm of physical explanations within inorganic nature, it also
continues on paradigmatically into the organic, psychic and social
cosmos, particularly in the English and French Enlightenment (see
[69) 54ff). It is only a small step from Oresme's graphic rendering of
the intensity distributions of a qUality98 up to the mechanization of
qualities in Boyle. And it was Boyle, too, who, in his Free Inquiry into
the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1686), taught the prevailing
philosophy of nature. As Boyle writes, it has been guided by the
following ideas:
Nature is a most wise being, that does nothing in vain; does not miss of her ends; does
always that, which (of the things she can do) is best to be done; and this she does by the
most direct or compendious ways, neither employing any things superfluous, nor being
wanting in things necessary; she teaches and inclines every one of her works to preserve
itself: and, as in the microcosm, (man) it is she, that is the curer of diseases; so in the
macrocosm (the world) for the conservation of the universe, she abhors a vacuum
([1415,219).
33
34
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
q;Vat~ d1JluOV(tyei); cf. De part. an. A5.645a9, B9.654b32, De gen. an. A23.731a24,
B6.743b23, f4.755aI9-20, De an. incessu 12.711aI8. Moreover, nature acts according to aims, it never brings about anything in vain: De an. incessu 12.711aI8 (If q;Vat~
oVdtv d1JIlWV(tyei lla7:1Jv), cf. De cael. A4.271a33 (6 dE f}eo~ xat lf q;Vat~ OMEV
lla7:1Jv nowVatv), B8.289b26, 290a31, 11.291bI3-14, De an. f9.432b21, De an.
incessu 2.704bI5, Polito A8.1256b20. Teleologically, it always strives after the best and
the perfect: De gen. et corr. BlO.336b28, Phys. 97.260b22-3, De cael. BI4.297aI6.
Cf. (101) 422ff; (92) 84ff.
3 For q;Vat~ in the sense of nature as a whole see De cael. A1.268alff., Met.
A6.987b2, f3.1005a32-3.
4 See Summa Theologia I-II quo 85, art. b; (2) IV, 21; Bonaventura, In Sent. Petri
Lombardi III, dist. 8, dub. 2 ([12)4, 183). Master Eckhart distinguishes between God's
ungenatUrter natUre and genaturter natUre ([32) 537,29-32).
, See 1. S. Eriugena, De divisione naturae libri quinque II 1, in (64)122, 523D-6C.
6 See the work of Thomas Aquinas cited above; see also below p. 20.
7 See (7) 4, 52-7 (for Phys. B1.193bI2-18), [7)5, 2 (for De cael. A1.268aI9).
H De divisione naturae libri quinque I 1 ([64)122, 441B-2B). For the history of the
distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata see also [43) 6, 504-9. See
also [96) XV 4, p. 1372 ("Natura primo dicitur dupliciter. Uno modo natura naturans,
idest ipsa summa lex naturae, quae Deus est .... Aliter vero dicitur natura naturata, et
haec multipliciter").
9 Timaeus, 29d, cf. Aristotle, De cael. B 14.297b 14-17.
IU See Plotinus, Enneades, VI 9.5,14 ([85)6.2,178).
II De opijicio mundi 6, p. 5M ([81) I, 5f (the intelligible world being the logos of God
creating the world.
12 See De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIll fiber unus, quo 46 (De ideis 2) ([6) 10, 124).
1.1 De civitate Dei XII 26 ([5)1, 553).
14 A translation of "na(!ddetYlla" (Tim. 38c) with "archetypus" already appears in the
Timaeus-translation by Ca1cidius ([16)30).
15 See J. S. Eriugena, De divisione naturae II 1 ([64)122, 523D-6C), also I 1
([64) 122,441B-2B).
16 Lexically documented in (40) 740f (entry on natura), also in (62) 880. For the
history of these concepts see [13) 6, col. 509-17.
17 See Apuleius, De Platone et eius dogmate I (1) 3, 92).
18 Documentary evidence in [29)5 (Die Naturanschauung und Naturphilosophie der
Araber im zehnten lahrhundert. Aus den Schriften der lautern BrUder) 142.
19 See Compendium IX, n. 27 ([24)2, 637), De docta ignorantia II 1, n. 94 ([24)1,
38), De coniecturis II 12, n. 131 ([24)1, 169), De ludo globi I 7 ([24) 2, 577).
20 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles II 75 (ars imitatur naturam, [3] 13,
475), III 10 (ars enim in sua operatione imitatur naturam, [3)14, 26); In libros
posteriorum analyticorum Aristotelis expositio I, lect. 1, n. 5 (ars imitatur naturam,
[3)1, 138); In octo libros physicorum Aristotelis II, lect. 13, n. 4 (ars imitatur naturam,
[3)2,93).
21 Phys. B2.194a21-2; cf. Phys. B8.199aI5-17; Meteor. ~3.381b6.
22 Compendium IX, n. 27 ([24)2,637).
2.1 De coniecturis II 12, n. 131 ([24) 1, 169).
24 De coniecturis II 12, n. 131 ([24)1, 169).
25 Idiota de sapientia 123 ([24) 1,224), De ludo globi I 45 ([24)2, 59lf).
35
27
41
43
36
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
57
37
have better served God's majesty if he had said that God always does mechanics
too. According to Monantholius God is the wisest, the first and the most powerful
#TJxavt,,6~ and #TJxavolrOL6~ (ibid. aIVr). Cf. A. Piccolomini, Della sfera del mondo.
De Ie stelle fisse (3rd ed. Venice, 1552 (1559, 2r (gran Machina), 8r (Questa
Machina, che noi chiamiamo sfere del Mondo . .. ), 9v (gran machina del Mondo).
69 Machina coelestis, 2 vols. (Danzig, 1673-9) 1, 2f, 78. So also Christoph Clavius, In
Sphaeram Ioannis (see note 64 above), p. 28 (God as opifex mundi, again with
reference to Genesis and Timaeus). Even in general textbooks of philosophy the
concept of machina mundi gained wider acceptance. See P. Mako, Compendiaria
metaphysicae institutio (Vienna, 1761), 123; Compendiaria logicae institutio (Vienna,
1760), 94; J. B. Horvath, Institutiones logicae, et metaphysicae (Augsburg, 5th ed.
1781),2.
70 De revolutionibus I [ProoemiumJ ([23J 9).
71 De revolutionibus I [ProoemiumJ ([23]8).
72 De revolutionibus I [ProoemiumJ ([23J 8). The source is Plato, Tim.30d3.
73 De revolutionibus I 8 ([23]19).
74 Prodromus dissertationum cosmographicarum, continens Mysterium cosmographicum [l st ed. 1621J XX (Notae)([51J 8, 113).
75 Letter of 10 February 1605 to Herwart von Hohenburg ([51J 15, 146). Well known
are Descartes' analogous remarks on the background of the metaphysical dualism of res
cogitans and res extensa; see Principia philosophiae IV 203 ("... there are absolutely
no judgments [or rules] in Mechanics which do not also pertain to Physics, of which
Mechanics is a part or type: and it is as natural for a clock, composed of wheels of a
certain kind, to indicate the hours, as for a tree, grown from a certain kind of seed,
to produce the corresponding fruit" ([25J 8.1, 326; [26J 285f); compare also the
characterization of the monads as natural machines in Leibniz (De ipsa natura . .. ,
[57J 4, 505) ("every machina naturalis, conceived of as a part of natura universalis
which is again characterized as artificium Dei, is composed of infinitely many [simple]
instruments").
76 Tractatus de eommensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum eeli III
([79]294,117-20).
77 Letter of 4 October 1607 to Johann Georg Brengger ([51]16,54).
78 Prodromus dissertationum cosmographicarum, continens Mysterium cosmographicum [1st ed. 1596] II ([51J 1,26)(= [1621J II, [51]8,47).
79 [51J 1,6 [1596]; [51]8, 17 [1st ed. 1620] (English in [52J 53ff). On the geometrical
language of Keplerian cosmology in this context, see Harmonice mundi V 3 ([51]6,
299) (reference to a Platonic God doing geometry); IV 1 ([51J 6, 223) (geometry
precedes the origin of things); letter of October 1605 to Christoph Heydon ([51]15,
235); and letter of 12 May 1608 to Joachim Tanckius ([51J 16, 161) (limits of geometry
as limits of God's creation). On this topic, see [67J.
80 Mechanica 1.847al1-19 (English by E. S. Forster in [4J 6).
81 Mechanicorum tiber (Pesaro, 1577) (Praefatio). Monantholius already emphasises
the theoretical character of mechanics (Aristotelis Mechanica (see note 68 above),
Praefatio oIVr), though for him, too, physics and mechanics are two different things. In
this he follows A. Piccoiomini, whom he quotes (loc. cit., p. 9). Cf. A. Piccoiomini, In
Mechanicas Quaestiones Aristotelis paraphrasis (Rome, 1547) I1Ir.
82 Le mecaniche, [38J 2, 155ff. This work first appeared in a French translation by M.
38
JURGEN MITTELSTRASS
of the Present State of Natural Philosophy and How Its Defects May Be Remedied
([45) 1-70) has the characteristic subtitle By a Methodical Proceeding in the Making
98
99
39
Those Natures which occur as the end products of tabular inductions are the Forms of
Natures, and the total set of most real Natures are, for the purposes of science and
technology, the fundamental properties of matter" ([42]113).
\05 Principia (1st ed. 1687) pp. 12f. I. B. Cohen has drawn attention to the fact that "in
a letter to Roger Cotes, Newton unconsciously wrote about his own 'laws of nature', but
then crossed out 'nature' to make it 'motion'" (]21] 102).
106 Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der Philosophie ([44]18, 342ff).
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43
RICHARD S. WESTFALL
Abstract. More than once, after his trial, Galileo asserted that the Jesuits were the
source of all his troubles. He was not alone in that judgment; it was the accepted view
of the age. Galileo's relations with the Jesuits are then a matter of some importance.
Without denying the fundamental issue of authority in questions of natural philosophy
that separated them, this essay explores how much the system of patronage, which
supported Galileo in his life in science, can help to illuminate their relations.
The essay insists on the centrality of the period 1615-16, the Inquisition's first
inquiry into Galileo and also the watershed in his dealings with the Jesuits. Until that
time the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano had been Galileo's steadfast supporters, crucial
figures in his rise to prominence. In 1616, as a result of charges brought against
Galileo, the Church condemned Copernicanism and placed several books on the Index,
but neither the Holy Office nor the Index touched Galileo in public. The essay argues
that the system of patronage had made him immune. It argues as well that the Jesuits,
reflecting on his apparent immunity and on his increasingly abrasi\e manner, encouraged by the system of patronage, decided then that it would be necessary to defend
their position of authority in the Catholic world and to cut Ga1ileo down to size.
Without pretending that there was not an important divergence of outlook between
Galileo and the Jesuits, this analysis moves the origin of their conflict from the realm of
intellectual differences to another context. It asks how Ga1ileo, the successful client,
impinged on others, and it asks how those with established authority in intellectual life
viewed the arrival of a new man whose genius was the more compelling because it
enjoyed the support of the patron class.
46
RICHARD S. WESTFALL
47
for that matter, that the Jesuits perceived more clearly than Galileo
what the ultimate impact of modem science upon Christianity would
be? And if it is understanding we pursue, we must not permit ourselves
to wonder that the Jesuits were ready to defend that world in which
they lived and moved and had their being.
I am convinced that an issue of belief, associated with that transformation of worldview, lay at the very core of the trial of Galileo. Great
historical events have many dimensions, however. Galileo and the
Jesuits pursued their evolving relations within the context of a specific
society in which the system of patronage supported all of the higher
culture as it supported Galileo himself. Without in any way denying the
importance of the issue of belief, I seek here to explore how far the
perspective provided by the system of patronage can help to illuminate
Galileo's relations with the Jesuits. My phrase is "help to illuminate".
Galileo and the Jesuits lived in a complex society in which many factors
beyond the question of belief to which I have referred and the system
of patronage contributed to shape men's actions. The best one can do is
to isolate for examination individual features without forgetting that
they were single strands in an intricate web. My intention is to inquire
how far the system of patronage can help to illuminate a matter as
complex as epochal events are wont to be.
Galileo burst on the intellectual scene in 1609 when he was already
forty-five years old. To those who had known him, his sudden emergence was no surprise, for he had been a witty conversationalist and an
exhilarating teacher, one of those rare men capable of galvanizing his
companions with his brilliance. Nevertheless, beyond two narrow
circles in Venice-Padua and Florence, his very existence had scarcely
been known. Except for a small pamphlet describing the operation of a
calculating device he had improved, and a later defence of his priority
with the device, he had not published anything, and in that age as surely
as now, those who did not publish perished. Then, in 1609-10, came
the telescope and the observations of the heavens announced in the
Sidereus Nuncius. It is not possible, I am convinced, to overestimate the
impact of the telescopic discoveries. Galileo was revealing the existence
of a wholly new world, a new world not only unknown but not dreamed
of before, even by the ancients. Correspondents vied with each other in
plundering history and mythology for the image that could appropriately describe its discoverer - Columbus, Magellan, Atlas. Ontioco
Bentivogli, who admitted that he had not originally believed the claims,
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RICHARD S. WESTFALL
found himself forced to confess that Galileo, "not only like Linceus, but
like another Prometheus, has truly mounted to the heavens and penetrated their most profound secrets; so that I thank God that by your
means He has been pleased to let me also participate in the knowledge
of things so rare and concealed for so many ages".4 After his visit to
Rome in 1611, Galileo received a letter from his friend Paolo Gualdo,
citing a letter Gualdo had received from Mark Welser in Augsburg.
Welser had described in detail a banquet given to honour Galileo in
Rome. As Gualdo commented, Galileo was now watched and reported
throughout the world. 5
The telescope and the Side reus Nuncius were not, of course, the end
of Galileo's achievement. He quickly consolidated their promise with
two more books, and later there would be much more. To us, looking
back from more than three and a half centuries, the discoveries with the
telescope seem almost the least of Galileo's accomplishments. This was
not the case in his own age. The great works we think of immediately
when his name is mentioned, the Dialogue and the Discourses, were the
products of the final years of a long life, and their impact was felt
primarily by later periods. In his own time, Galileo's badge of genius
was the telescope. Instantly it transformed him into the most celebrated
intellectual of Italy, and probably of Europe. And it transformed him as
well into one of the most desirable clients, a man likely to bring glory to
the patron who supported his activity.
It is essential to my theme that Galileo comprehended the system of
patronage and knew how to exploit it. He demonstrated his knowledge
of the system from the very beginning, with the Side reus Nuncius. That
treatise was literally born on the night, 11 January 1610, when Galileo
realized that the stars he had discovered near Jupiter were satellites
circling the planet. As we know from his correspondence, he had been
seeking to leave Padua, to escape from the burdens of teaching, to find
leisure to pursue his research and to write; and as we also know, he had
concluded that only the patronage of an absolute prince could supply
him with these benefits. Galileo named the satellites for the ruling
family of his native Florence and composed the Side reus Nuncius,
which he dedicated to the Grand Duke, to proclaim their existence to
the world. For his pains, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at
the University of Pisa, without obligation to teach or to reside in Pisa,
and Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke, with an annual
stipend of one thousand scudi. To the court in Florence, Galileo
49
expressed the fear that the rest of the world might doubt the existence
of the Medicean stars if they had to accept them on his authority alone.
In order for the Grand Duke to gain the maximum esteem from the
new celestial bodies that bore his name, it was essential for others to see
the satellites for themselves. Hence he had prepared a number of
excellent telescopes for the other rulers of Europe, so that they might
know by their own eyes that the Medicean planets were real, though he
would send the telescopes only at the Grand Duke's orders, an inspired
manoeuvre whereby Galileo enlisted the Grand Duke as his public
relations agent. 6
With his following publications, Galileo took care to send copies to
the wealthy and powerful, especially to Cardinals of the Church. In the
twentieth century, scholars advertise their achievements by sending
presentation copies to academic colleagues. In the early seventeenth
century, under the system of patronage, Galileo sent presentation
copies to potential patrons. As far as possible, he timed his visits to
Rome to maximize their effect. Thus he paid his first visit (after the
advent of the telescope) only when he had a new discovery of great
importance, the phases of Venus. The following visit, of which we shall
hear, was not entirely spontaneous; but on the next one, in 1624, he
carried microscopes with him, one of which we know he presented to
Cardinal von Zollern for the Duke of Bavaria. "I saw a fly that Signor
Galileo himself arranged for me to see", Johannes Faber, a prominent
member of the Accademia dei Lincei reported to Federigo Cesi, the
Principe of the Accademia. "I was astonished, and said to Signor
Galileo that he was another Creator since he made things appear that
until now were not known to have been created." 7 On responses such
as that a career could rest secure.
During the critical years of Galileo's career, however, microscopes
and books that he published were secondary. The telescope remained
the foundation of his enormous reputation. Until the late 1630s, not
many years before his death, Galileo's telescopes remained the best that
were made, and he continued to receive requests for them until the end
of his life. Some of the instruments went to fellow investigators; for
example, Gassendi sought and obtained one, though he was careful to
indicate that Peiresc was involved in the request. 8 The overwhelming
majority of them, however, went to men of the patron class, like
Peiresc, rather than other scientists. Thus, toward the end of 1629,
Galileo received a request for a telescope for Phillip IV, the King of
50
RICHARD S. WESTFALL
Spain, with the information that the court insisted on paying, without
further ado, whatever price Galileo set. At that time Galileo was
completing the Dialogue. Nevertheless, he immediately undertook the
preparation of an instrument suitable for the King of Spain. As to
payment, he humbly begged to inform His Majesty that he could not
similarly serve him. He had never, Galileo stated, accepted payment for
a telescope, and he never intended to.9 From the evidence I have seen,
the assertion appears to have been true. Do not be misled to conclude
that the action was disinterested. The adventurer from Flanders who
came to Venice with the instrument that launched Galileo's career had
tried to sell it to the Senate. Galileo had presented his improved version
to the Doge and thereby made his fortune. He never forgot the lesson.
In such particulars we begin to perceive the material circumstances
within which Galileo was able to pursue a life of science that could not
easily have supported him otherwise in the early seventeenth century.
He could, it is true, have stayed on in Padua - though a university
chair, which demanded periodic reappointment, with decisions made by
men of precisely the same dominant class, differed less from the world
of patronage than one might at first think. Galileo's decision to leave
Padua, the decision of a man without personal means, was a decision to
throw himself wholly into the world of patronage. Activities such as the
presentation of books and of telescopes to men of wealth and power
were the social reality of the day, and by accepting their necessity and
conforming to the limits they set, Galileo was able to realize his
magnificent achievement.
We can contemplate in this respect a letter that Galileo received
from Benedetto Castelli in 1638. Castelli had been in Rome for more
than a decade in the service of the Barberini, the Papal family, and
through their influence he had been appointed to the chair in mathematics at the university in Rome. In 1638, when a death vacated the
chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, where Castelli had once
taught with distinction, the Grand Duke attempted to lure him back.
Castelli was anxious that he not offend the Grand Duke, but he also
could not accept his proposal. In his letter of 30 July, he explained to
Gaiileo why he could not. He was, Castelli reminded Galileo, a member
of the Cassino Congregation of the Benedictine Order, subject to the
"protection" of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the powerful nephew of
the Pope, and he was as well in the personal service of the Cardinal. "I
have no way to free myself from this place", Castelli continued,
51
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RICHARD S. WESTFALL
Discourse on Bodies in Water, a treatise which brought the mathematical principles of Archimedean hydrostatics to bear on the categories of
Aristotelian natural philosophy. I wish to follow this controversy only in
so far as it concerns the question of patronage. Four replies to Galileo's
Discourse appeared. All of them were composed by academics at the
University of Pisa. All of them were dedicated to one or another
member of the Medici family. According to one assertion by Galileo,
their authors bound themselves together (hence the notion of a league),
before his own Discourse appeared, to oppose whatever he might say in
itP That is, by every indication, we have to do with a struggle within
the system of patronage. As Arturo d'Elci, the Overseer of the university, who wrote one of the attacks under the pseudonym of ''The
Unknown Academician", expressed it, Galileo was "greedy for glory",
and d'Elci clearly feared that Galileo's assertiveness was bound to
infringe on the welfare of established clients like himself.13 A further
indication that the controversy arose out the issue of patronage appears
in a letter from Castelli. The time of these events preceded the letter
from Castelli that I quoted above by twenty-five years; Castelli had just
been appointed to a professorship of mathematics at the University of
Pisa. In one of his earliest letters to Galileo from Pisa, he sent the
greetings of an anatomist, Ruschio, who suggested very strongly (as
Castelli put it, "in block letters") that Galileo was not envied
for the great and marvellous achievements of his intellect, matters that do not fall within
the knowledge or the consideration of these malicious men, but for those thousand
scudi [Galileo's stipend from the Grand Duke], which are probably better known by
them and more avidly desired than by yoU. 14
53
him, for Colombe celebrates the discoverers of new things and compares them to the Gods, and Castelli added that among the discoverers
of new things Galileo was, by common agreement, appropriately
included. Galileo amended the passage by the insertion of one adverb,
"meritamente", so that it now read: "and properly compares them to the
Gods ...".15
Add to his ego, perhaps as one facet of it, his inability to carry on a
controversy in a civil manner. Colombe's pamphlet against Galileo was
hardly a model of civility, and one can scarcely wonder that he chose to
reply in kind. The other three objections to Galileo's treatise, however,
remained properly on a plane of philosophic discourse and refrained
from any appeal to personal invective. One cannot, alas, say the same
about Galileo's reply. It was addressed throughout ad hominem. Its
basic instrument was ridicule. It is impossible, in my opinion, to read it
without concluding that Galileo's aim was less to establish the truth of
the issue under discussion than absolutely to humiliate his opponents.
"There is no point", he exclaimed, "in undertaking to refute someone
who is so ignorant that it would require a huge volume to refute his
stupidities (which number more than the lines of his essay) ...".16
Perhaps there was no point in the exercise, but he performed it
nevertheless. To pamphlets of 50 pages he replied with a volume of
350. A grenade had been exploded outside his door; for his response,
nothing less than a bomb could assuage his outrage.
These are not easy matters for an historian of science to discuss.
There is no doubt in my mind that Galileo had good cause for his ego.
He was one of the handful of rare geniuses that have graced mankind.
His four opponents in the controversy were not even close to the same
calibre. My goal at this point, however, is not to assess relative merits
but to comprehend Galileo's impact on his contemporaries. We have a
word for his conduct, and we should not fear to use it. Galileo was
insufferable. And, what is important to my argument, the characteristics
that made him insufferable were not solely personal. They were also
intimately related to patronage. Where certain institutional arrangements lead one to disguise and suppress his egotism and contempt for
others, patronage encouraged these characteristics in Galileo. It does
not seem much too strong to say that patronage demanded them. It is
relevant, surely, that humanistic controversies of that period, involving
men who worked within the same system, frequently displayed similar
features. And it is revealing that Galileo's young followers, identifying
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RICHARD S. WESTFALL
with his status as the Grand Duke's philosopher, quickly learned to ape
his manners. Thus Niccolo Aggiunti lamented the "calumnies and
impostures of malicious men" that afflicted Galileo; and without reflecting apparently on what generated malice toward Galileo, went on
to decribe Chiaramonti's book on the stability of the earth, which in
fact he had not even seen yet, as "this excrement of a melancholy
humour".17 Galileo was attractive as a client exactly in so far as he was
perceived as a godlike discoverer of new things and a brilliant philosopher who easily outshone his opponents in philosophic discourse. The
praise heaped upon him by men of the highest rank, their gifts, his
special appointment by the Grand Duke, did nothing to diminish his
self-esteem. Egotism may have come easily to Galileo, but he received
every possible stimulus to behave as he did.
While the controversy on bodies in water was still in progress,
Galileo became involved in a second one, which did not address itself
to the Tuscan scene but nevertheless involved matters that bear on my
topic. The opponent in the new controversy, which concerned sunspots,
was a German who wrote under the pseudonym of Apelles. Their
differences involved the interpretation of the spots seen on or in front
of the sun, with manifold opportunities for sarcastic thrusts like those
mentioned above; and they included as well the question of priority in
the discovery, with all of the potential for bitterness that such questions
seem usually to entail. Galileo eventually learned that Apelles was
Christopher Scheiner, a Jesuit whom the order called to its Collegio
Romano in 1624. Although Scheiner does not seem initially to have
looked upon Galileo as an enemy, he was not one quietly to swallow
ridicule, and when he did learn to hate Galileo, he remained implacable
until his death.
Soon there was a third controversy as well. Like the first, this one
began in Tuscany, though it soon spread beyond. In December of 1613,
the court was in Pisa, and Castelli, then in the early months of his
appointment to the university, was present at a state dinner. It is surely
significant that the incident took place at the court, a firm indication
that the controversy began as another attempt to undermine Galileo
with his patron. The Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, the widow
of Ferdinand I and the mother of Cosimo, was a very pious woman too pious by twice for Galileo's good. During the dinner a cleric was
whispering in her ear. When Castelli was about to leave, he was called
back and forced into a discussion of the Copernican system and
55
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57
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59
know that they were not juvenile exercises. Rather they were the work
of a mature young scholar who was either already a professor at the
University of Pisa or at least on the verge of assuming that position, and
who turned to the philosophers of the Collegio Romano to enhance his
understanding of logic and natural philosophy ([16], [1]). No doubt
there will be a long discussion about the interpretation of these
findings; the findings themselves appear to be established beyond the
possibility of rejection. On the basis of what has been published so far, I
am impressed by the case that has been made for the enduring
influence of the Collegio Romano on Galileo's outlook in the allied
fields of epistemology and method; I am less impressed with the present
case for their enduring influence on his natural philosophy. For this
essay, all that matters is the solidly substantiated conclusion that at
the beginning of his professional career, Galileo sought out the Jesuit
professors of the Collegio and willingly placed himself at their feet.
In 1610, Galileo published his short tract, Sidereus Nuncius, which
asserted the existence of hitherto unknown bodies in the heavens, on
the basis of observations made with an instrument that no-one else had.
Not surprisingly, there was scepticism about his assertion, and not
surprisingly there were some who claimed that the new celestial bodies
were delusions generated by the instrument itself. It was the Jesuit
astronomers at the Collegio Romano who obtained a telescope, confirmed Galileo's observations, and said as much publicly. Their support
was a critical factor in his initial success.
When Galileo came to Rome in 1611, the Collegio organized a
special assembly in his honour with a discourse on his discoveries. In
addition to the learned community of Rome, a number of counts, dukes
and prelates, including at least three Cardinals, attended the assembly,
which was little short of an official laying on of hands. Late in 1614, the
French cleric, Jean Tarde, visited the Collegio Romano. He recorded in
his diary that the Jesuit fathers accepted everything Galileo had discovered, including apparently the sunspots, although they agreed that
this evidence of mutability in the heavens was the source of some pain
([6]19, 591-2). Tarde's visit to Rome fell on the very eve of Galileo's
denunciation to the Inquisition. The denunciation was not the work of
the Jesuits, who appear on the whole to have been embarrassed by the
outburst of Dominican fundamentalism. At least one expression of
private support from their number has survived, and among Galileo's
letters there are numerous indications that he considered them to be his
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allies. When fear that the copy of his letter to Castelli sent to Rome by
Lorini had been altered to his disadvantage led him to send a copy he
knew to be authentic, Galileo specified more than once that he wanted
Father Grienberger, the successor to Clavius, to see it. 24 The Jesuit
order was not so authoritarian that it contained no diversity of opinion.
Nevertheless, I find the evidence very strong that at this stage the
members of the Society in Rome who were most influential in such
matters were willing to accept Galileo's discoveries. Without denying
the basic difference in outlook mentioned above, I am convinced that
the origin of the conflict between Galileo and the Jesuits did not lie in
Galileo's discoveries themselves, despite the unsettling implications he
drew from them.
Against this background consider a lecture delivered at the Collegio
Romano two years later, on the three comets that had appeared in the
heavens in 1618. The man who delivered the lecture was Orazio
Grassi, the professor of mathematics at the Collegio. Grassi was the
Signor Sarsi of II Saggiatore, where Galileo reduced him to an object of
derision forever. But Grassi was not an object of derision. He was one
of the most respected scientists of the Jesuit order, who occupied the
chair in mathematics at the Collegio Romano for more than ten years.
When the canonization of Loyola led the Collegio to plan a new
church, St. Ignatius, intended to be second in magnificence in Rome
only to St. Peter's, it designated Grassi as the architect. Contrary to the
implication of Galileo's ridicule, Grassi was clearly a man of ability
much respected by his age.
His lecture on comets did not explicitly mention Galileo. He
obviously referred to Galileo several times, however, and the references
were all respectful. Nevertheless, Galileo regarded the lecture as an
attack, and it appears to me that Galileo was correct. The result of the
Church's actions in 1616 (to which I shall return) had been to separate
the realms of science and faith. As Bellarmine stated several times, it
was permissible to accept the Copernican system as a superior mathematical hypothesis. What was not permissible was the assertion that
Copernicanism is true, for passages in Scripture appeared to be in
contradiction to the heliocentric system. Increasingly, moreover, in the
opinion of the learned community Galileo had established himself as
the recognized master of the separate realm of science. What was the
import of Grassi's lecture? Grassi did not build his argument on
Scriptural citations. Rather he confined himself to the domain of
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63
that he himself generated in some circles, had led directly to the action
taken against Copernicanism, as the theologians' identification of the
condemned propositions with him testifies. Those who were informed
understood that he stood at the source of the disturbance. Thus,
Antonio Querengo, in a letter to Cardinal d'Este, spoke of the decree
against Copernicanism as the resolution of "Galileo's disputes"/9 But
neither the Holy Office nor the Congregation struck Galileo. Apparently he was immune. Galileo's escape in 1616 has been attributed to
the influence of the Grand Duke and of Prince Federigo Cesi of the
Aeeademia dei Lineei. This attribution is what I have begun to doubt as
I have reflected on the multiple paeans of praise sung to Galileo in that
age. They were sung, not just by the Grand Duke and by Cesi, but by
the whole class of patrons, that is, by the ruling class, of Italy and of
Europe as a whole. Galileo was the illumination of the age. True, he
kept advancing paradoxical propositions that challenged the accepted
wisdom of the age and common sense itself. Continually he made his
patrons nervous, and they felt the need to rein him in. But almost to a
man, those who composed the Holy Office, men who by definition
belonged to the class of patrons, appear to have been profoundly
anxious not to extinguish the light of the age.
Recall that the Pope, Paul V, who was repeatedly described as
stolidly anti-intellectual, received Galileo in Rome - received him after
the publication of the decree by the Congregation of the Index! - and
assured Galileo of his favour. 3o Recall that when rumours began to
circulate that Galileo had been censured by the Holy Office, Cardinal
Bellarmine furnished him with an official, signed statement that no such
thing had occurred ([6)19, 342). Recall that in the immediate aftermath
of the events of 1616 even conservative Cardinals such as Borromeo
and Aldobrandini were eager to express their esteem for Galileo - and
to receive telescopes and copies of his books from him.31 Recall that
before he left Rome he had begun negotiations through the archlyconservative Cardinal Borgia to supply his method of determining
longitude at sea, another fruit of his genius, to the Spanish government,
and that during the following two years he remained in constant touch
with the Spanish crown on this matter. 32 And recall, what seems to me
the most revealing indication of all because it was unconscious of its
implication, the request that Galileo received from the court in Florence
while he was still in Rome in 1616, asking him to stay on until Cardinal
Carlo de' Medici arrived, since the court was concerned, "when people
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of quality dine with him [the CardinalI, that he should have someone
present who would be able to please those Lords with his conversation
and discourse, for which Their Highnesses judge that you can be the
best one possible".33 It is hard to imagine how we could have a fuller
demonstration of the reputation Galileo enjoyed with every segment of
the patron class of Italy and of Europe.
If 1616 seemed to indicate that Galileo was immune from threat,
must we not say that patronage had made him immune? Such apparently was the conclusion of his enemies. In 1623, Caccini was spreading
his opinion around Rome that various "Princes" had defended Galileo
from the punishment of the Inquisition, almost that the "Princes" were
obstructing the Inquisition and protecting evil persons. 34
Galileo himself was chastened by the events of 1615-16. He did not
quickly forget the terror a denunciation to the Inquisition inspired, and
he remained rather quiet for a time. Of course he was not immune from
disciplinary action in any absolute sense. He was immune only if he
constrained himself within certain limits, and he was well aware of this
fact. It seems possible to me that in the late twenties, as he contemplated the enormous gamble the Dialogue involved, he reflected anew
on the outcome in 1616 and relied again on his apparent immunity.
This is speculation, of course, for he left no statement to that effect. The
outcome of the denunciation of 1615 is not speculation, however; it is
recorded fact.
Galileo's activities in Rome during the six months he was there were
recorded well enough that we can also speak of them as facts. By every
account he was brilliant, brilliant beyond compare. Everywhere he
could be found surrounded by opponents whom he engaged in discourse on the Copem;~an system and on natural philosophy, "now in
one house and then in another".35 In later years more than one person
recalled the impact of his discourse. Virginio Cesarini, a young prodigy
of learning in whom the Jesuits had vested great expectations, altered
the course of his intellectual life as a result of his discussions with
Galileo during these months and took up the study of mathematics and
natural philosophy which he had hitherto largely ignored. 36 He chose
not to enter the Society of Jesus, but he did become a member of Cesi's
Accademia dei Lincei. One external observer, who was not a member
of Galileo's circle, left an account of a disputation on Copernicanism at
the home of Federigo Ghisilieri. A whole phalanx of anti-Copernicans
were present, attacking him, almost in formation. Before Galileo replied,
he made it clear that he understood their position better than they did
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67
outlook between Galileo and the Jesuits, this analysis moves the origin
of their conflict from the realm of intellectual differences to another
context. It asks how Galileo, the successful client, impinged on others,
and it asks how those with established authority in intellectual life
viewed the arrival of a new man whose genius was the more compelling
because it enjoyed the support of the patron class.
The rest of the story is quickly told. Galileo had only one style of
controversy. To Grassi's lecture he replied with a Discourse on Comets.
The Discourse appeared over the name of Mario Guiducci; we know
from the manuscript that it was Galileo's composition, and at the time
everyone received it as such. Although the issue of comets had nothing
to do with sunspots, Galileo chose to open the Discourse with a charge
of plagiarism against Scheiner, deliberately couched in the most insulting
terms. Scheiner calls himself Apelles, Galileo said, though he does not
compare even with a mediocre painter ([616, 48; [8124). Can we
seriously wonder that Scheiner became his inveterate enemy? The
Discourse then proceeded to rip Grassi apart, not yet with the fullthroated ridicule of II Saggiatore to be sure, but in a sufficiently
humiliating manner nevertheless. In the reports that Galileo received
back from Rome there was no mistaking the reaction now. It was not
Grassi but the Jesuits who were offended, and the word they were using
in regard to Galileo was "annihilation".44 Grassi replied to the Discourse with the Libra Astronomica (ascribed to the pseudonymous
Lothario Sarsi). It is instructive to read the Libra. Despite the attack
that Galileo had made on him, Grassi replied with restraint - except
for one passage. That one passage offered, with unseemly joy, the
wicked insinuation that Galileo remained a closet Copernican. The
insinuation was wholly true, but three years after the condemnation of
1616, it could hardly be received as a friendly gesture. In due time, in
response to the Libra, Galileo composed II Saggiatore, one of the all
time masterpieces of sarcastic invective. Not even a saint would have
received II Saggiatore without hostility, and Grassi has not been
nominated for sainthood. The stage was now fully set for the final
drama.
After the tragedy of 1633, two Jesuits who were in a position to
know commented on it. Father Grienberger, the successor to Clavius in
the chair of astronomy at the Collegio Romano had this to say:
If Galileo had known how to retain the affection of the Fathers of this College, he
would have lived gloriously before the world, and none of his misfortunes would have
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happened, and he would have been able to write as he chose about everything,
including the motion of the earth.45
Both comments seem true to me. And both agree that fully to understand Galileo's conflict with the Jesuits we need to look beyond the
intellectual issue that divided them and at the context within which they
pursued it, a context in which the system of patronage helped significantly to shape men's actions.
NOTES
1 Cf. Galileo to Diodati, 15 January 1633: "I understand from good sources that the
Jesuit Fathers have inserted in the principal heads the conviction that my book is to be
detested and is more dangerous to the Holy Church than the writings of Luther and of
Calvin ..." ([6]15, 25).
2 Cf. Naude to Gassendi, April 1633, and Micanzio to Galileo, 15 July 1634 ([6]15, 8,
and 16, 109). I could multiply the instances cited if there were need; I am convinced
that, if I wished to spend the time, I could multiply them nearly without limit.
3 Guiducci to Galileo, 21 May 1633 ([6]15, 131).
4 Bentivogli to Galileo, 21 September 1614 ([6]12, 99).
5 Gualdo to Galileo, 27 May 1611 ([6] 11, 117).
6 Galileo to Vinta, 19 March 1610 ([6]10, 297-9). The Tuscan court accepted the
proposal, and Galileo sent telescopes to a number of rulers in Catholic Europe with
letters from the Grand Duke to introduce them.
7 Faber to Cesi, 11 May 1624 ([5] 875).
8 Gassendi to Galileo, 19 January 1634 ([6]16, 21). See also Diodati to Gassendi, 10
November 1634, Diodati to Peiresc 10 November 1634, and Diodati to Schickhardt,
29 December 1634 ([6]16,153,184).
9 Galileo to Buonamici, 19 November 1629 ([6]14, 52-3).
10 Castelli to Galileo, 30 July 1638 ([6] 17,361-2).
11 Nozzolini to Monsignor Marzimedici, 12 Sept. 1612 ([6]4, 289), Galileo to Cesi, 5
January 1613, and Cigoli to Galileo, 1 February 1613 ([6]11, 461 and 476).
12 Risposta aile opposizioni ([6] 4, 727).
13 Considerazioni (]6] 4, 177-8).
14 Castelli to Galileo, 20 November 1613 ([6]11,596).
15 Risposta aile opposizioni ([6] 4, 465). Cf. a passage in Galileo's suggested dedication
to the allied "Errori ... commessi da Messer ... Coresio", in which he compared
himself to a famous painter, probably Andrea del Sarto, whose frescoes in the
courtyard of Santissima Nunciata were known to all of Florence, and his critics to
69
clumsy country imitators from the Umbrian town of Montelupo, who are no better than
house painters: "And who in our city, if he saw one of the meanest painters of
Montelupo running in fury to daub whitewash on the marvellous frescoes of Andrea
would not hasten there and with cries and remonstrances and, if they did not suffice,
with angry blows prevent this outrageous act? Sig. Galileo has handled this question so
superbly that I do not hesitate to say, and you will understand it very well, that
Archimedes himself would not have been able to explain it more ingeniously and
establish it on more solid foundations, and should a man not oppose one who, ruining
everything he touches, attempts to mutilate itT' (!6J 4, 285). (It appears to me that in
this jibe Galileo is conflating two passages from Vasari's life of del Sarto, one about a
monument to him in the church of the Servites made by Raffaella da Monte Lupo,
which the superintendents of works in the church mutilated through ignorance, and one
about frescoes depicting traitors to Florence that del Sarto painted during the seige of
the city, which were later covered with whitewash ([14J 293-4 and 298-9).) The
literature on Galileo is full of references to Galileo's enemies, but it has not frequently
bothered to consider what it was about him that aroused enmity. The provocative
display of egotism was a characteristic he never learned to suppress. A decade after the
controversy on bodies in water, he wrote the famous passage in the Assayer, comparing philosophers to eagles, which can only be read as a self-portrait, and one filled
with contempt for nearly everyone else: "Perhaps Sarsi believes that all the host of good
philosophers may be enclosed within four walls. I believe that they fly, and that they fly
alone, like eagles, and not in flocks like starlings. It is true that because eagles are rare
birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with
shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them. . . . The
crowd of fools who know nothing, Sarsi, is infinite. Those who know very little of
philosophy are numerous. Few indeed are they who really know some part of it ..."
([7] 239). Nearly another decade later, Galileo began the dedication to the Dialogue
with a passage ostensibly about Ptolemy and Copernicus, which can again only be read
as his own portrait of himself: "Though the difference between man and the other
animals is enormous, yet one might say reasonably that it is little less than the
difference among men themselves. What is the ratio of one to a thousand? Yet it is
proverbial that one man is worth a thousand where a thousand are of less value than a
single one. Such differences depend upon diverse mental abilities, and I reduce them to
the difference between being or not being a philosopher; for philosophy, as the proper
nutriment of those who can feed upon it, does in fact distinguish that single man from
the common herd in a greater or less degree of merit according as his diet varies"
(!9] 3). What can we call this except hubris? Can we afford to ignore its impact on
others if we want to understand important episodes in Galileo's life?
16 Fragments by Galileo in response to Colombe and di Grazia ([6] 4, 443). There may
be no need further to establish what is a well known aspect of Galileo, but let me call
attention to the notes he made on Antonio Rocco's Esercitazioni filosofiche, a reply to
the Dialogue. Even in private notes Galileo could not curb the violence of his reaction.
Thus, "this beast has not fully understood a word of what I say here". Then, "0 wicked
and totally ignorant!". And ultimately, "blockhead!", "fathead". ([6] 7, 641, 645, 646,
668.) After 1633, Galileo did not venture to publish these comments. Before the trial,
the system within which he worked tended to encourage him to display his arrogance
rather than to conceal it.
70
RICHARD S. WESTFALL
18
71
38
REFERENCES
1. Carugo, Adriano, and Alistair Crombie, 'The Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of science
and of nature', Annali dell'lstituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 8.2
(1983)3-68.
2. Colanna, Gustavo Brigante, Gli Orinsi (Milano: Ceschina, 1955).
3. de Dainville, Fran~ois, La naissance de l'humanisme moderne (Paris: Beauchesne,
1940) .
4. Descartes, Rene, Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols, eds. C. Adam and P. Tannery
(Paris: Vrin, 1964-76).
5. Gabrieli, Guiseppe, 'II carteggio linceo della vecchia Accademia di Federigo Cesi
(1603-1630)" Memorie della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di
scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, VI, 7. I and 7.2 (1938).
6. Galilei, Galileo, Le opere di Galileo Galilei, 20 vols in 21, ed. Antonio Favaro
(Firenze: Barbera, 1890-1909).
7. Galilei, Galileo, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, tf. Stillman Drake (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957).
8. Galilei, Galileo, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, tf. Stillman Drake and C.
D. O'Malley (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
9. Galilei, Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, tr. Stillman
Drake (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962).
10. Harney, Martin P., The Jesuits in History (New York: American Press, 1941).
11. Hollis, Christopher, A History of the Jesuits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1968).
12. Mitchell, David, The Jesuits. A History (London: Macdonald, 1980).
13. di Santillana, Giorgio, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1955).
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RICHARD S. WESTFALL
14. Vasari, Giorgo, Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and
Architects, 4 vols, eds. E. H. Blashfield, E. W. Blashfield, and A. A. Hopkins (New
York, 1897).
15. Villoslada, Riccardo G., Storia del Collegio Romano (= Analecta Gregoriano, 66)
(Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1954).
16. Wallace, William, Galileo and His Sources. The Heritage of the Collegio Romano
in Galileo's Science (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).
WILLIAM R. SHEA
Abstract. Descartes' biographer, Adrien Baillet, tells us that Descartes heard of the
Brothers of the Rosy Cross in Germany during the winter of 1619-20. This news
reached him "at a time when he was in the greatest perplexity concerning the way that
he should follow in the investigation of the truth", and he immediately attempted
to contact members of the Fraternity. Descartes failed to meet any of the alleged
Rosicrucians but he was rumoured to have become one of their members when he
returned to Paris in 1623, the year of the great Rosicrucian Craze that was to engross
some of the best French minds for several months. Baillet says that Descartes had no
difficulty in proving that he was not a Rosicrucian but the accusation stuck and was
occasionally revived during his lifetime and after.
In this essay, I examine Descartes' interest in the Rosicrucians against the general
background of the period, and I consider the reasons why he was subsequently accused
of belonging to the movement. I also indicate how some of Descartes' more daring
pronouncements in the works of his maturity can be traced to the hermetic and mystical
tradition that influenced his youthful quest for a new method that would unlock the
secrets of nature.
seventeenth century, and this can be brought home vividly by comparing Descartes' lucid manifesto of rationalism in the Discourse on
Method or the Principles of Philosophy with the outlook prevalent a
few years earlier. For instance in the concluding paragraph (article 64)
of the second part of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes writes:
I recognize no matter in corporeal things apart from that which the geometers call
quantity, and take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e. that to which every kind of
division, shape and motion is applicable. Moreover, my consideration of such matter
involves absolutely nothing apart from these divisions, shapes and motions; and even
with regard to these, I will admit as true only what has been deduced from indubitable
common notions so evidently that it is fit to be considered as a mathematical demonstration. And since all natural phenomena can be explained in this way, as will become
clear in what follows, I do not think that any other principles are either admissible or
desirable in physics ([141 B.1, 78-9; [131 1,247).
Less than three decades earlier, texts such as the following were
widespread:
73
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 73-99.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
The things which are perceivable by the senses are helpful in enabling us to conceive of
Olympian matters. The wind signifies spirit; movement with the passage of time signifies
life; light signifies knowledge; heat signifies love; and instantaneous activity signifies
creation. Every corporeal form acts through harmony. There are more wet things than
dry things, and more cold things than hot, because if this were not S,), the active
elements would have won the battle too quickly and the world would not have lasted
long ([14]10, 218; [13]1, 5).
Or again:
There is a single active power in things: love, charity, harmony ([14]10, 218; [13]1, 5).
75
fourth birthday, a period in life when the mind is still open to bold
ideas and grandiose schemes. These tracts include the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), the Confessio (1615), the Chemical Wedding of Christian
Rosencreutz (1616), and the Raptus philosophicus (1619) to mention
but a few. 2 The Fama and the Confessio, which appeared in several
modem languages, were easy to read, because they were short (together
they run to about twenty pages of printed text), and attractive, because
they attacked the Establishment. Short shrift is made of the acknowledged authorities: the Pope in religion, Aristotle in philosophy, and
Galen in medicine.
The hero of these tracts is a mysterious Rosencreutz who according
to the Confessio was born in 1378 and lived for 106 years. He travelled
in the east where he learned the "Magia and the Cabala" and entered
into "the harmony of the whole world".3 He returned to Europe to
found a society for the reformation of universal knowledge at a time
which brought forth such men as Theophrastus (Paracelsus) who was
''well-grounded in the aforesaid harmonia", although he was not a
member of the Fraternity ([43) 286). The author of the Fama recounts
the history of the fictitious Order culminating with the recent discovery
of the passage of the vault in which Brother Rosencreutz was buried in
Germany. This is seen as a symbol heralding the dawn of a new age:
"For like as our door was after so many years wonderfully discovered,
also there shall be opened a door to Europe (when the great wall is
removed) which already doth begin to appear, and with great desire is
expected of many" ([43) 290-1). The Fama ends by exhorting its
readers "to declare their mind ... in print" ([43) 296). Several did and
were contacted by others who had also read the Rosicrucian manifestos,
but there is no recorded instance of anyone ever meeting a member of
the alleged Fraternity.
Descartes' biographer, Adrien Baillet, tells us that Descartes heard
of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross in Germany during the winter of
1619-20. Baillet's account is particularly instructive because he had
access to Descartes' manuscript notes that have since been lost:
It was in conversations with his German hosts that he heard of a Brotherhood of
scientists established in Germany some time ago under the name of the Brothers of the
Rosy-Cross. They were praised in an astonishing manner ... and Descartes felt shaken.
He, who openly stated his genuine contempt of aU scientists because he had never met a
genuine one, began to accuse himself of haste and rashness. His desire to emulate them
was strengthened by the fact that news of the Brotherhood reached him at a time when
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
he was in the greatest perplexity concerning the way that he should follow in the quest
for truth. He felt that he could not remain indifferent to them ([4J 1, 87; cited in [14110,
193).
If all the disproof that was needed was "to make himself visible",
then Descartes had an easy time of it! In any event, this was most
fortunate since Fr. Garasse had clear ideas about the treatment that
should be meted out to Rosicrucians:
I conclude that the Brothers of the Roses are guilty, evil, and condemned as sorcerers.
They are an evil grouping of good-for-nothings, dangerous to religion, the secular state
and sound morality .... I cannot imagine tortures great enough for these dogmatizers.
77
Garasse adds for good measure: "the doctrine of these allegedly fine
spirits, of which they speak in their cabala, is atheism". In this they
resemble Luther who "was a perfect atheist", and, hence, "what is best
for them is the rack or the noose".5
But why, we may ask, was Descartes suspected of being a Rosicrucian? There are a number of reasons, all circumstantial. I shall consider
five.
The first is that he came from Germany, the land from which
Rosicrucian tracts poured forth. We know that Descartes had no luck in
his quest for the elusive and illusory Brothers of the Rosy Cross, but
according to Baillet he met and impressed Johann Faulhaber in Vim in
1620. Prior to 1613, namely before the beginning of the Rosicrucian
craze, Faulhaber wrote mathematical treatises with forbidding but
philosophically unproblematic titles such as Arithmeticus cubicossicus
hortus (Tubingen, 1604), Usus de novo in vento instrumenti alicuius
Belgae (Augsburg, 1610), Novae geometriae & opticae inventiones,
aliquot peculiarium instrumentorum (Frankfurt, 1610), Speculum
mathematicum polytechnicum novum, tribus visionibus illustre (Vim,
1612). After 1613, we find the following publications: Ansa inauditae
novae & admirandae artis, quam Spiritus Dei aliquot propheticis &
Biblicis numeris ad ultima usque tempora obsignare & occultare voluit
(Nuremberg, 1613), Cae/estes arcana magia, sive cabalisticus, novus,
artificiosus & admirandus computus de Gog & Magog (Nuremberg,
1613) and, especially, the Mysterium arithmeticum sive cabalistica et
philosophica inventio, nova admiranda et ardua, qua numeri ratione et
methodo computantur. ... Cum illuminatissimis laudatissimisque Frat.
R. C. Famae viris humiliter et syncere dicata (Vim, 1615). The latter is
one of the first works dedicated to the Rosicrucians.
The spontaneous, enlightened comment is: "Yes, but Descartes was
interested in Faulhaber the mathematician, not Faulhaber the Hermeticist". Fair enough. But was this distinction, so obvious to us, equally
clear to the seventeenth century? Why are two distinguished editors
of Euclid, John Dee in England and Fran~ois de Foix de Candalle
in France, professed hermeticists? What should have driven a man
like Dee to write a lengthy Preface to Euclid as well as the Monas
hieroglyphica, or Candalle to comment on Euclid and translate the
Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus?
Naude gives a list of authors whose doctrine is embraced by the
Rosicrucians. This includes not only the names of Dee and Candalle
but also the Mertonians John Hentisbury and Richard Swineshead
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
Descartes also hoped that Ferrier would help him develop "what I
call the science of miracles because it teaches how to use air and light
in such a way that we can achieve through their agency all the illusions
that Magicians are said to perform with the help of Demons"Y The
79
80
WILLIAM R. SHEA
and Salomon used it" ([41]295). Readers of Descartes' Rules for the
Direction of the Mind may recollect a passage in Rule Four:
So useful is this method that without it the pursuit of learning would, I think, be more
harmful than profitable. Hence I can readily believe that the great minds of the past
were to some extent aware of it, guided to it even by nature alone. For the human mind
has within it a sort of spark of the divine, in which the first seeds of useful ways of
thinking are sown, seeds which, however neglected and stifled by studies which impede
them, often bear fruit of their own accord. 15
81
82
WILLIAM R. SHEA
83
Note how conveniently the peasants will be spared the tedious task
of reading what philosophers have written. The obsolescence of our
departments of philosophy awaits the discovery of a universal language!
A fourth reason for crediting Descartes with a willingness to
acknowledge non-Cartesian forces in nature could have been culled
from his Compendium musicae, composed in 1618, in which he avers
that:
The human voice is pleasant because it agrees with our dispositions. What makes the
voice of a friend more agreeable than that of an enemy is probably the sympathy or
antipathy that we feel. For the same reason, a drum covered with the skin of a lamb
ceases to vibrate and becomes silent if, as we are told, its initial sound sets up a
resonance in another drum covered with the skin of a wolf ([14]10,90).
The source of this story could again be della Porta who gives two
versions of it:
The Wolf is hurtful and odious to sheep after he is dead: for if you can cover a drum
with a wolf's skin, the sound of it will make the sheep afraid ... if you hang several
skins one against the other ... the Wolf's skin eats up the Lamb's skin (1301 bk. 1, ch.
14,pp.19-20).
There is Antipathy between Sheep and Wolves, as I said often, and it remains in all
their parts; so that an Instrument strung with Sheep strings, mingled with strings made
of a Wolf's guts, will make no music, but jar, and make all discords. 25
There is always, of course, the possibility of a mechanical explanation of such phenomena, as Descartes urged in 1644 in the Fourth Part
of his Principles of Philosophy.26 But, in 1619, I wonder how far his
explanation would have risen above the one della Porta offers for
"infected mirrors". Della Porta informs us in book I of the Magia
naturalis that a harlot possesses a "virtue" such that "if someone often
looks at himself in her mirror, or puts on her clothes, he will become as
insolent and lewd as she is".27 Seven books later, having kept us on
epistemological, if not moral, tenterhooks, he offers the following
explanation:
The polished mirror fears the look of an immoral woman, as Aristotle says, for her look
soils it and reduces its splendour. This is because the vapour of her blood coalesces on
the surface of the mirror. 28
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
To date no one has been able to trace this book. Henri Gouhier has
suggested that it is the title of a projected work in which Descartes
would appear on the "theatre of the world ... wearing a mask". As a
resolute defender of Descartes' "rationality", Gouhier interprets the
dedication to the Rosicrucians as ironical. 32 But we need not share
85
The wars are the Thirty Year War that did not end until the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. The Emperor is Ferdinand, who was crowned in
Frankfurt in 1619. The exact location is not known but Daniel
Lipstorp, writing in 1653, three years after Descartes' death, suggests a
village near Vim, where the mathematician Faulhaber lived.35
"Finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no
cares or passions to trouble me ... I was completely free to converse
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
87
88
WILLIAM R. SHEA
89
I even make bold to believe that inner joy has a secret force to make Fortune more
favourable. I would not write this to people with weak minds lest they should be led to
superstition, but, in the case of your Highness, I rather fear that she will laugh at my
credulity. But I have a very large number of experiences, as well as the authority of
Socrates, to confirm my opinion. My experience is such that I have often noticed that
what I undertake gladly and without an interior repugnance generally goes well even in
games of chance where Fortune alone holds the sway.39
Descartes not only believed in his inner voice, he had "a very large
number of experiences" (the French has "une infinite d'experiences")
that confirmed its reliability.
The young Descartes' interest in hermeticism helps us understand
why he attached such deep significance to his threefold dream. I believe
it also casts light on his ready and willing enthusiasm for a cosmic
scheme that would embrace the stars. Descartes was to become more
cautious as he grew older, but as late as 1632, when he was thirty-six
years old, he could write to Mersenne as someone who is about to fulfil
the abiding dream of the astrologers:
In the last two or three months, I have penetrated deeply into the heavens and, having
satisfied myself about its nature and that of the celestial bodies that we see, as well as
many other things that I would not even have dared to hope a few years ago, I have
become so bold that I now dare to seek the cause of the position of each star. Even if
they appear to be strewn haphazardly in the heavens, I do not doubt that there is a
regular, fixed and natural order among them. Knowledge of this order is the key and
the foundation of the highest and most perfect science that man can have about natural
things. The more so, since, by its means, we could know a priori all the varied forms
and essences of terrestrial bodies, whereas, without it, we have to rest content with
guessing them a posteriori and by their effects.40
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
The instantaneous activity of God is also invoked in the establishment of the imaginary world, the fable that is meant to be truer to
nature than the allegedly realistic accounts of the philosophers. The
matter that God creates is perfectly solid and homogeneous. 52 But such
a matter is essentially inert and unable to give rise to change. For
motion to spread and produce a division in the matter it would already
have to be fluid, but matter can only become fluid through motion! The
whole thing looks circular! Not so for Descartes since God "from the
first instant" divides matter into parts that are distinguished by their
93
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
book, but he hides and only shows himself very rarely. In this country, he always lives
in some small and remote town. Some say that this is how he got the name d'Escartes
for he used to be called something else" (letter of Claude de Saumaise to M. de Puy, 4
April 1637, cited in [14]10, 555-6). When he first arrived in Holland, Descartes
called himself du Perron, e.g., in his correspondence with Isaac Beeckman in 1619
([14] 10, 153, 160, 161, 164, 166). The physician Vopiscus-Fortunatus Plempius states
that (around 1629) Descartes lived in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam "unknown to
anyone (Nulli notus)" ([14]1, 401).
5 Fran<;:ois Garasse, "La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps", cited in
[2]137-8.
6 John Dee, The Mathematical Preface to the Elements of Geometrie (1570), quoted in
[42] 31.
7 See [30] Book 17, chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10 discuss this kind of optical tricks.
The first edition of Magia naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium in four books
appeared in Naples in 1558 and was reprinted at least thirteen times between 1560 and
1588, not counting the numerous reprints of the Italian, French and German versions.
The second edition in twenty books was published in Naples in 1589, and was
frequently reprinted, as well as translated into Italian, French, German and English. See
[27].
H Compare, for instance, the following passages from the Cogitationes privatae and the
Magia naturalis: (1) [14]10, 209 and [30] bk. 20, ch. 9, p. 408 on making bystanders
appear coloured; (2) [14]10, 244 and [3D] bk. 16, ch. 2, p. 341 on making invisible
writing legible by heating the paper; (3) [14]10, 244 and [30] bk. 15, ch. 5, p. 332 on
fishing with a submerged candle; (4) [14]10, 232 and [30] bk. 20, ch. 10, p. 409 on a
mechanical dove that can be made to fly.
~ After musing on the possible applications of parabolic mirrors that "burn at an
infinite distance", della Porta concludes: "I have observed, that we may use this Artifice
in great anG wonderful things, and chiefly by inscribing letters in a full Moon" ([30] bk.
17, cit. 17, p. 376). Agrippa speaks of raising letters and reading them on the disk of
the moon "as was done of old by Pythagoras" but he does not claim that he knows how
to do it (Henricus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, bk. 1, ch.
6, cited in [14]10, 347 from the Opera omnia (Lyons, 1600) 1, 347. De occulta
philosophia was first published in 1531.
10 See the diary of Isaac Beeckman cited in [4]10, 347. In the same year, Mersenne
expressed to Galileo the hope that the new telescope would reveal whether living beings
existed on the moon (letter of 1 February 1629 ([26] 2, 175-6.
11 Letter to an unknown correspondent, September 1629 (?) ([14]1,21).
12 Les Mtiteores, 8th Discourse ([14] 6,343). See 131]461-74.
L1 Letter to Beeckman, 29 April 1629 ([14]10, 165) and Beeckman's reply ([14]10,
167-8). Later, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes gave no inkling of his early
interest but disparaged "the art of Lully" as merely serving "for speaking without
judgement about matters of which one is ignorant" ([14] 6, 17; [13]1, 119). Further
evidence of Descartes' interest in the art of memory is a long note on Lambert
Schenkel, a popular writer on mnemonics ([14]10, 230). Paolo Rossi remarks that
Descartes accepts both Schenkel's terminology and his way of raising the problem
([32]154-5), and Frances Yates adds that Descartes' "new idea of organizing memory
on causes sounds curiously like a rationalization of occult memory" ([41]374).
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15
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WILLIAM R. SHEA
life could be extended: "We must not doubt that human life could be prolonged if we
knew the proper art" ([14]5, 178). When Descartes died in Stockholm at the age of
fifty-three, the Gazette of Antwerp scoffed at his alleged claims of longevity: "A fool,
who said he could live as long as he wished, has died in Sweden" (quoted in a letter of
Christiaan Huygens to his brother Constantijn, 12 April 1650 ([14]10, 630. The
prolongation of life was discussed by several authors since Roger Bacon in the
thirteenth century. Bacon referred to Scripture to prove the possibility of living almost
a thousand years. Like Descartes he emphasised a sane and moderate diet. For a short
survey of Bacon's views, see his chapter "De retardatione accidentium senectutis, et de
prolongatione vitae humanae" in his Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de
nul/itate magiae ([3]1, 538-42).
21 "He was never untidy, and he especially avoided dressing like a philosopher" ([4]2,
447).
22 Letter to Mersenne, April 1634 ([14]1, 286).
23 Cogitationesprivatae ([14]10, 213; [13]1, 2).
24 Letter to Mersenne, 20 November 1629 ([14]1, 81-2). On the history of such
attempts see [32], [22], [36].
25 [30] bk. 20, ch. 7, p. 403. Della Porta ascribes this view to Pythagoras. The earliest
source that I have come across is Fracastoro's book on Sympathy and Antipathy of
1550 where he writes that "striking a drum made of the skin of a wolf will, they say,
break drums made of the skin of lambs" ([17] 22). There are many variants on this
theme. For instance Burton applies it to Jan Zizka, the fifteenth-century national hero
of Bohemia: "the great captain Zisca would have a drum made of his skin when he was
dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his enemies to flight" ([7]1, 38).
26 After stating that he has explained all the properties of magnets and fire by "the
shape, size, position and motion of particles of matter", Descartes adds: "And anyone
who considers all this will readily be convinced that there are no powers in stones and
plants that are so mysterious, and no marvels attributed to sympathetic and antipathetic
influences, that are so astonishing, that they cannot be explained in this way" (Principles
of Philosophy, part 4, article 187 ([14]8.1, 314-15; [13]1, 279. The French version
of the Abbe Picot adds the following marvels not mentioned in the original Latin
version and said to result from the motion of parts of the first element: "making the
wounds of a dead man bleed when the murderer draws near, or exciting the imagination
of those who are asleep, or even awake, and giving them ideas that warn them of what
is happening far away" ([14] 9.2, 309).
27 [30] bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 19. I have modernized the translation.
28 [30] bk. 8, ch. 14, p. 230. I have modernized the translation.
29 [14]11, 602. The passage in Aristotle that is the source of the remarks of both della
Porta and Descartes occurs in On Dreams II, 459 b 28-31: "If a woman looks into a
highly polished mirror during the menstrual period, the surface of the mirror becomes
clouded with a blood-red colour" ([1]357).
30 Cogitationesprivatae ([14]10, 214; [13]/, 2).
31 Letter to Huygens, March 1638 ([14]2, 48).
32 [191 110. I find no irony in the following remark which Descartes jotted down in his
notebook: "The sciences are at present masked, but if the masks were taken off, they
would be revealed in all their beauty. If we could see how the sciences are linked
together, we would find them no harder to retain in our minds than the series of
numbers" ([14]10,215; [13]1, 3).
97
([14]10, 242).
35 Daniel Lipstorp, Specimina philosophiae Cartesianae (Leiden, 1653), pp. 78-9,
mentioned in [15]156. Adrien Baillet, in his two volume Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes
published in 1691, does not identify Descartes' winter retreat in 1619, but has him
sojourn in Ulm from the end of June to the beginning of September ([4]1, 96). In the
abridged version that he published a year later, he states, without further explanation,
that Descartes took up his winter quarters in the Duchy of Neuburg in October 1619
([5]39; [5a] 33). Neuburg is not near Ulm but is situated on the Danube in Northern
Bavaria a few kilometers to the west of Ingoldstadt.
36 [4]1,81-8; in [14]10,181-8. This passage is translated in [21]33-40. Descartes'
original Latin manuscript bore the title "Olympica". It is not clear what "Olympica"
meant for Descartes, but the word belongs to the hermetic and Paracelsian tradition. In
a Latin book on the magic of the Ancients published under the name of Astrabe1 in
Basel in 1575, we find a list of nine kinds of magic. These include Olympian magic
along with Hesiodic, Pythagorean and Hermetic ([37]6, 457).
37 [14]10, 182; [21]35. In the Optics, Descartes states that light streams out of the eyes
of cats, and he implies that this is also possible in men who rise above the ordinary namely exceptional people like himself (Dioptrique, Discours 1 ([14]6,86. According
to Sextus Empiricus, "Tiberius could see in the dark" (Outline of Pyrrhonism, bk. 1,
chs. 14,84 ([35]1, 51.
38 See [8]147-8, and notes on 154; [40]. In Cicero's widely read De divinatione,
Quintus, Cicero's interlocutor remarks: "the Stoic view of divination smacked too
much of superstition. I was more impressed by the reasoning of the Peripatetics, of
Dicaearchus, of ancient times, and of Cratippus, who still flourished. According to their
opinion there is within the human soul some sort of power - 'oracular' I might call it by which the future is foreseen when the soul is inspired by a divine frenzy, or when it
is released by sleep and is free to move at will" ([9]483).
39 Letter to Elizabeth, November 1646 ([14]4, 529).
4() Letter to Mersenne, 10 May 1632 ([14]1, 250-1).
41 [14]252. Note how Descartes cannot help himself from dreaming ("je ne s~aurois
m'empescher d'y rever").
42 The most explicit passage occurs in the Second Set of Replies to the Meditations
([14] 7,140; [13]2,100).
43 Letter to Beeckman (1), 22 August 1634 ([14]1, 307-8). See [11]77-86; [33]112.
98
WILLIAM R. SHEA
44 Letter to Mersenne, 25 December 1639 ([14]3, 630). Descartes had made the same
point in an earlier letter to Mersenne, 11 October 1638 ([14)3, 399).
45 Letterto Mersenne, 4 November 1630 ([14]1,176).
46 Principles of Philosophy, part 2, arts. 46, 49,50 ([14]8.1, 68-9).
47 Principles of Philosophy, part 1, art. 21 ([14]8.1, 13).
48 Third Meditation ([14] 7,49; [13]2, 33).
49 In the case of motion, Descartes explicitly says "nulla habita ratione ejus qui forte
fuit paulo ante" (literally, "without considering the motion that was perhaps shortly
before") (Principles of Philosophy, part 2, art. 39 ([14]8.1, 64.
50 Le Monde ([14]10, 45; [13]1, 97).
51 [14] 10,46;[13] 1, 97. Underlining mine.
52 [14]10, 31; [13]1 omits this passage.
53 ]14]10,34; [13]1, 9l.
54 [14]10,49; [13]1 omits this passage.
REFERENCES
99
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
INTRODUCTION
101
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 101-132.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
103
continuous movement of the imagination, in such a way that it has an intuition of each
term at the same time that it passes on to the others, and this I would do until I had
learned to pass from the first relation to the last so quickly that there was almost no
role left for memory and I seemed to have the whole before me at the same time ([7[
10,521).
One way in which this passage has been taken is as a claim that
deduction has no real role to play in knowledge. Ian Hacking takes it in
such a way, assimilating Descartes' view to that of the mathematician G.
H. Hardy, who thought of proofs as "gas, rhetorical flourishes designed
to affect psychology ... devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils"
([19]).
Hacking supports his reading by appeal to the doctrine of eternal
truths. This doctrine, first elaborated in three letters to Mersenne of 15
April, 6 May and 27 May 1630, offers an account of God's grasp of
truths. The second letter presents the essentials of the doctrine:
As for the eternal truths, I say once more that they are true or possible only because
God knows them as true or possible. They are not known as true by God in any way
which would imply that they are true independently of Him. If men really understood
the sense of their words they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of
anything is prior to the knowledge which God has of it. In God willing and knowing are
a single thing in such a way that by the very fact of willing something He knows it and it
is only for this reason that such a thing is true.4
The central claim is elaborated upon in the third letter in these terms:
You ask what necessitated God to create these truths: and I reply that just as He was
free not to create the world, so He was no less free to make it untrue that all the lines
drawn from the centre of a circle to its circumference are equal. And it is certain that
these truths are no more necessarily attached to His essence than other creations are.
You ask what God did in order to produce them. I reply that from all eternity He willed
and understood them to be, and by that very fact He created them. In God, willing,
understanding, and creating are all the same thing without the one being prior to the
other even conceptually ([ 1O[ 15).
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
105
106
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
107
the dialectic of the Topics and the De sophisticis elenchis, and it retains
important traces of its dialectical origins. Kapp has given a particularly
insightful account of this discursive context of syllogistic reasoning
in his now classic article on syllogistic in Pauly-Wissowa's RealEncyclopiidie. 9 Kapp's argument is that the syllogism should be seen as
a real process in which two people participate. We have already noted
that the conclusions of Aristotelian syllogisms are not sought but given
prior to the construction of the syllogism. What are sought are the
premisses which will yield those conclusions in the requisite way. The
path to be followed in such a search is clearly the reverse of syllogistic
inference. If, following Kapp, we let A seek the premisses, then upon
finding them by this reverse path A is in a position to construct a
syllogism, and to present this syllogism to B who, in grasping that
syllogism, moves inferentially from premisses to conclusion. The process described in Aristotle's definition of the syllogism - namely, that
certain things (the premisses) being stated, something other than what is
stated (the conclusion) follows of necessity from the truth of those
things alone (An. pro AI, 24b18-22) - occurs as an intellectual
process in B. But the syllogism itself is not to be identified with B's
mental activity; A and not B is responsible for the syllogism which B
grasps. That syllogism is therefore in an important sense independent of
B, who can only accept or reject it. In other words, the context of
syllogistic is a thoroughly discursive one. This is true not only of the
paradigmatic case of the dialectical syllogism - where A and Bare
opponents, and where the point of the exercise is for A, by employing
dialectical skills, to get B to accept something contentious - but
equally so of the demonstrative syllogism, where A and B are teacher
and pupil respectively, the point of the exercise now being for A to
convey information to B in the most effective and economic way.
The fact that it is the topics that provide the discursive model for
syllogistic is interesting in the light of their subsequent history. The
topics underwent a number of changes after Aristotle, with Themistius
and Cicero providing their own systems of topics, and Boethius providing what was to be the definitive system of antiquity as far as the
Middle Ages was concerned. Yet while there is on the face of it a
fundamental gulf separating Aristotle and Boethius - their lists of
topics differ considerably and are organized in different ways, as well as
offering different procedures by which to find arguments by means of
these topics 10 - there is one crucial question on which they are in
108
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
109
110
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
the central role of sorting ideas into appropriate groups, but the topics
in turn are conceived in a completely pedagogic fashion. The structure
of knowledge is dictated in Ramus by the pedagogic classification of the
arts and sciences; as Ong puts it, "Ramus assumes that the primary
units which the mind 'contains' are the objects in the curriculum" ([35]
197), i.e., the curriculum subjects. In this respect, Ramism can be seen
as an extreme version of Aristotle's mature preoccupation with the
question of organizing and presenting already attained knowledge, an
attitude reinforced in both cases by a belief that learning is virtually
complete and remains only to be conveyed (see [16]) although there is
an added factor in Ramus: there is a Platonic element in his thinking,
more explicit in his earlier writings,12 whereby the ideas in the mind are
prior to the empirical world, and it is in this context that he advocates
clarity and distinctness as the criterion of the truth of ideas.
There is no role for demonstration, if by this we mean logical
inference, on this conception. The "principles of the arts", Ramus tells
us, "are definitions and divisions; outside of these, nothing": to "demonstrate" something is simply to define itP Even geometry, on Ramus'
view, consists not of demonstrations properly speaking but of definitions and rules. Because Ramus treats knowledge in terms of mapping
ideas accurately according to their definitions in the mind, his treatment
of reason effectively reduces it to the operation of memory, and the
problem of "method" and that of memory becomes identical. There had
been a very active medieval concern with memory, which continued to
flourish in the sixteenth century, according to which the topics were
construed in terms of places (loci, the Latin translation of the Greek
r:61lOt) in the mind where ideas were to be found by employing
mnemonic devices displaying the structure of those places (see [48]
passim). But this is both too arbitrary for Ramus - because the
mnemonic systems, which typically worked with an image of a city or a
building intimately known to the subject, so that items in that city or
building could be associated with items of knowledge, need in no way
reflect the pedagogic ordering of knowledge - and too complex for
him, and, taking his cue from Quintillian, he abolishes the loci and
images and replaces them with the division and definition of one's
subject matter. 14
In sum, there are three elements in the humanist reformulation of
logic or dialectic. The first is the extension of the scope of dialectic to
cover everything except actual delivery and grammar, thereby trans-
111
112
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
113
and unless we can construct that syllogism we will not have true
understanding. There can be little doubt that Aquinas wishes to adopt
an Aristotelian solution to the problem, but the constraints he is
operating under render this impossible. These constraints are, on the
one hand, the belief in the existence of pure spirits - God and the
angels - who know and understand, but who have no corporeal
faculties. On the other hand, the medical tradition from Galen onwards
had shown that damage to the brain and nervous system affected the
workings of reason, so it was known that our reasoning was in some
way connected with the functioning of the cerebral organs. One could
yield to one or the other of these constraints, either by maintaining that
knowledge and reason were purely functions of the cerebral organs, so
that knowledge for us and knowledge for God, who knows without
recourse to a corporeal organ, would be quite different; or one could
separate our intellect and our corporeal organs as much as possible,
holding, on neo-Platonist grounds for example, that true understanding
transcended anything we could achieve merely on the basis of the
exercise of corporeal faculties. The first of these is clearly heir to the
tradition of the via negativa, and the second to the tradition of via
affirmativa. Aquinas offers a third option, still within the tradition of
the latter, but which attempts to capture the idea that while we cannot
attain to knowledge without the use of our corporeal faculties the
successful exercise of those faculties yields something which is not
wholly different from the understanding available to pure spirit, and the
connection between the two is captured not in terms of identity but in
terms of analogy.
I want to return to these questions below. For the moment, it is
sufficient to note that they form a crucial key to the context within
which conceptions of inference are formulated in the Renaissance, and
in particular that the conception of reasoning as the exercise of a
corporeal faculty tied logic and inference closely to one's understanding
of psychological processes. This is even more marked in the representatives of the scholastic tradition in logic or dialectic in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries than it is in the Ramists. Unfortunately, unlike
Ramism, this late scholastic tradition has not been studied closely, but it
has been outlined by Wilhelm Risse, and I shall cull from Risse's largely
pioneering work a sketch of the principal features of this tradition and
some of the representative texts making it Up.l?
The most authoritative logic textbooks in the late scholastic tradition
114
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
115
116
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
The difference between intuition and deduction lies in the fact that
whereas the latter consists in grasping the relations between a number
of propositions, intuition (intuitus) consists in grasping one proposition
or in grasping a necessary connection between two propositions, and it
is equated with clear and distinct perceptionP In the limiting case, as
we have seen, deduction reduces to intuition: we run through the
deduction so quickly that we no longer have to rely on memory, with
the result that we "have the whole in intuition" before us at a single
time. So in the limiting case, knowledge consists not in intuition and
deduction as such, but simply in intuition.
Notice, however, that as well as consisting in a grasp of a necessary
117
118
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
In the general plan of the book the author takes a route very different from the one I
have followed. He examines what truth is; I have never thought of doing so, because it
seems a notion so transcendentally clear that nobody can be ignorant of it. There are
many ways of examining a balance before using it, but there is no way to learn what
truth is, if one does not know it by nature. What reason would we have for accepting
anything which could teach us the nature of truth if we did not know that it was true,
that is to say, if we did not know truth? Of course it is possible to tell the meaning of
the word to someone who did not know the language, and tell him that the word truth,
in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object and that when it is
attributed to things outside thought, it means only that they can be the objects of true
thoughts, whether in our minds or in God's. But no definition of logic can be given
which will help anyone to discover its nature. I think the same holds of many other
things which are very simply and naturally known, such as shape, size, movement,
place, time and so on: if you try to define these things you only obscure them and cause
confusion .... The author takes universal consent as the criterion of his truths; whereas
I have no criterion for mine except the light of nature ([7[ 2, 587; [10[ 65-6).
That is to say, while we can define truth, such a definition could not be
explanatory, for nothing can be clearer than truth: we can explain what
the word means in the sense of explaining that this is the word that we
use of a certain phenomenon, but not in the sense of giving an account
of that phenomenon in other terms which are better understood. The
reasoning behind this is that unless we had a prior understanding of
truth, we could not understand a definition of it, for we would have to
be able to grasp that the definition itself was true if we were to
understand it. Unless we had already grasped the difference between
truth and falsity, it would be wholly obscure what role definitions could
play. Of course, a great deal here depends on whether we are interested
in expressions extensionally equivalent to "... is true", or what truth
consists in, or what it is that distinguishes true from false sentences, or
what we recognize as tests for truth, or what the connection between
truth and other semantic notions is, and so on. Truth can be taken as
primitive in some respects, but not in others. But if one takes Descartes'
own example, the conformity of a thought with its object, then, whether
one construes that object as being an intentional object or whether, as
with the correspondence theory of truth, one takes it as a real object (or
state of affairs), then Descartes is surely right. To say that truth consists
in such a relation is to say that it is true that it consists in that relation.
We can gain no enlightenment about what truth consists in in this
fashion.
Nevertheless, to say that truth is primitive and simple is not to say
119
120
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
121
Aristotle is possible. In the Prior analytics, Aristotle classified syllogisms into three figures, and the following can serve as examples of the
general forms:
Barbara (Fig. 1)
A holds of all B
B holds of all r
Cesare (Fig. 2)
N holds of no E
N holds of all M
E holds of no M
A holds of all
Darapti (Fig. 3)
holds of all P
n holds of all P
holds of some
122
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
123
124
STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
125
they are for us. Leibniz's position can be understood as the exact
opposite of this, as an advocation of univocity on the basis that he takes
as given that eternal truths must be the same for us and for God, and
hence we must have some insight into how God knows them to be true:
and we do have such insight, in that we can say that God knows them
to be true because He knows their proofs. The second current of
thought that Descartes is reacting against is really the precursor of this
Leibnizian view. This second current is the nascent tradition of mathematical physics, and Kepler, Mersenne and Galileo all take the view
that our grasp of mathematical truths is no different from that of God.
It would take us too far from our topic to attempt to follow through
the theological, metaphysical and other considerations underlying all
these different accounts. The crucial point is to recognize that the
context in which Descartes' account is formulated is not mathematical
or logical but in the first instance theological: it is a response to a
clearly unstable theological conception of eternal truths, a conception
which pulls us in two opposing directions, complete univocity and
complete equivocality.26 However, there is an epistemological element
in this theological question, as we have seen, and the consequences, for
the question of cognition, of holding to the equivocality conception are
worth drawing out. On Descartes' account, our having a merely human
intellect does not mean that we have the same kind of knowledge as
God, only in a reduced degree - as Kepler, Mersenne and Galileo
were arguing, at least in the case of mathematics. Descartes had
touched upon questions raised here - two years before he first
elaborated the doctrine of eternal truths - in Rule 14 of the Regulae:
If in the magnet there be something the nature of which our understanding has never
grasped, we cannot hope ever to be able to know it through reasoning; for this we
would need some new sense or a divine intellect; what the human mind can achieve in
this area is achieved when we perceive with complete distinctness that combination of
already known essences or natures which produces those effects found in the magnet
([7J 10,439).
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
hand, and the belief that there are pure spirits, such as God and the
angels, who reason yet have no corporeal faculties, on the other. His
answer is to deny flatly that we can say anything about those creatures
who reason without recourse to corporeal faculties. In this he is surely
right. Another consequence of this conception is that it enables
Descartes to naturalize cognition and epistemology generally to a large
extent; not to the extent of advocating a materialist theory of mind, as
one commentator has argued ([4)), but to a very considerable extent
nonetheless (for details see [28), [34), [44), [14)). This is made possible
by dissociating our knowledge from God's, and Descartes can thereby
free himself of the constraint of trying, per impossible, to model human
knowledge on a wholly inappropriate divine prototype. This of course
leaves the problem of how creatures with our corporeally limited and
constrained cognitive faculties can have any confidence that those
corporeal faculties actually yield knowledge. But the cogito provides a
ready answer to this problem, for no matter how limited, constrained,
systematically misleading, error-prone etc., our corporeal faculties are,
they could not mislead us in this respect. The cogito has an inbuilt
guarantee: whatever my cognitive faculties, I cannot be mistaken about
my own existence, since it is just not possible for them to mislead me in
this respect. We simply do not need God's knowledge as a model, only
God's guarantee for our knowledge, and this is not such a high price to
pay when we realize that it takes us away from a model for knowledge
which is not only inappropriate but incoherent. 27
This approach is taken further in Leibniz. His univocal model of
reasoning should not be seen as something which simply contradicts
Descartes' equivocal model; rather, it builds upon it and goes beyond it
in certain crucial respects. In attempting to understand proof in terms
of intuition, so that we can move directly from premisses to conclusion
in the one step, Descartes is raising an issue which Leibniz will deal
with much more successfully in his account of algebra as a system in
which "we cannot err even if we wish ... the truth can be grasped as if
pictured on paper with the aid of a machine".28 What Leibniz is doing
here is getting rid of the need to think through all the steps in a proof
by making one's traversal of these steps not instantaneous, as was
Descartes' solution, but mechanical, something which requires no
thought yet compells intellectual assent. Moreover, Leibniz, apparently
taking it as given that we cannot say anything about cognitive processes
different from ours, proceeds to ascribe to God a reasoning process
127
The period between the demise of the medieval logical tradition in the
early sixteenth century and the development of modern logic in the
work of Boole and especially Frege is generally seen, as I noted earlier,
as an interregnum in the development of logic. But the gulf that
separates the two is conceptual as well as chronological. Something has
happened in the intervening period, and if we are to grasp the main
features of the transition from ancient and medieval logic to modern
logic, then it is clearly crucial that we understand exactly what it was
that occurred in the intervening period: a period which, although it may
be an interregnum in terms of technical results, plays a crucial transitional role in terms of the development of conceptions of inference. My
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
argument has been that the central transition was from a discursive to a
cognitive conception of inference, and that Descartes played a critical
role in this transition by providing an account of how inference can
both be constitutive of knowledge and yet a cognitive process in which
our corporeal faculties engage. It is by rejecting the notion that
inference is an aid to knowledge that he is able to do this, and this
rejection depends upon his being able to treat our cognitive faculties as
being productive of knowledge in their own right, which in turn is only
possible if we do not model them on God's faculties. This last point is
secured via the doctrine of eternal truths, which thereby plays a
fundamental role in Descartes' conception of inference.
I am not suggesting, of course, that Descartes' conception is essentially the modern one, for it is not: although, like Hacking, I do believe
that Leibniz's conception has some claim to be seen in this way. What I
have tried to establish is that without the Cartesian moves that I have
outlined above, we would not have the modern conception that we do
have. It must not be forgotten, however, that this modern conception is
in many respects as problematic and unstable as any of its predecessors.
The fundamental problem of how deductive inference can be both
necessary and informative is one that we have not yet solved, for we
have not yet been able to give a fully integrated account of both the
logical and cognitive features of inference (see [11), for example).
Indeed, in the face of this and related problems, some philosophers
have advocated models of inference which are reminiscent of the older
pre-Fregean conceptions: Hintikka's game-theoretical semantics (see
[43)) bears a striking resemblance to the discursive conception, for
example, whereas Ellis' "rational belief systems" approach ([12)) is in
many respects a continuation of the psychologistic tradition. Nevertheless, even the former programme is designed to capture logical and
cognitive aspects of inference. This is constitutive of modern approaches
to conceiving of inference, and it is something that we owe to
Descartes.
NOTES
I I am grateful to Charles Larmore, Lloyd Reinhardt, and John Yolton for helpful
comments on a draft of this essay.
2 Much of this groundwork has been laid by Gerd Buchdahl. See, for example, II], 12],
13]
129
3 See, for example, 1271. An exception to the neglect of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury logic is Howell's work (122], 123]), although this is unfortunately largely
descriptive.
4 Translated in 110]13-14. In this, as in the next quotation, words in italics designate
Latin phrases.
5 On the question of dating see 147].
6 See 17]10, 521. This is a passage that I shall look at below. On the dating of the
Search after Truth see 18] 2, 1101-104.
7 Charles Larmore has a good account of some of the issues involved here (129]). He
construes Descartes' psychologism as comprising a theory of assent, according to which
we are compelled to hold as true a proposition we recognize as certain, and then he
shows how this is connected to the doctrine of eternal truths via the argument that what
we recognize as certain may nevertheless be false. This presupposes that God's basis for
assent and ours must be different, an issue that I shall focus on below.
M For further discussion ofthe issues raised in this paragraph see my 116].
9 Now translated as 125].
10 See 145]159-261 on the changes in the topics in antiquity and the early middle
ages. On the development of the use of the topics in rhetoric in this period, see 16].
lIOn the "Systematics" see 122] and 140].
12 The first (1543) version of the Dialecticae institutiones has explicitly Platonist
elements, which are discarded from the second (1546) edition onwards. On the
development of Ramus' doctrines see 135] chs. 8-12.
13 Arist. animo (1543), fols. 58, 60. Cited in 1351188.
14 See 142] 135f, especially 140; also [48] ch. 10. Division and definition are versions
of the Platonic procedures of tJta{ewu; and Oetap6~.
15 A good historical survey of these questions is provided in 121]. For more detail on
antiquity, cf. 138].
16 137] remains the standard account of this question.
17 See 140] and Risse's 139]. My summary here is based largely on pages 284-9 of the
latter. On the texts, Risse has provided an indispensible bibliography in his 141].
1M See Etienne Gilson's discussion of the authors whom Descartes would have studied
at La Fleche in 117] 5-33.
19 On this whole question see 122] ch. 6.
20 The procedure is, however, at least partially modelled on what Descartes takes to be
the mathematical procedure of analysis. See the first part of my [14].
21 For details see 151 63-74,207-10.
22 See 15] 58-63 for full references and an invaluable discussion of intuitus.
23 17]10, 521. See also Descartes to Mersenne, 27 February 1637 (110]30), where
Descartes insists that the aim of the Discourse on Method is not to teach method but to
describe it.
24 See [36] passim. I have ignored many details, such as the fact that some noncategorical first-figure syllogisms are not "perfect", because these have no bearing on
our current concerns.
25 133]. The two currents are discussed on pages 27-159 and 161-227 respectively.
26 Marion ([33]455-6), perhaps inspired by Gilson in this respect, argues that the
original Thomist solution, which depends on the doctrine of analogy, is the path that
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
Descartes should have taken. I find this baffling since so much of his account shows
how the shift from an exemplarist to a representational context robs analogy of its
original value and motivation. To keep analogy we would have to return to exemplarism, and it is difficult to imagine what grounds anyone could have for suggesting
that this would be a move in the right direction.
27 I have argued elsewhere ([15]) that we can make no sense of the idea of knowing
truths in virtue of having made or created them.
28 Leibniz to Oldenburg, 28 December 1675 ([31J 166).
29 There are illuminating discussions of this issue throughout Gerd Buchdahl's writings.
See also [30J.
REFERENCES
1. Buchdahl, Gerd, 'Descartes's anticipation of a "logic of discovery"', in Scientific
Change, ed. A. C. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963).
2. Buchdahl, Gerd, 'The relevance of Descartes's philosophy for the modern philosophy of science', British Journal/or the History o/Science I (1963),227-49.
3. Buchdahl, Gerd, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The Classical Origins,
Descartes to Kant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
4. Caton, Hiram, The Origin of Subjectivity. An Essay on Descartes (New Haven:
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6. Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R.
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(Paris: Vrin, 1964-76).
8. Descartes, Rene, Descartes: Oeuvres philosophiques, 3 vols, tr. F. Alquie (Paris:
Garnier, 1963-73).
9. Descartes, Rene, Descartes' Conversation with Burman, ed. John Cottingham
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
10. Descartes, Rene, Descartes: Philosophical Letters, tr. Anthony Kenny (Oxford:
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11. Dummett, Michael, 'The justification of deduction', Truth and Other Enigmas
(London: Duckworth, 1978).
12. Ellis, Brian, Rational Belief Systems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).
13. Frege, G., The Foundations of Arithmetic, tf. 1. L. Austin (2nd ed., Oxford:
Blackwell, 1959).
14. Gaukroger, Stephen, 'Descartes' project for a mathematical physics', in Descartes:
Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex: Harvester
Press, 1980),97-140.
15. Gaukroger, Stephen, 'Vico and the maker's knowledge principle', History of
Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1986), 29-44.
16. Gaukroger, Stephen, 'Syllogistic, circular reasoning and the logic of discovery',
forthcoming.
17. Gilson, Etienne, La liberte chez Descartes et la theologie (Paris: Alcan, 1913).
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18. Hacking, Ian, 'What is logic?', The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 285-319.
19. Hacking, Ian, 'Proof and eternal truths: Descartes and Leibniz', in Descartes:
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Press, 1980), 169-80.
20. Hacking, Ian, 'A Leibnizian theory of truth', in Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive
Essays, ed. Michael Hooker (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1982), 18595.
21. Harvey, E. Ruth, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute, 1975).
22. Howell, Wilbur Samuel, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton:
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23. Howell, Wilbur Samuel, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1971).
24. Jardine, Lisa, 'Lorenzo Valla: Academic scepticism in the new humanist dialectic',
in The Sceptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1983),253-86.
25. Kapp, E., 'Syllogistic', in Articles on Aristotle: Volume 1. Science, eds. Jonathan
Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1975),
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Third Series, ed. H. D. Lewis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956).
27. Kneale, William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
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6-22.
29. Larmore, Charles, 'Descartes' psychologistic theory of assent', History of Philosophy Quarterly 1 (1984), 61-74.
30. Laudan, Larry, Science and Hypothesis: Historical Essays on Scientific Methodology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981).
31. Leibniz, G. W., Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. E. Loemker (2nd ed.,
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32. Lukasiewicz, J., Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957).
33. Marion, Jean-Luc, Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes: Analogie, creation des
verites eternelles et fondement (Paris: Presses Univs. de France, 1981).
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35. Ong, Walter J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of
Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
36. Patzig, Gunther, Aristotle's Theory of the Syllogism: A Logico-Philological Study of
Book A of the Prior Analytics, tr. Jonathan Barnes (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1968).
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and Institute d'Etudes Medievales d'Ottowa, 1936).
38. Pigeaud, Jackie, La Maladie de {'lime: Etude sur la relation de {'lime et du corps
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STEPHEN W. GAUKROGER
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Angabe ihre Fundarte. Band 1: 1472-1800, (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1965).
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48. Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Abstract. The terms "science" and "philosophy" have undergone radical changes in
meaning since the seventeenth century; it is therefore more profitable to consider the
relation between metaphysics and other disciplines. This essay discusses the various
ways in which Leibniz uses the term "metaphysics", and concludes that he had two
radically distinct conceptions: the one as the science of general principles and concepts,
the other as the science of immaterial reality. On both conceptions physics was
grounded in metaphysics, but in very different ways: in the former case through the
dependence of specific principles and concepts on more general ones; in the latter case
through the dependence of matter on the immaterial realm of God and monads. Only
through Leibniz's mystical belief in a structural parallel between the hierarchy of
concepts, and the universe as generated out being and nothingness, do the two
conceptions fuse together into a unitary science of metaphysics.
1. INTRODUCTION
133
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 133-163.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
134
135
More rarely we find the corresponding notion of metaphysical possibility. As Leibniz explains in a note of 1698:
Metaphysical possibility, apart from presupposing something physical, is a pure figment,
since it can exist only in concept, and not in actuality or really ([ 14] 392).4
136
ordinary language. And above all I recoil from scholastic distinctions, which are
calculated to confuse the understanding of things; whereas one good definition removes
the empty subtlety of all their distinctions, just as bringing a light to bear dispels
darkness ([12J 1.9, 485).
All the same, Leibniz does sometimes seem to use the term "metaphysical" in a purely pejorative sense. For instance, in his disputation
On the Principle of Individuation he writes:
So it is obvious that to be numbered among the greatest chiefs of the scholastic sects is
the man who, when it came to deciding the dispute about the principle of individuation,
had recourse to materia signata, drawn from no other source than the deficiencies of
pagan metaphysics ([12J 6.1, 7).
137
As will become clear later, he meant by this that they belonged to the
underlying realm of immaterial reality, rather than to the material realm
of appearance; but he was evidently unhappy about this mode of
expression. Later, in a letter to des Bosses of 21 July 1707, he implies
that it was an aberration. He criticises Father Perez for the obscurity of
his use of the expression "metaphysical indivisibles", but then admits:
I could use this expression of his for denoting my monads, which I remember once
calling metaphysical atoms, and also substantial atoms ([II] 2,336).
Leibniz's reluctance to describe things he believed in as "metaphysical" has some bearing on the vexed question of whether or not
he was serious about the vinculum substantia Ie, which he proposed in
his correspondence with des Bosses. For some commentators it is an
essential part of his system, allowing him to maintain the reality of
corporeal substances despite his apparent phenomenalism. For others it
138
139
140
and he accepted that, for the time being at least, metaphysics could
have only a provisional or hypothetical status, justified by its results. 12
To return to the passage from Stahl, we can extract a number of
distinct themes about the nature of metaphysics. Metaphysics is:
(i) superior to other sciences;
(ii) contemplative (abstracted from sensible matter);
(iii) universal;
(iv) first philosophy;
(v) wisdom;
(vi) theology;
(vii) about being in general.
I shall now consider how far these themes are taken up in Leibniz's
later pronouncements.
3.1. Metaphysics as Superior to Other Sciences
141
142
143
144
The one theme which Leibniz does not seem to take up from Stahl's
definition is the idea of metaphysics as wisdom. There is a very early
writing ([12] 6.2, 119) in which he refers to the "politico-metaphysician"
as a wise man; but presumably his idea is that metaphysics needs to be
combined with political understanding to make a man wise. In another
early work, the De collegiis of 1665, he is more etymologically correct
145
146
Here he seems to be saying that indulgence in "metaphysical speculation" is liable to lead to trespassing on theological territory, and that his
universal characteristic rather than his metaphysics can be of service to
the theologians. More typical is the following passage from an undated
paper, where he claims that many issues in natural theology can be
settled by means of his metaphysical system:
But many important and certain things can be said about the nature of conatus and of
the principle of that which acts, or of substantial form as the scholastics called it. From
this a great light is thrown even on natural theology, and the darkness spread over the
mysteries of faith by the objections of philosophers is dispelled ([II] 7,326-7).
As examples, he cites immortality, the existence of God, the embodiedness of ange~s, and transubstantiation.
It is abundantly clear that Leibniz regarded himself as a philosopher
and metaphysician, and not as a theologian. But this may say more
about his role in society than about any perception of limits to his
competence on his own part. He was not in holy orders, and he did not
occupy a chair of theology at a university. Apart from that, he was as
147
In other words, the "choice of the order of the universe" seems here to
be included within the scope of reason, rather than to be above it. In
general, Leibniz leaves very little as exclusive to faith; and in his On the
True Mystical Theology of about 1696,17 he goes as far as to say:
Faith without knowledge comes not of the spirit of God but of the dead letter of the
empty echo. Faith without light awakens no love but only fear or hope and is not living
([lSJ 369).
148
In his early days, Leibniz concurred quite happily with the definition of
metaphysics as the science of being in general. Thus in his 1664 thesis
Specimen quaestionum philosophicarum, he writes:
Now at last it is time to move to metaphysics, where the first question will be one which
touches the very essence of being ([ 1 2] 6.1, 87).
In his later writings, Leibniz became cautious about defining metaphysics as the science of being, presumably because this definition was
too closely associated with the sterile verbal distinctions of scholastic
metaphysics. As he wrote in the Nouveaux essais:
149
It is true that the compendia of metaphysics, and other such works of the same stamp
which are generally read, teach of nothing but words. To say, for example, that
metaphysics is the science of Being in general, which explains its principles and the
modes which emanate from it; that the principles of Being are Essence and Existence;
and that its modes are either primitive (i.e., the one, the true, the good), or derivative
(i.e, the same and the different, the simple and the composed, etc.); and in talking of
each of these terms, to give only vague notions, and verbal distinctions - this is
certainly to abuse the name of science ([12J 6.6,430-1).
Having said this, he goes on to praise Suarez, and then himself, for
dealing with metaphysical issues of general importance. But he says
nothing to detract from his criticism of the vacuity of defining metaphysics as the science of being in general.
Notwithstanding Leibniz's later criticism of this definition of metaphysics, it has an important bearing on the distinction between metaphysics and logic, and hence on the question of whether the foundations of Leibniz's philosophy are metaphysical or logical. In his early
writings, at least, Leibniz made a sharp distinction between these two
most general of sciences, the former of which is concerned with Being,
that latter with predication. Thus in a passage quoted above from the
Specimen quaestionum philosophicarum, he continues:
"Can two contradictories both be false, or whether there is a middle between being and
not-being", not in respect of participation, which is the case when they are both true,
but of negation. But in case anyone might think that this is merely a logical question,
having nothing to do with metaphysics, note should be taken of what Henr. Gebhard
says in his Princ. jur. conc. 12. n. 8. pag. 146, that those most common attributes of
Being are often common to metaphysics and logic, but to the former in the mode of
being, and to the latter in the mode of predication ([12J 6.1,87).19
150
Russell [26], Couturat [6], and others have maintained that Leibniz's
metaphysics was derived from his logic. I do not wish here to discuss
the substance of the claim; 20 but it is relevant to consider how far the
distinction has any meaning for Leibniz. He certainly frequently
appealed to basic principles of reason, such as those of contradiction,
sufficient reason, the best, and the identity of indiscernibles. He also
claimed that they were essential for ending disputes in metaphysics for example in his Sciemia media of 1677 ([10]25), the Principles of
Nature and of Grace of 1714 ([11]6, 603), and the correspondence
with Clarke of 1715-16 ([11]7, 363). But as far as I am aware, he
never stated whether the principles themselves were logical or metaphysical. Typical is his First Truths of the early 1680s ([10]518-23),
where he starts with principles that we should describe as logical, such
as the principle of contradiction; but then brings in quite specific
metaphysical theorems, such as that there is no vacuum. In fact Leibniz
does not seem to have been interested in drawing the line between logic
and metaphysics, since they are both equally the province of reason.
4. LISTS OF METAPHYSICAL TOPICS
151
152
I recently composed ... a little discourse on metaphysics, on which I would like to have
Mr. Arnauld's opinion. For I think I have treated the question of grace, the cooperation of God with his creatures, the nature of miracles, the cause of sin and the
origin of evil, the immortality of the soul, ideas, etc., in a way which seems to give new
openings calculated to clarify very great difficulties ([ 11 J 2, 11).
And in a letter to Johann Bernoulli of late 1698, he says: "I now come
to the metaphysical part of your latest letter" ([13] 3, 541), and then
discusses infinite divisibility, primary and secondary matter, incomplete
being, aggregates of substances, monads, etc. Again, in the Nouveaux
essais, he mentions with approval some parts of Suarez's metaphysics:
... on the continuum, on the infinite, on contingency, on the reality of abstract things,
on the principle of individuation, on the origin and the vacuum of forms, on the soul,
and on its faculties, on the cooperation of God with his creatures, etc. ([ 12J 6.6, 431).
153
metaphysics was centred on a distinction between the realm of appearance and underlying reality; and his only reservation could be that his
own system was not speculative, but grounded in reason, or at least in
reasonable hypotheses.
Leibniz himself distinguished between two types of philosophy: the
esoteric or "acroamatic", and the exoteric. 21 He characterized his own
philosophy as esoteric, along with that of his mentor Plato, as contrasted with the exoteric nature of that of Aristotle, Locke, and others.22
Thus, in his Principium quoddam generale of 1687, he writes:
The more one is versed in esoteric [interiore] philosophy, the more readily one will
recognize this ([13] 6, 134).
our systems are very different. His has more relation to Aristotle and mine to Plato,
even though we both distance ourselves on many points from the teachings of these two
ancient philosophers. He is more popular, and I am sometimes forced to be rather
more acroamatic and more abstract ([12]6.6, 47-8).
He explains further:
Relevant here is the ancient distinction between two ways of writing: the exoteric, that is
to say popular, and the acroamatic, which is for those who are concerned to discover
the truth. And if someone wants to write as a mathematician in metaphysics or in
ethics, there is nothing preventing them from doing so with rigour; some people have
professed to do this, and have promised us mathematical demonstrations outside
mathematics, but rarely with any success ([12] 6.6, 260-1).
154
ceeding from its spiritual nature; and also that an arcane force is inwardly present to us,
which the soul can take advantage of, kindled by love and charity, and elevated by
attentive meditation ([lOJ 627).
155
concepts which transcend the borders between the special sciences, and
which it is the task of metaphysics to analyse. However, these passages
have to be understood in the light of Leibniz's project for a "universal
characteristic". He believed that ultimately it must be possible to define
all concepts in terms of a relatively small set of highly general, simple
concepts, analogous to Aristotle's categories. Establishing such a
hierarchy is one of the tasks of metaphysics. He further believed that
the task would be made easier if he could devise a notation which
would make manifest the simple concepts out of which each complex
concept was constructed, as is already the case to a limited extent with
the compound words of natural languages. To this end, he experimented with a number of schemes involving arithmetical notations.
Quite independently of this, Leibniz discovered binary arithmetic,
which he believed to constitute a more fundamental notation for
arithmetic than the decadic system. Putting the two considerations
together, we obtain the result that it ought to be possible to designate
all concepts by binary numbers. This would mean that the ultimate
simple concepts were those denoted by the symbols 1 and O. As far as
is known, Leibniz did not experiment with using binary notation for his
universal characteristic. He did, however, speculate that 1 and 0 might
correspond to the ultimately simple concepts of being and nothingness,
and that just as all numbers, and hence all concepts, can be generated
out of 1 and 0, so the real world is generated out of being and
nothingness. Thus in his De organa sive arte magna cogitandi, probably
of the early 1670s, he writes:
Perhaps only one thing is conceived independently, namely God himself - and also
nothing, or absence of being. This can be made clear by a superb analogy.... [He then
outlines the binary system, and continues:J I shall not here go into the immense
usefulness of this system; it would be enough to note how wonderfully all numbers are
thus expressed by means of Unity and Nothing. But although there is no hope in this
life of people being able to arrive at the secret ordering of things which would make it
evident how everything arises from pure being and nothingness, yet it is enough for the
analysis of ideas to be continued as far as is necessary for the demonstration of truths
([lOJ 430-1).
156
One thing that needs to b' made clear from the start is that Leibniz did
not avail himself of the distinction between the a priori and the
experimental in order to demarcate metaphysics from physics. He was
certainly as aware as anyone of the difference between truths of reason
and truths of fact - it lay at the very heart of his logic. But it is equally
certain that he saw the distinction as applying within physics, rather
than between physics and other sciences such as mathematics, logic,
and metaphysics. Indeed, as we have already seen, he even allowed a
role for experience in metaphysics. He is notoriously reticent as to the
precise relationship between experiential or experimental evidence and
a priori structures in physics. In practice, virtually all of Leibniz's own
work on physics was utterly a priori, whether in the form of mathematical reasoning and conceptual analysis, or in the form of speculative
theorizing (as in his Hypothesis physica nova, for example). He did
conduct some experiments in the technological sphere, but only in the
sense of making different attempts to get machines or chemical processes to work. As far as I am aware, he never conducted a controlled
experiment in order to test a scientific theory. At best he conducted
thought-experiments, for example to establish the difference between
momentum and kinetic energy; 23 but he was so confident of his
predictions that he never bothered to carry out the experiments in
practice.
Leibniz always maintained a sharp distinction between theories or
hypotheses, and phenomena: the former being the product of reason,
the latter of sense experience. But the role of the phenomenon seems to
be confined to that of providing an explicandum, to be accounted for
by a theory. Leibniz hardly concerned himself with the modern problem of the consistency between theory and phenomena. 24 He took it for
granted that any number of hypotheses might be consistent with the
phenomena, so that the most pressing problem was that of choosing
between theories on grounds other than their conformity with the facts.
Thus in his Phoranomus of after 1696, he writes:
157
The hypothesis to be chosen is the one which is more intelligible; the truth of a
hypothesis consists in nothing other than its intelligibility ([10] 591).
158
159
nothing but components moving each other, and never anything which would explain a
perception ([II] 6,609).
160
It is this mystery that lies at the heart of his esoteric or "real" metaphysics. As he puts it in his Principium quoddam generate of 1687:
From this it is now obvious (rather more so than in the normal run of explanations)
how true physics is to be derived from its source in the divine perfections. For God is
the ultimate reason of things, and knowledge of God is no less the principle of the
sciences than his essence and will are the principles of things. The more one is versed in
esoteric philosophy, the more readily one will recognize this ([13]6,134).
NOTES
I
I discuss the history of the distinction between science and philosophy in [22].
In fact he deleted the first occurrence of the word "metaphysical" in the MS. This
161
supports the interpretation that the word is being used in the same sense in each
occurrence.
3 The misspelling "Methaphysico" is not in the MS.
4 Cf. [14) 396. In [14) 315, Leibniz seems to be using the expression metaphysice
loquendo in this sense. He writes: "For metaphysically speaking it would be possible for
there to be infinitely many worlds or universes in infinite time and space ...".
Presumably he means that it is a possibility which can be conceived, even though it is
not a hypothesis that can be maintained in practice.
5 Similarly, in [14) 550, he refers to "good ... in the metaphysical sense".
6 For example in an undated letter to de VoIder (11 J 2, 192), he implicitly equates
per/ectior with having plus realitatis.
7 For example Gabriel Wagner, under the pseudonym "ReaIis of Vienna" ([12) 1. 7,
676), Tentzel ([12)1.9, 361, 485), Nizolius ([12)6.2, 408, 429), and Locke ([12)6.6,
430-2).
8 For example to Locke ([12) 6.6,430-2).
9 However, there may be no pejorative implication here he may simply mean
"metaphysically possible" in the sense mentioned above.
10 Boehm ([1] passim), Rescher ([25]114-16), and Mates ([24]198) take the
vinculum substantiale seriously. Others such as Latta ([9]118-20), Russell ([26) 152),
and Broad ([2) 124-9) dismiss it as an optional extra. For a recent detailed treatment
of the whole topic, cf. [7) passim.
II [27]3. The relevant part of the text is reproduced in [12]6.1, 21-2.
12 Brown ([3) passim) argues that Leibniz abandoned the deductivist approach in
favour of a hypothetico-deductivist one. See note 24, below.
IJ Significantly, he originally wrote "theology" instead of "metaphysics". See section
3.6, below.
14 He was, however, incorrect in saying that De corpore had two parts: prima
philosophia and physica. In fact it has four parts, of which these are Parts II and IV
respectively. Part I is logica, and Part III is de rationibus motuum, et magnitudinum.
15 See also his remark in the De originatione radicali of 1697 ([11) 7, 304): "From this
it is now wonderfully comprehensible how in the very beginning of things there was
brought to playa certain divine mathesis, or metaphysical mechanism".
16 Grua gives the date "1688?"; but the strongly Hobbesian sentiments suggest an
earlier date.
17 Forthe dating of this, see [19)132, n. 31.
18 One exception is his letter to Henriette Charlotte von Pollnitz of 14 June 1700
([16)10,62-70), which contains three Biblical quotations.
19 In the printed text these are transposed. I do not know whether the slip is Leibniz's
or the editor's.
20 I discuss this in [18).
21 Wohrmann [28) argues that the esoteric approach involves demonstrating everything
rigorously, whereas the exoteric approach is looser and more dogmatic. He rests his
case largely on a passage from the Preface to Nizolius of 1670, where Leibniz does
indeed write as follows: "There is, however, a great difference between two ways of
philosophizing. One is, so to speak, acroamatic, the other exoteric. The acroamatic way
is that in which everything is demonstrated; the exoteric in which certain things are said
without demonstration, though they are confirmed by certain similes and probable
162
163
22. MacDonald Ross, G., 'Science and Philosophy', in Companion to the History of
Modern Science, eds. G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, M. J. S. Hodge, and R. C.
Olby (Beckenham: Croom Helm, forthcoming).
23. MacDonald Ross, G., 'Leibniz's exposition of his system to Queen Sophie
Charlotte and other ladies', Studia Leibnitiana, SonderheJt, forthcoming.
24. Mates, B., The Philosophy of Leibniz (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1986).
25. Rescher, N., Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell,
1979).
26. Russell, B., A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1900).
27. Stahl, D., Compendium metaphysicae (Jena, 1655).
28. Wohrmann, K.-R., 'Die Unterscheidung von Exoterik und Esoterik bei Leibniz',
Studia Leibnitiana, Supplementa 21 (1980),72-82.
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
Abstract. Towards the end of his life Leibniz wrote that "the transition from preestablished harmony to occasional causes doesn't seem very difficult". Nevertheless he
was at pains to answer suggestions that his pre-established harmony is not essentially
different from occasionalism. Two differences he points to are that occasionalism
involves miracles, and that - like Cartesian interactionism - it involves physical
impossibilities and causal correlations between body and mind. Just as the second
difference marks him and Spinoza off from both Malebranche and Descartes, so the
first marks him off from both Spinoza and Malebranche.
1. INTRODUCTION
On more than one occasion it was suggested to Leibniz that his system
of pre-established harmony between body and mind was really not any
improvement over, or essentially different from, the occasionalism of
Cartesians such as Malebranche. It seemed to Arnauld in 1687 that
Leibniz was "saying the same thing in other words" as the occasionalists; 1 it seemed to Foucher in 1695 that Leibniz's system was
"scarcely more advantageous than that of the Cartesians"; 2 and it
seemed to Jaquelot in 1704 that, apart from its being unable to cope
with free will, it was not significantly different from occasionalism. 3
Leibniz's own way of talking perhaps encouraged such judgements.
Towards the end of his life he wrote to Raymond de Montmort that his
views were not very far distant from Malebranche's. "The transition
from occasional Causes to pre-established Harmony", he said, "doesn't
seem very difficult".4 That Leibniz does talk in this way has something
to do with his having arrived at the pre-established harmony via
Malebranche's occasionalism. He saw his views, not as denials of
Malebranche's, but as advances from, or developments of them.
But, all of this notwithstanding, the differences between his views
and Malebranche's were important to Leibniz. He was at pains to
answer suggestions that his pre-established harmony is not essentially
different from occasionalism. And, when it suited his purposes, he
could be very critical of occasionalism. This essay explores "the
165
R. S. Woo/house (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 165-183.
1988 by K/uwer Academic Publishers.
166
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
Leibniz made similar comments just a few years later, in 1686, in the
Discourse on Metaphysics. The greater detail of these comments begins
to show what he had in mind. It was ~vlnething which was to develop,
in the course of time, into one of his major objections to occasionalism,
an objection which turns on his view of substances as active and as
167
168
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
169
170
ROGERS.WOOLHOUSE
171
172
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
3. THE OBJECTION FROM PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY
173
174
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
175
176
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
177
178
ROGER S. WOOLHOUSE
One thing that has come out in the previous section is a reply to the
first part of Russell's comment about the over-boldness of Leibniz's
claim that had Descartes known of the law of conservation of momentum he would have been led to the doctrine of pre-established
harmony. It has come out that the objection Leibniz had at this point to
Descartes is one that applies, and was applied by Leibniz, to occasionalism too. What then of the second part of Russell's comment that
Spinoza's view of the union between mind and body, was surely another
possible alternative? There is something right, something almost too
right about this.
It is because of certain of its differences from them that Leibniz's
doctrine of pre-established harmony escapes the objection from physical impossibility which he has to occasionalism and interactionism.
Those theories hold, first, that bodily (or, mental) events sometimes
have bodily (or, mental) causes and sometimes mental (or, bodily)
179
causes; and, second, that the correlations between body and mind are
causal. According to the doctrine of pre-established harmony, however,
bodily (or, mental) events 'always have bodily (or, mental) causes;
second, for every bodily (or, mental) event there is a correlated mental
(or, bodily) event; and, third, the correlation between body and mind is
non-causal. Now precisely these three, associated, features of preestablished harmony are also features of Spinoza's view of the union
between body and mind; and in this sense Russell is almost too right
that Spinoza's view would have provided a possibility for Descartes
additional to Leibniz's. According to Spinoza, bodily (or, mental)
events always have bodily (or, mental) causes, never mental (or, bodily)
ones: "The modes of each attribute [thought, or extension] have God for
their cause only insofar as he is considered under the attribute of which
they are modes, and not insofar as he is considered under any other
attribute" ([26] pt. 2, prop. 6); or, more explicitly, "Body cannot
determine the Mind to thinking, and the Mind cannot determine the
Body to motion, to rest or to anything else" ([26] pt. 3, prop. 2; also pt.
5, pref.). Also according to Spinoza, every bodily (or, mental) event has
a corresponding correlated mental (or, bodily) event: "whether we
conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute
of Thought ... we shall find one and the same order" ([26] pt. 2, prop.
7 schol.). Finally, according to Spinoza, the correlation between mind
and body is non-causal. The union of mind and body is in representational terms of idea and object: "the Body is the object of the Mind"
([26] pt. 2, prop. 21 ).
But there is also something wrong, at least from Leibniz's point of
view, with the second part of Russell's comment. Consideration of this
brings us back to the second section of this paper and to Leibniz's
complaint against occasionalism that it involves miracles. At the bottom
of this objection was a conception of the created world as composed of
active substances which contain in their own natures the principle of
their changes. Now this conception is decidedly not something which
Leibniz and Spinoza share. Indeed, in his complaints about this aspect
of occasionalism, Leibniz more than once included Spinoza in its scope.
"The doctrine of occasional causes", he said in his 1698 article "On
nature itself", "is fraught with dangerous consequences .... So far is
this doctrine from increasing the glory of God by removing the idol of
nature ... it seems rather, like Spinoza, to make out of God the nature
of the world itself, by causing created things to disappear into mere
180
ROGERS.WOOLHOUSE
modifications of the one divine substance, since that which does not
act, which lacks active force, and which is despoiled of all distinctiveness and even of all reason 'and ground for subsistence can in no way
be a substance" ([20] 4, 515: (14] 506-7). This connection between
occasionalism and Spinoza is made elsewhere in the same paper. In the
course of arguing (as we saw in section 2) that God's commands for the
world must leave a permanent impression in the natures of created
things, he said that if this were not so there would be no created
substances: "everything would reduce to certain evanescent and flowing
modifications or phantasms, so to speak, of the one permanent divine
substance. And, what reduces to the same thing, God would be the
nature and substance of all things - a doctrine of most evil repute,
which a writer who was subtle indeed but irreligious, in recent years
imposed upon the world" ([20] 4, 508-9: [14] 502). Then, again, four
years later, in his 1702 reply to Bayle, Leibniz argued that unless one
rejects occasionalism and supposes that things do as they do because of
their own natures, one is committed to supposing that "there would be
no substances beyond his [God's] own - a view which would lead us
back into all the absurdities of Spinoza's God .... Spinoza's error
comes entirely from his having pushed too far the consequences of the
[occasionalist] doctrine which denies force and action to creatures"
([20]4,568: (14]583).
NOTES
Arnauld to Leibniz, 4 March 1687 (12012, 84: 1171105).
Foucher to Leibniz, Journal des savants, September 1695 (12011, 425: tr. R. Niall D.
Martin in 141 98).
.' Jaquelot to Leibniz, 2 February 1704 (1201 3,463).
4 Leibniz to Raymond de Montmort, 26 August 1714 (1181704).
5 Leibniz to Malebranche, 13 January 1679 (1201/, 328: 1141209).
h Leibniz to Malebranche, 22 June 1679 (1201/, 330: 1141 210).
7 Draft of a letter from Leibniz to Arnauld (1201 2, 68-9: 1171 84).
x All quotations in this paragraph are from Leibniz to Arnauld, 4/14 July 1686 (1201 2,
57-8: j1 7165).
~ Arnauld to Leibniz, 28 September 1686, quoting Leibniz to Arnauld, 4/14 July
1686 (12012, 64: 1171 78).
10 Arnauld to Leibniz, 4 March 1687 (120] 2,84: 11711(5).
II Arnauld to Leibniz, 4 March 1687 (120]2, 84: 1171105-6).
I~ All quotes in this paragraph are from Leibniz to Arnauld, 30 April 1687 (12012,
92-3: j171116).
1] All quotes in this paragraph are from "A new system", Journal des savants, 27 June
1695 (120]4,483: j14]457).
I
181
14 "Clarification of the difficulties which Mr Bayle has found in the new system of the
union of soul and body", Histoire des ouvrages des savants, July 1698 (1201 4, 520:
[141 494).
"Reply to the thoughts on the system of preestablished harmony contained in the
second edition of Mr Bayle's Critical Dictionary, article 'Rorarius''', Histoire critique de
la republique des lettres, 1702 (1201 4,554-71: 1141 574-85).
16 He also remakes it in "Considerations on vital principles and plastic natures, by the
author of the system of preestablished harmony", Histoire des ouvrages des savants,
May 1705 (1201 6,541: 1141 587).
17 Arnauld to Leibniz, 4 March 1687 (120J 2,84: [171105-6).
IN "On nature itself, or on the inherent force and actions of created things", Acta
emditomm, September 1698 (120J 4,507: J14J 500-1).
IY Leibniz to Fillipi, January 1680 (1201 4,286).
20 For example in "A brief demonstration of a notable error of Descartes and others
concerning a natural law, according to which God is said always to conserve the same
quantity of motion; a law which they also misuse in mechanics", Acta emditomm,
March 1686 (121] 6, 117-23: J14J 296-301).
21 "Explanation of the new system of the communication between substances, by way
of reply to what is said about it in the Journal of 12 September 1695", Journal des
savants, April 1696 ([20J 4, 497: J16J 327); Leibniz to Bernoulli, 1696 (121J 3, 243:
Jl6J 328, n. 30).
" Specimen dynamicum (1695) (121 J 6, 240: J14J 439); letter to Nicolas Remond, 10
January 1714 (l20J 4,607: Jl4J 655).
2.1 "Brief demonstration" (see note 20); Discourse on Metaphysics(l20J 4, 441-4:
J141314-15).
24 Descartes does not make exactly this identity: "force to continue motion in a straight
line ... does not depend solely on the quantity of matter that is in each body, but also
on the extent of its surface" (191 113).
25 It also appears clearly in the letter to Bernoulli, 1696 (1211 3, 243: Jl61 328, n. 30).
Discussion of some such objection as Leibniz's can be found down to the present day
(l3J 103-9; 16J 253-8; 110J 88-9; 113J 64-5; 122J 86; 125J 256; 127J 126-43;
1281291-2,298-9).
26 Presumably modern accounts of how Descartes took this way out are blindly
following Leibniz, cf. j111205; 123J 81; 124J 583; 127J 129. In his 1702 reply to Bayle
(see note 15) Leibniz attributes this way out to "the Cartesians" rather than to
Descartes himself (l20J 4, 559: 114J 577).
27 See 1121130, n. 35 for references earlier than Leibniz's.
2N "Considerations on vital principles and plastic natures, by the author of the system
of pre-established harmony", Histoire des ouvrages des savants, May 1705 ([20J 6, 540:
1141587); Monadology (1714) (12016, 620-1; Jl61263-4); Leibniz to Remond, 10
January 1714 (12013, 607: Jl41655).
29 This, from "Considerations on vital principles" (see note 28) (1201 6, 540: J14J 587),
is the earliest instance I know of this stronger claim .
.10 See "Reply to the thoughts ... in the second edition of Mr Bayle" (see note 15)
(120J 4,559: [14J 577; [20J 2, 70, 111-12, 113-14: Jl7186, 143, 146).
.'1 C. A. Strong is the only relatively recent writer I know of who is quite clear that
there is a connection between the three features of Leibniz's view (the features that, (1)
bodily (or, mental) events have only bodily (or, mental) causes, (2) there is a thorough-
I,
182
ROGERS.WOOLHOUSE
going correlation between body and mind, and (3) the relation between mind and body
is non-causal. He explicitly points out that "[t]he conception of the physical world as a
closed circle would imply an exact. 'psychophysical representation' for all mental states,
to account for their apparent action" ([27]74). Later he makes clear that "[t]he
assumption of ... any dependence of ... [mind (or, body)] on [body (or, mind)], not
only contradicts its [psychophysical parallelism's] anti-causal essence, but is inconsistent
with the thorough-going correspondence it involves" ([27]79).
On the other hand, C. D. Broad misses the connection completely. Speaking of "two
sides" to psychophysical parallelism (a "negative" one, that mind and body do not
causally interact, and a "positive" one, that there is a one-one correlation between
mental and physical events), he says that the second might be accepted by someone
who rejected the first and that the second is compatible with interactionism ([3]121,
133).
REFERENCES
1. Bayle, Pierre, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, tr. R. H. Popkin
(Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1965).
2. Bayley, Benjamin, 'Of the immateriality of the soul, and its distinction from the
body', in 'An appendix containing some pieces found among Mr. Toland's papers',
in A Collection of Some Pieces of Mr. John Toland, 2 vols (London, 1726;
reprinted New York: Garland, 1977) 2,3-28.
3. Broad, C. D., The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1925).
4. Brown, Stuart, Leibniz (Milton Keynes: Open Univ. Press, 1983).
5. Clarke, Samuel, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London,
1705; reprinted Stuttgart: Frommann, 1964).
6. Cornmann, James W. and Keith Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments:
An Introduction (2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1974).
7. Descartes, Rene, Descartes: Philosophical Letters, tr. and ed. A. Kenny (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1970).
8. Descartes, Rene, Principles of Philosophy (1644), in volume 1, The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, 2 vols, tr. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
9. Descartes, Rene, Le Monde, ou traite de la lumiere (1664), Eng. tr. M. S.
Mahoney (New York: Abaris, 1979).
10. Ducasse, c., 'In defense of dualism', in Dimensions of Mind, ed. S. Hook (London:
Collier-Macmillan, 1960),85-9.
II. Gale, G., 'Leibniz's dynamical metaphysics and the origin of the vis viva controversy', Systematics 11(1973), 184-207.
12. Garber, Daniel, 'Mind, body and the laws of nature in Descartes and Leibniz',
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 8 (1983),105-33.
13. Hoffding, H., Outlines of Psychology (London, 1891).
14. Leibniz, G. W., Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, tr. and ed. L. E.
Loemker (2nd ed., Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969).
183
MARY B. HESSE
To Gerd Buchdahl,
who taught us the art of hermeneutics
in history of philosophy of science.
Abstract. Vieo's "new science of humanity" is best known as an attempt to supplement
Baconian methodology with a study of human history based on a method of poetic
imagination. Vieo took the key to this study to be a theory of the poetic origins of
language, which he analysed into three "ages", parallel to the cyclic repetitions of
history: the "divine" language of signs and gestures, the "heroie" language of emblems
and metaphors, and the "rational" language of science and logic. Two questions arising
from Vieo's theory are of particular importance for modern discussions of language.
First, it is argued in this essay that for Vieo language is primarily conventional, and
must therefore be studied as a social institution rather than a natural phenomenon, and
that it incorporates social value judgments. Second, the nature of "metaphor" and its
dependence on the imaginative faculty is discussed, and it is concluded that Vico meant
metaphor not only to be typical of the first two ages of language, but to have an
essential cognitive function also in the third, rational age.
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MARY B. HESSE
reconstruct it, especially now that debate about the metaphoric nature
of language has revived among philosophers as well as literary critics.4
Vico's admiration for Bacon is tempered by his view that concentration on "physics and geometry" in Baconian science has led to neglect
of ethics and the study of man and history,5 and he rejects Bacon's
scientific ideal of an "Alphabet of Nature".6 Bacon had followed the
tradition that the ideal language was given by God to Adam, who
named the animals, and that this language was lost at the flood. Bacon
saw his task as being to restore it, and with it the knowledge of nature
which man was meant to have in his pristine state. The scientific
language will be an alphabet, in which letters correspond to the natures
of things, and words and sentences will be made up according to rules
that correspond to the causal relations among things, that is, to the laws
of nature. The notion that this language will be a return to a lost
original was largely abandoned by the end of the seventeenth century,
but the vision of its future establishment by the accumulation of
knowledge was not. It is maintained through early Royal Society
attempts at a "Real Character", and in Leibniz's "Characteristica Universalis",7 and in twentieth-century attempts at a formalization of
language based on logic and science rather than natural speech.
We may take Hobbes's theory of "naming" as typical of the way the
Adamic tradition was received by Vico.8 Hobbes rejects the idea of the
original Adamic language, noting that it is not complete: the "names of
animals" do not include other ingredients of language such as numbers,
qualities, and abstract names. Mere names of things can be private
marks, but genuine language is a social phenomenon: "to show to others
that knowledge which we have attained, which is, to counsel and teach
one another" ([27) ch. 4, p. 19). Hobbes does, however, share the
aspiration for an ideal language which develops with man's rationality
and is distinct from lower-level animal communication. We use arbitrary signs for conceptions of universals, but there are no universals in
the world: there is "nothing in the world universal but names; for the
things named are every one of them undivided and singular" ([27) ch. 4,
p. 19; [26) 1, ch. 2.4). The same universal name is imposed on many
things by means of their similarity, and is used to recall to mind any
one of these singular things. Although words for universal names are
conventional, the proper definition and use of the names is not.
Hobbes' ideal is geometry: here the right conceptions are given proper
definitions, and analytic truths are known concerning their causal
187
188
MARY B. HESSE
189
190
MARY B. HESSE
And introducing the question of how the three languages and their
characters were formed he says:
We must establish this principle: that as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time
(for they were, after all, men who imagined the gods and believed their own heroic
nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began
at the same time, each having its letters, which developed along with it (446, cf. 692,
916).
191
These two passages seem to mean that the first languages, along with all
social institutions, were created by men and were therefore in that
sense conventional. It also appears that there was never an entirely
"bestial" age such as Vico describes elsewhere as the state of the ''first
men". There was no historic time in which humans had only a gestural
or symbolic language, but all three types of language are coeval.
There is a second, more serious, difficulty in supposing that Vico's
language has a wholly natural character. This concerns his view of the
nature of knowledge itself, and the possibility of knowing the history of
man and society. The primary aim of Scienza Nuova is to develop a
new science of the human to complement Baconian science of the
natural world, and the best known feature of Vico's work is his claim
that we can know the truth only of what we ourselves have made. This
is the verum-factum principle, expressed in Scienza Nuova as "the
eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the
world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its
principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our
own human mind" (331). The principle is taken for granted and little
discussed in Scienza Nuova, but Vico discussed it at length in earlier
works, where his theory of natural knowledge is developed and never in
essence repudiated. I I
Nature is made by God, hence Vico believes we cannot completely
know it, except insofar as we construct experiments and applications in
terms of our own categories. In his description of natural science Vico
echoes Bacon's emphasis on experimental "operations", and Lockean
doubts as to whether we can ever know the corpuscular essences of
things. Physics is not capable of logical demonstration - it is "mere
probability", and in spite of its great successes, we should not assume
that physics is "identical with nature itself",i2 Again, when the study of
chemistry was "directed towards something quite useless", that is
towards natural truths that were "denied it by nature", nevertheless it
"exceeded the end it had set itself and produced pharmacology, a
working art of great use to the human race":
Human knowledge arises, therefore, from a defect of our mind, i.e., from its extremely
limited character, as a result of which, being external to everything and not containing
what it strives to know, it does not produce the truths which are its aim. The most
certain things are those which, redressing the defects of their origin, resemble divine
knowledge in their operation, inasmuch as in them the true is convertible with what is
made. 13
192
MARY B. HESSE
Science concerning the Nature of the Nations, by which are found the
Principles of Another System of the Natural Law of the Gentes. 14 In
193
Vico emphasises that the "master key" which "has cost us the persistent
research of almost all our literary life" (34), is the principle that the
primitives had by "necessity of nature" to speak in poetic characters
because of the "poverty" of their language and their inability to form
intelligible class concepts (209, 384). Before language men were like
Proteus looking at his own reflection in the water: "their minds were so
limited to particulars that they regarded every change of facial expression as a new face, ... and for every new passion they imagined a new
heart, a new breast, a new spirit" (700, cf. 688). The poetic characters
of the first language are "imaginative genera" to which primitives
"reduced all the species or all the particulars appertaining to each
genus" (34). To understand the concept of imaginative genera, it is
useful to look first at Vico's account of "genera or ideas" in chapter 2 of
De sapientia where he discusses "metaphysical forms". Vico later
repudiated much of the metaphysics of De sapientia ([47) 153), but it is
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MARY B. HESSE
clear that the metaphysical forms are the forerunners of the imaginative
genera, although they are more dependent on Vico's account of the
physical science than is the case in Scienze Nuova.
In De sapientia Vico identifies forms with the Latin "genera", and
asserts that
the ancient philosophers of Italy believed the genera to be forms which were infinite,
not in extension but in perfection. . . . On the other hand, they held that species, or
particular things, were representations modelled on these forms (152]60).
Metaphysical forms are like those used by a modeller: they are "made
in the mind", and in the case of nature they are made by God. Physical
forms, on the other hand, are like seeds, which "become more complete
as the seed develops each day" and approaches the perfection of its
metaphysical form. Geometry and the human arts, such as painting,
sculpture modelling and architecture, participate in the divine modelling process, because they are concerned with "prototypes which the
human mind contains within itself" ([52]61). Arts such as oratory,
politics and medicine do not approach perfection, because their forms
are not present in the human mind. In particular, Aristotelian physics
"confuses the forms", because it claims that the physical forms are
universal, whereas "all particular forms are imperfect",16 and only
Platonic forms attain perfection. It is a mistake to rely on universal
terms, which are in fact homonyms or ambiguities, because they lead to
neglect of the differences between particulars: ''universal genera [in the
Aristotelian sense] do not provide for what is new, wonderful and
unexpected" ([52]62, cf. 73). Vico goes on to draw a conclusion about
methods of argument, and to favour induction over Aristotle's syllogistic or Zeno's sorites:
It is a likely conjecture that the ancient philosophers of Italy approved neither the
syllogism nor the sorites, but used induction based upon resemblance in their arguments. . .. ]T]he most ancient dialectic of all was induction and the comparison of
resemblances, which Socrates was the last to employ (152174).
195
196
MARY B. HESSE
197
into the way he conceives the relation between these genera and the
intelligible class concepts of the rational ages of history. Parallel with
the three ages, he says, there is first feeling, then perceiving "with a
troubled and agitated spirit", and then reflection "with a clear mind"
(218); "poets were the sense and philosophers the intellect of human
wisdom" (779). Poetic sentences, he goes on,
are formed by feelings of passion and emotion, whereas philosophic sentences are
formed by reflection and reasoning. The more the latter rise toward universals, the
closer they approach the truth; the more the former descend to particulars, the more
certain they become (219, cf. 821).
This contrast between "truth" and "certainty" seems to sit uncomfortably with the sense of poetic fable as "true" which we have
discerned above. Pompa and McMullin ([341, [31]) interpret the
contrast here as similar to the hypothetico-deductive method, where the
philosophical knowledge of universals is a realistic interpretation of
scientific theory, and the "poetic certainty" of particulars is the empirical check provided by mutual reinforcement of theory and evidence.
Indeed it is clear in his discussion of method that Vico does oppose
both Cartesian a priorism and simple Baconian induction. But without
further elaboration the alternative hypothetico-deductive interpretation
neglects the special and original character of Vico's theory of representation, which is based on the ideal as well as the factual, on imagination
as well as cognition, and on rhetorical as well as literal and argumentative uses of language. In developing this idea I shall largely follow
Verene's account of imaginative genera, which is more adequate than
the hypothetico-deductive account in enabling us to see how Vico's
theory of metaphor is of fundamental importance. 2o
Verene takes the distinction between the "imaginative universal" and
the "intelligible universal" ([45171f) to belong to the distinctive forms
of language of the first two and the third ages respectively. Primitive
language is essentially metaphorical, but in a special sense of "metaphor". Basic to all human perception and representation is the ability to
impose order on the flux of experience by imagining unities and
identities (Vico's word for imagination is fantasia). This is quite
different from the process of abstraction that yields intellectual universals as the common content of diverse particulars, which is the basis of
Aristotelian class logic. Such abstraction requires there to be factual
identities between properties if Aristotle's real forms are to result. 21
198
MARY B. HESSE
199
about truth only make sense if we assume Vico to have had a strong
belief in the appropriateness of the "original" imaginative classes.
Backing for such a belief comes from his theory of the "mental
dictionary", which represents those concepts which are appropriate and
normative for all human societies as such. The original fables are
necessarily true and "ideal", not because they belong to any particular
historical events, but because they belong to the very conditions of life,
although they later become corrupted in the cycle of history. In this
belief Vico may be said to reveal his own version of the Adamic myth.
It is not that Adam had uncorrupted knowledge of the nature of
physical things, but that in the first languages human beings were
directly in touch with the true springs of social reality, and after that the
Fall (d. 401-2).
In this interpretation of the imaginative genera Vico's problem is
taken to be the process of concept formation before articulate language;
a process that involves for the primitive mind implicit normative
judgments as well as pre-linguistic perceptions. A post-Kantian philosophical tradition would probably dismiss this problem as merely
psychological. But Vico is explicitly concerned with the interface of
what he calls "philosophy" and "philology", where by "philology" he
means the study of the origins of language and more generally with the
historical conditions of apprehension of particulars. When, however, he
contrasts the ascent of philosophy towards universals and "truth", with
the descent of poetry towards particulars and "certainty", he has in
mind a sense of "philosophical truth" which is different from the
original imaginative truth of fables. The philosophical sense is appropriate to the analytic "rational" stage of human thinking - the stage
where the principles of the New Science itself get established, and
abstract intelligible class concepts are defined (209, 460). "Falsity" does
not even exist until the reflective stage of thinking is reached: "since the
first men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are
truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign anything false; they
must therefore have been ... true narrations" (408). "Reflection ... is
the mother of falsehood" (817).
Rational philosophy, however, with its logical concepts of truth and
falsity, is not enough for understanding, because "poetic certainty" is
also required in the application of logic to the world. The certainty of
the human sciences results from our ability as human beings to reconstruct the original imaginative conditions under which human concepts
200
MARY B. HESSE
201
202
MARY B. HESSE
of names for actions, and the inability to abstract qualities from subjects
(406). Vico gives the example of "Hermes" to stand for civil wisdom
(209), and a sad and ugly woman to stand for poverty, age and death.
Synecdoche is the putting of whole for part or part for whole, and is the
way general terms were first named from their particulars or parts, for
example individuals ("Godfrey") to stand for classes ("knighthood"),
"heads" for "men", "harvests" for ''years'' (407). All these tropes were
necessitated by the early poverty of language. Irony, on the other hand,
must be later than the other tropes, since it "could not have begun until
the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a
reflection which wears the mark of truth" (408); it is a deception,
whereas the early fables and their expressions in metaphor, metonymy
and synecdoche were necessarily "true narrations".
Vico goes on to describe how the tropes became figurative: "these
expressions of the first nations later became figurative when, with the
further development of the human mind, words were invented which
signified abstract forms or genera comprising their species or relating
parts with their wholes" (409). Poetic speech becomes prose speech "by
contracting into a single word as into a genus, the parts which poetic
speech had associated" (460). For example, "the blood boils in my
heart" becomes simply stomachos, ira, col/era, anger. 24 Metaphors
become explicit likenesses instead of identities (404). Personifications
of mental faculties become poetic devices instead of the identifying
names of these faculties (402-3). Heraldic symbols have "to be
explained by mottoes, for their meanings are analogical; whereas the
natural heroic emblems were such from lack of mottoes, and spoken
forth in their very muteness" (484).
In these paragraphs the discussion of tropes is almost painfully
orthodox, and one might draw the conclusion that Vico ascribes
metaphor and the rest mainly to the childhood of the race, after which
rational abstraction and reflection render them unnecessary for developed thought. He places a high value on poetic speech as proper and
necessary in its time, but its time is only that of the primitive. It is easy
to mount arguments for this interpretation. There is no doubt that
Vico's theory of history is predominently progressive, not cyclic or
relativist. Poetic language belongs to the earliest ages, and is not
repeated in the same form in the ricorsi after the cycle has once
brought a society through the age of reflection. Metaphors of the body
are not recovered unselfconsciously, and indeed are strictly unimagi-
203
nab Ie, once the power of abstract thought has been developed. The
primitive nature of metaphor in Vico is emphasised, for example, by
Dorfles, who admits its function of conveying meaning, but concludes
that this simply implies that "much of our cognitive power still remains
entangled in the coils of a form of discourse which is predominently
irrational" ([11] 586).
Another argument against the pervasiveness of Vico's metaphor in
all ages of language might be drawn from the theory of the three ages
itself. In "The tropics of history: the deep structure of the New Science",
Hayden White suggests that there is a transition from metaphor to
metonymy in the religious age, from metonymy to synecdoche in the
heroic age, and from synecdoche to irony in the rational or human age
and its ricorsi into decadence and barbarism ([53] 72f). This would
place metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche in the early ages, and irony
along with literal speech in the rational age. But further consideration
indicates that White is not here arguing the primacy of the linguistic
tropes as the style of language in the respective ages. Rather, his
argument is a subtle comparison of the tropes with corresponding
social structures: the rule of the gods goes along with their personification in the divine age, and this is metaphoric; in the heroic or
aristocratic age replacement of "heroes" for their characteristics (subjects for qualities) is metonymic; in the human, democratic, age, the
elevation of individual against class (part for whole) is synecdochic. The
types of language in White's analysis remain the "mute", the "heraldic",
and the "articulate" ([53J 77) as they do consistently in Vico himself.
Vico was not consistent in the way he coupled tropes with the three
ages, and this reinforces the suggestion that he did not place great
weight on any evolution from trope to trope to non-tropical language.
In Scienza Nuova metaphor is not by any means restricted to the poetic
age. Not only is it said "to make up the great body of the language
among all nations" (444), but it is also associated in particular with the
heroic language: "the signs in which the heroes wrote .. . must have
been metaphors, images, similitudes or comparisons, which having
passed into articulate speech, supplied all the resources of poetic
expression" (438). And synecdoche, far from superseding metaphor
and metonymy, is said to develop "into metaphor as particulars were
elevated into universals or parts united ... [to] make up their wholes"
(407). And in the first edition of Scienza Nuova metonymy, synecdoche
and metaphor are mentioned in that order as forming third-age
204
MARY B. HESSE
205
The analysis of imaginative genera is undoubtedly the most fundamental argument for the nature and importance of metaphor in the
poetic and heroic ages. But if we seek to argue that in Vico's view
metaphor is pervasive, necessary and normative for all language, the
objection might still be made that he regards third-age metaphors as
being superseded by explicit figurative speech, and therefore reducible
to the merely persuasive and ornamental. In this concluding section I
shall summarize the arguments Vi co himself gives for the metaphoric
character of early language, in order to consider how far he intended
these arguments to imply the metaphoric character of all language.
Vico has four kinds of argument for metaphor in the first languages.
First, the "poverty of language and the need to explain and be understood" (34, cf. 456) requires "poetic locution" to express and extend
206
MARY B. HESSE
207
system, which Vico certainly did not, this is an argument that applies to
all natural language as such. The extensibility of language also implies
the use of what Vico calls "imagination" in the grasp of new classifications of things and the naming of new concepts. So the mechanism of
imaginative genera is also a common feature of all living language. For
Vico it is the way all children learn language (186, 209, 376), and it is
pervasive in etymological development. Even more important is the fact
that Vico's theory of induction, which certainly applies to the third age,
emphasises particulars against Aristotelian universals. If we cannot rely
on universals being present identically in different particulars for
purposes of inference then we cannot rely on particulars being named
by univocal general terms. But this is just where Vico's imaginative use
of metaphor enters his theory of language.
The argument for the existence of tropes alongside logic in rational
language is part of the more general argument for the continuing
rational function of rhetoric in Vico's philosophy of the third age. On
this there is some disagreement among the commentators, the "rationalists" arguing that topics and tropes are superseded by logic, and the
"imaginists" arguing that rhetoric retains a rational, normative function,
which is complementary to critical reason. We have seen an example of
this debate in the exchanges between Pompa and Verene.
Support for the continuing rational function of rhetoric comes,
however, from the very style and structure of Scienza Nuova itself. As a
"science" it must be "universal and eternal", as Vico states that every
science must be (163, 332), but does this imply that it must eschew
metaphor and rhetoric? 26 Vico does not explicitly pursue this question,
but there are reasons for thinking that the New Science cannot be
contained in a purely "third-age" concept of reason. He can quite
consistently claim that the principles of the New Science are "universal
and eternal", without implying that such universal truth is identical with
what the Baconians and Cartesians take to be the product of critical
and empirical reason. Indeed the whole thrust of Vico's corpus suggests
that to get universal truth about human affairs, we must adopt a
philological and historical, and therefore rhetorical, method as well as a
Baconian one. In other words, it is not incorrect to regard Vico as the
father of a hermeneutic method that defines a new sort of cognitive
reason.
The style of Scienza Nuova is full of repetitions, and is certainly far
from being clear and distinct, a fact about which commentators have
208
MARY B. HESSE
]45].
209
For a recent philosophical debate with references, see [36J and [25J.
See SN(163), and De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), pp. 33,41. This
work is translated in [49J, and, in part, in [52J. Page references will be to the latter
edition unless noted otherwise. Vico is most outspoken about his contemporary science
in his Autobiografia (1728), translated in [47J. For example: Boyle's experimental
physics is profitable for "medicine and spagyric ... [butJ contributed nothing to the
philosophy of man" (p. 128); Descartes "craftily feigned" his studies "to exalt his own
philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and
human erudition" (p. 113); and Bacon's De sapientia veterum is "more ingenious and
learned than true" (p. 148).
6 He knew of the Alphabet from Bacon's De augmentis scientiarum (see [47J 139). In
the Baconian tradition "language" is used in an extended sense to mean "naming" or
"representation", but with little attention to syntax (see [30J 359).
7 For accounts of this movement see 11 L[22J, [391, 1401.
S For Vico and Hobbes see particularly 151, 1141, 1301, [381.
9 For Hobbes' debt to Galileo see the Introduction by I. C. Hungerland and G. R. Vick
to [28125.
10 For Vico on Hebrew and Christian religion see, for example, [451185.
liOn the verum-factum principle and its relation to "certainty" (certum) see De
sapientia, [52]50-6; 134] ch. 7; and ]451 ch. 2. Vico does repudiate his earlier view of
geometry, which ceases to be the model of a "man-made" institution like those of
society. and becomes mere abstraction. having "less reality" than human institutions
(SN 349).
11 De nostri temp oris, 152]40.
I)
De nostri temp oris, 152]55.
14 This first edition of Scienza Nuova was almost totally rewritten in the 1744 edition.
Extracts are translated in 152] 81-156.
For Vi co's theory of providence see, for example, 17] 64f., and [341 ch. 5.
1(, 152163. Compare Vico's Platonic "ladder of forms" (l52J 62) with Bacon's "ladder of
axioms" described, for example, in ]211146.
17 Cf. Scienza Nuova (424): "the order of human ideas is to observe the similarities of
things first to express oneself and later for purposes of proof. Proof, in tum, is first by
example, for which a single likeness suffices, and finally by induction, for which more is
required. Socrates ... introduced by induction the dialectic which Aristotle later
perfected with the syllogism, which cannot proceed without a universal".
On the other hand Aristotle "deduces particulars from their universals rather than
uniting particulars to obtain universals ... land this did not yieldJ anything more
notable to the advantage of the human race. Hence with great reason Bacon ...
proposes, commends, and illustrates the inductive method in his Organum, and is still
followed by the English with great profit in experimental philosophy" (499).
IX De sapientia, ch. 4.2, in 148] 269; 112] 410; 1451 49f.
I" Winch borrows the thrcc principles in his "Understanding a primitive society"
(154J 107). It is the loss of the sensus communis by the time of Dilthey and his
successors that makes the epistemology of what is "made by man" more problematic
than the epistemology of natural science, cf.115J 196f.
20 Comparing his view with Pf':,lpa's in 1341 and 1351, Verene says: "The central
difference, and I believe it to P', c' very important one, is that his view is not grounded
I,
210
MARY B. HESSE
in Vico's notion of fantasia. Pompa does not explore the sense of fantasia present in the
origin of human mentality, upon which the New Science rests .... The difference
remains that Pompa's view approaches Vieo's thought through cognition and the
philosophical argument and the present study comes to Vieo through the basis of his
thought in rhetoric and the image" ([45] 155n).
21 Contrary to Vico's remarks on induction, above p. 194. I have discussed these issues
in [23], [24], and [4] ch. 8.
22 See [52]60f., and 145]74. The socially normative character of Vieo's use of "truth"
is emphasised by [3] ch. 12, [15]2lf, and 120] 75f. In [5]614, Barnouw objects to their
identification of Vico's rhetoric with classical practieal reason, or phronesis, where this
is assumed to lead to a dualism of reason in the "rational" age, arguing that Vieo has
rhetorie developing into universal rational ideas in the third age. How far Vieo retains a
dualism of logic and rhetoric in the third age is a question I return to in section 5.
23 Compare the account in [55] chs. 2, 10.
24 "Mi bolle il sangue nel cuore": the humours seem to have got somewhat mixed in
this idiom.
25 Just as there is little analysis of the verum-factum principle or of methodology as
compared with his earlier works.
26 This question is given somewhat different answers by McMullin (131] 60) and
Mooney 132] 208.
27 Vico complains about the "overfine" intelligence of immature intellects when they
pass prematurely from the sciences to metaphysics (159). And in an Oration of 1732
he exhorts the students of Naples to retain the "heroie mind" (] 51 D.
REFERENCES
1. Aarsleff, H., From Locke to Saussure (London: Athlone Press, 1982).
2. Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953).
3. Apel, K-O., Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis
Vico (Archiv for Begriffsgeschichte, 8) (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963).
4. Arbib, M. and M. Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1987).
5. Barnouw, J., 'Vieo and the continuity of science, the relation of his epistemology to
Bacon and Hobbes', Isis 71 (1980),609-20.
6. Berlin, I., Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).
7. Burke, P., Vico (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).
8. Cantelli, G., 'Myth and language in Vico', in 142]47-63.
9. De Mas, E., 'On the new method of a new science; A study of Giambattista Vico',
Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971), 85-94.
10. De Mauro, T., 'Giambattista Vieo: From rhetorie to linguistie historicism', in
141 ]279-95.
11. Dorfies, G., 'Myth and metaphor in Vico and in contemporary aestheties', in
141]577-90.
12. Fisch, M. R, 'Vieo and pragmatism', in [41]401-24.
13. Frankel, M., 'The "Dipintura" and the structure of Vieo's New Science as a mirror
of the world', in 144]43-51.
211
14. Funkenstein, A., 'Natural science and social theory: Hobbes, Spinoza and Vico', in
142]187-212.
15. Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975).
16. Gardiner, P., 'Vico', in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols, ed. P. Edwards
(London: Collier-Macmillan 1967) 8, 247-51.
17. Giuliani, A., 'Vico's rhetorical philosophy and the new rhetoric', in 142] 31-46.
18. Grassi, E., 'Critical philosophy or topical philosophyT, in 1411 39-50.
19. Grassi, E., The priority of common sense and imagination: Vi co's philosophical
relevance today', in 14311,163-90.
20. Habermas, J., Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974).
21. Hesse, M., 'Francis Bacon', in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D. 1.
O'Connor (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), 141-52.
22. Hesse, M., 'Hooke's philosophical algebra', Isis 57 (1966), 67-83.
23. Hesse, M., The Structure of Scientific Inference (London: Macmillan, 1974).
24. Hesse, M., The cognitive claims of metaphor', in Metaphor and Religion, 2 vols,
ed. J. P. van Noppen (Brussels: van Noppen, 1984) 2, 27-45.
25. Hesse, M., Tropical talk', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary
Volume 61 (1987),297-311.
26. Hobbes, T., English Works, 11 vols, ed. W. Molesworth (London, 1839).
27. Hobbes, T., Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946).
28. Hobbes, T., Computatio sive Logica, eds. I. C. Hungerland and G. R. Vick (New
York: Abaris Books, 1981).
29. Howell, W. S., Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1956).
30. Land, S. K., The account of language in Vico's Scienza Nuova', Philological
Quarterly 55 (1976), 354-72.
31. McMullin, E., 'Vico's theory of science', in 143]1, 60-90.
32. Mooney, M., The primacy of language in Vico', in 14311,191-210.
33. Padley, G. A., Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500-1700 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).
34. Pompa, L., Vico, A Study of the "New Science" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1975).
35. Pompa, L., 'Imagination in Vico', in 144]162-70.
36. Rorty, R., 'Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor', Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1987), 283-96.
37. Rossi, P., Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1968).
38. Rossi, P., The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of
Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1984).
39. Schapiro, B. J., John Wilkins, 1614-/672 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1969).
40. Slaughter, M. M., Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).
41. Tagliacozzo, G. and H. V. White (eds.), Giambattista Vico, An International
Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969).
42. Tagliacozzo, G. and D. P. Verene (eds.), Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976).
212
MARY B. HESSE
43. Tagliacozzo, G., M. Mooney, and D. P. Verene (eds.), Vico and Contemporary
Thought, 2 vols (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).
44. Tagliacozzo, G. (ed.), Vico Past and Present (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities
Press, 1981).
45. Verene, D. P., Vico's Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).
46. Vico, G., La Scienza Nuova Prima, ed. F. Nicolini (Bari: Gius. Laterza, 1931).
47. Vico, G., The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, eds. M. H. Fisch and T. G.
Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1944).
48. Vico, G., Opere, ed. F. Nicolini (Milano: Ricciardi, 1953).
49. Vico, G., On the Study Methods of our Time, ed. E. Gianturco (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
50. Vico, G., The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised translation of the third
edition (1744), T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968).
51. Vico, G., 'On the heroic mind', in 1431 2,228-45.
52. Vico, G., Vico Selected Writings, ed. L. Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1982).
53. White, H. V., The tropics of history: The deep structure of the New Science', in
142165-85.
54. Winch, P., 'Understanding a primitive society', in Rationality, ed. B. R. Wilson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 78-111.
55. Yates, F. A., The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
PETER M. HARMAN
Abstract. This essay discusses the role of metaphysical argument in the vis viva
controversy. The debate between Johann Bernoulli and Colin MacLaurin over the vis
viva concept and Leibnizian dynamics is reviewed. Special emphasis is placed on
Bernoulli's appeal to the Leibnizian metaphysical principles of causality and continuity
in supporting his theory of motion, and to the special status he accords the principle of
the conservation of vis viva in dynamics. MacLaurin's critique of Bernoulli is reviewed,
with special emphasis on his discussion of the law of continuity, and his defence of
Newton's concept of fluxions and his disparagement of the status of infinitesimal
quantities in Leibniz's mathematics and Bernoulli's dynamics. The physical and metaphysical arguments he deploys in criticising the principle of the conservation of vis viva
are discussed, his approach being essentially Newtonian in inspiration.
1. INTRODUCTION
All natural philosophers who wished to proceed mathematically in their work had
therefore always (though unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles
and were obliged to make use of them, even though they otherwise solemnly protested
against any claim of metaphysics on their science.... (Kant, Metaphysical Foundations
of Natural Science ([13[ 4,472.
214
PETER M. HARMAN
Following Buchdahl, I have myself argued that reference to metaphysical foundations is constitutive of the conceptual development of
classical physics ([7); [10)); and in particular that debates over the status
of the concepts of force and inertia were integral to reception of
Newton's physics ([7) 8-80; [8); [9)). In this essay I will further
illustrate this theme by reviewing the debate between Johann Bernoulli
and Colin MacLaurin over the vis viva concept and the Leibnizian law
of continuity (see also [11)).
The correspondence between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke in 171516 had given public expression to the disagreement between Newton
and Leibniz about the status of the concept of gravitational attraction,
and also reawakened Bernoulli's interest in Leibnizian dynamics. The
publication of Leibniz's "Specimen dynamicum" (1695) had led to a
flourishing correspondence with Bernoulli, who became deeply involved
in Leibniz's priority quarrel with Newton over the invention of the
calculus, to which the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke was
a tailpiece (6)). In 1716 Leibniz drew Bernoulli's attention to his
debate with Clarke and Newton, whom he considered to be his real
adversary lurking behind the scenes. Leibniz criticised Newton's doctrine
of the "spontaneous diminution of active forces and final cessation in
the world", pointing out to Bernoulli that by the Leibnizian principle of
the conservation of vis viva ("living force") the "same quantity of forces
is always preserved" (14) 3, 964). Leibniz thus sees the principle of the
conservation of vis viva as refuting Newton's claim, in Query 23 of the
Latin edition of the Opticks (1706), that because motion is constantly
being dissipated, for example in the collision of inelastic or partially
elastic bodies, it was apparent that "some other principle is necessary
for conserving the motion": "the variety of motion which we find in the
world is always decreasing, (and hence) there is a necessity of conserving and recruiting it by active principles" ([18) 397-401). While
active principles were laws of nature, they were also conceived as the
mediating agents by which God conserved motion and gravity in the
cosmos. Clarke therefore rejected Leibniz's concept of the conservation
of vis viva on theological grounds, maintaining that to deny (as did
Leibniz) that "every action is the giving of a new force to the thing
acted upon" would be to suppose that God is "quite excluded from
the government of the natural world". Clarke affirms the Newtonian
doctrine that "there must be a continual increase and decrease of the
whole quantity of motion in the universe" which had the consequence
215
Bernoulli presents his memoir "Discours sur les loix de la communication du mouvement" as a systematic elaboration of the Leibnizian
science of dynamics, remarking that he was the first natural philosopher
for 28 years (since the publication of "Specimen dynamicum" in 1695)
to espouse Leibnizian dynamical principles. Based on Leibniz's metaphysical principles of causality and continuity, the elasticity of matter,
216
PETER M. HARMAN
217
218
PETER M. HARMAN
vis viva is a fundamental natural law expressing the order and harmony
of nature: if the quantity of vis viva, the "single source of the continuation of motion in the universe", were not conserved then "all nature
would fall into disorder". He explicitly contrasts this Leibnizian expression of the self-sufficiency of nature, as grounded on the preservation
and conservation of vis viva in mechanical processes, with the Newtonian
doctrine of the diminution of activity in the collisions of bodies ([2J 3,
58). Bernoulli's theory of motion is justified by the appeal to the
metaphysical principles of causality and continuity, and to the harmony
between mathematics and nature as expressed by the generation of vis
viva from vis mortua.
Bernoulli made it plain that his theory of motion and concept of vis
viva was essentially Leibnizian in inspiration. He contrasts his own
statement of the law of the conservation of vis viva with Huygens'
formulation of the conservation of the quantity mv 2 in collisions. For
Huygens the quantity mv 2 was merely a number, without any fundamental dynamical significance. In his Horologium Oscillatorium (1673)
Huygens demonstrates that the distance through which the centre of
gravity of a body or system of bodies will fall under the action of
gravity is equal to the height to which it can ascend as a result of the
velocity acquired in the fall; there is an equality between actual descent
and potential ascent of the centre of gravity of a system of moving
bodies. From Galileo's law of falling bodies the descent of each body is
proportional to the square of its velocity; the quantity mv 2 is conserved
in the descent and ascent of the centre of gravity of a system of bodies
([12J 18, 147,247,255). Bernoulli remarks that Huygens had regarded
his theorem of the conservation of mv 2 as a mathematical proposition,
a mere formula, without realizing its fundamental status as a general
dynamical natural law. Indicating his own espousal of Leibnizian
dynamics, he declares that "without recourse to nature and first
principles, the most important theorems degenerate into simple speculations" ([2J 3, 58).
While Bernoulli presents his "Disc ours sur . . . mouvement" as a
treatise on the motions and collisions of bodies which was essentially
Leibnizian in inspiration, there are important differences between his
argument and Leibniz's own presentation in "Specimen dynamicum".
Bernoulli's discussion is confined to the physics of Leibnizian derivative
forces. The Leibnizian theory of substance is basic to Leibniz's own
science of dynamics; derivative forces are phenomenal analogues of the
219
220
PETER M. HARMAN
221
through all possible intermediate degrees of motion; from which they conclude that
atoms, or any perfectly hard bodies, are impossible; because if two of them should meet
with equal motions, in contrary directions, they would necessarily stop at once, in
violation of the law of continuity ([17]87-8).
222
PETER M. HARMAN
223
224
PETER M. HARMAN
Bernoulli (in his "Disc ours sur ... mouvement") to the principle of the
conservation of vis viva as establishing the self-sufficiency and intelligibility of nature. To Bernoulli's claim that if "the quantity of vis viva, the
single source of the continuation of motion in the universe were not
conserved ... all nature would fall into disorder" ([2]3, 58), MacLaurin
countered with the Newtonian argument that "tho' the course of nature
was to be regular, it was not necessary that it should be governed by
those principles only which arise from the various motions and
modifications of un active matter, by mechanical laws" ([17]84).
MacLaurin's Newton concludes with discussion of the concept of
gravity, where these physico-theological arguments are further deployed.
Following Newton and Clarke he claims that gravity "seems to surpass
mere mechanism" ([17]387). Buchdahl has discussed the complex of
arguments arising from this claim, and writes that for Newton
the argument operates however at two different levels, a physical ... and a metaphysical level. It is physical when Newton argues that the growing irregularities in
astronomical motions, as well as the continual "loss of motion" [in inelastic collisions[,
require a power that will "reform" the parts of the universe at suitable moments in time .
. . . On the other hand, the "metaphysical" argument is quite different. ... He contends
that the existence of gravitational phenomena becomes rational (and thus real) only on
the supposition that they are an expression of divine providence, often described as an
"active principle" ... ([5J 179-80).
REFERENCES
I. Aiton, E. J., The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions (London: Macdonald, 1972).
2. Bernoulli, Jean, Opera omnia, 4 vo1s (Lausanne and Geneva, 1742).
3. Bos, H. J. M., 'Differentials, higher-order differentials and the derivative in the
Leibnizian calculus', Archive for History of Exact Sciences 14 (1974), 1-90.
225
CATHERINE WILSON
Abstract. Kant is generally held to have demonstrated the false pretence of a system
constructed on the order of Leibniz's Monadology to describe a supersensible or
"intelligible" reality. The Critique is thus conceived as superseding all previous
philosophical systems, which are thereby revealed as "dogmatic" or based on wishful
thinking. This is certainly the way Kant portrays himself in works dealing with the
subject of progress in metaphysics. However, when faced with what he regarded as the
corruptions of the contemporary Leibnizians, Kant could also depict himself as the true
defender of Leibniz and his own critical work as the key to the correct understanding of
the systems of the past. Clearly, then, the relation of Monadology to Critique is not
simply the relation of a conjecture to its refutation. The present essay examines some
aspects of Kant's own fascination with the idea of the supersensible, arguing that the
Critique is an attempt to unmake and then remake the notion in more serviceable form.
The relation between the Leibnizian and the Kantian phenomenalisms is discussed in
the main body of the paper.
Here, at last "it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived
at unity". We observe something of an inconsistency in this description
of "dialectic"; for although Plotinus contrasts "settling down" in the
world of the intellect with "wandering around" in the world of sense, it
appears that dialectic (or "metaphysics") is fairly busy with "wandering
around" the intelligible world until it achieves closure, unity, and rest.
This conception of an intelligible world which can be explored by
non-sensory means was one which Kant programatically rejected, while
retaining the spatial metaphor. Metaphysics in its first stage is "a
boundless sea in which progress leaves no trace and on whose horizon
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Eighteenth Centuries, 227-244.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Leibniz saw a clear relation - though it is not always easy to say what
this relation was - between his own discoveries about the conservation
229
of forces, and the discoveries of others about the new world revealed
by the microscope, and his metaphysical teachings. The Specimen
dynamicum, for example, moves back and forth between "empirical"
argument about pendulums, rotating and falling bodies, rebound, and
relative motion, and apparently non-empirical conclusions concerning
the relation between mind and body, the goodness of God, and the
distribution of vital principles throughout the universe. 3 In the New
Essays, he indicates that microscopical investigations into plants,
insects, and the comparative anatomy of animals should strengthen the
likelihood of his doctrines. "I am merely going on beyond our observations", he explains in this connection, "not restricting them to certain
portions of matter or to certain kinds of action ... the only difference is
that between large and small, between sensible and insensible"
([81 474).
Such presentations suggest that the "intelligible world" of the
Monadology is given simply by detailed attention to the consequences
of empirical observation and experiment: Leibniz is often concerned to
show that the ontology of the "Cartesians" or of the corpuscularians
who ascribe only magnitude, figure, and motion to their ultimate
particles runs into conflicts with experiment and observation. He tries
to show that the only way to bring the "sub-sensible" world into
alignment with the results of physical experiment is to make major
modifications in this ontology. But this involves in turn negating some
of the more evident revelations of sense-experience, notably its tendency
to turn up only objects possessing magnitude, figure, and rest-ormotion. When this pattern of argument is run out we can see that
Leibniz sometimes argues in a quite direct way for the extension of
observed properties into the subvisible realm (from animalcules to
unextended living beings); sometimes in an indirect way (from the
behaviour of billiard balls to the denial that, at some ultimate level,
substance is billiard ball-like). But these patterns of argument differ in
turn from the Leibnizian presentation of the sensible world as a
"picture" of a non-sensible world. Thus, in the New Essays, we read,
As for motion: it has only phenomenal reality, because it belongs to matter or mass
which is not strictly speaking a substance. Still there is a semblance of action in motion,
as there is a semblance of substance in mass .... I give to bodies only a semblance of
substance and of action, because something made up of parts cannot, strictly speaking,
be accounted a substance any more than a herd can .... Its unity comes from thought
([81 211 ).
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233
the things themselves and determining their possibility - a perfectly just criticism on
the assumption that we intuit things as they really are, although in confused representation ([41 A267/B323).
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235
When Kant claims that Leibniz took appearances for things in themselves, what could this conceivably mean? Does he not distinguish
consistently between sensible appearances and their causes, between
phenomena and the reasons for them? Or even, when in his Platonizing
mood, between intelligible substances and material objects?
Kant detects, nevertheless, a problem: Leibniz treats the objects of
experience as phenomena, acknowledging thereby that they depend on
our powers of representation. Yet he fails to see the implications of his
own position. For, he goes on to suppose that that whose existence is
not dependent on our powers of representation is an object of a special
type, and that the properties of these objects must call up spatial and
temporal relations. Had he realized that this power of representation in
us itself calls up spatial and temporal relations, he would not have
needed to seek the basis of these relations in the representations of the
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monads. What he was looking for in these remote objects lay all the
time close at hand.
Kant can, moreover, explain this delusion. Leibniz failed to see that
the principle of the identity of indiscemibles was entirely otiose in its
application to objects of sense. We do not require concepts to differentiate between, say, two matching armchairs. Such objects are already
perceived as having distinct spatial locations. What blinded Leibniz to
the consequences of this fact was his determination to find qualitative
differences even between two drops of water or two atoms. He
supposed, in other words, that water-drops (appearances) are differentiated by concepts (like things-in-themselves). Had he admitted that
water-drops and atoms can be identical in all respects except spatial
and temporal location, Kant thinks, Leibniz would have realized that
space and time are "prior to" substance and thus that monads were
neither objects nor the foundations of space and time. But why did
Leibniz suppose that the identity of indiscemibles should apply to the
objects of experience?
Here I think Kant has detected, in a way which is less than fully
explicit, the dual nature of the Leibnizian intelligible world as extension
and replacement. The principle in question shows this tension. Leibniz
sometimes presents it as a generalization from experience. In the
gardens of Herrenhausen, he argues, no two leaves are alike; and "two
drops of water, viewed with a microscope, will appear distinguishable
from each other". \2 So, one would be breaking abruptly with the
evidence of the senses if one were to assert that a qualitative uniformity
underlies all this variety. In this sense the Monadology just extends
absolute differentiation to the sub-sensible level. But the principle is
also asserted dogmatically in order to exclude the possibility of
identical atoms even supposing the microscope were to "reveal" them.
Given two identical-looking dust particles, the Leibnizian will argue
that this is only appearance, with apparent homogeneity disguising a
true heterogeneity. But given two dissimilar oak-leaves, the Leibnizian
will seize on this appearance as a true one, with evident heterogeneity
proving an unlimited one. This is not entirely fair.
Kant sees, moreover, that the extensive machinery of absolute
differentiation at the monadic level has been introduced in the hope of
giving a sense to the assertion that although A and B are not in fact
distinguishable by means of sense except by reference to spatial
position or temporal location, they are distinct in fact. The pathos is
237
that for all of this extensive machinery, Leibniz cannot even explain
what distinguishes the left-handed glove from the right-handed glove.
Taking space and time as "forms" and as prior to objects is a
hypothesis, which unlike Leibniz's, solves a problem.
Kant thus intends to show in this discussion that (a) the identity of
indiscernibles considered as a theory of logic could not be used as an
argument against atomism considered as a physical theory; (b) the
representations of the monads can never explain but only multiply the
instances of the problem of the nature of space and time; and, (c)
monads can not be objects, not even "intelligible objects". But the
attack is more comprehensive: Kant is concerned to show that Leibniz
has no tenable Appearance-and-Reality Scheme whatsoever.
The problem is that in doing so Kant appears to blend together
Platonizing scheme A and Mechanical scheme C. At one point he
ascribes to the Leibnizians the doctrine that "if one were completely
conscious of all the representations contained in the intuition of a body
that would ... provide a concept of it as an aggregate of monads"
([61 89). No doubt he was thinking of passages like the following in the
New Essays:
sensory ideas depend on the shapes and motions, which they precisely express, though
the mechanical motions which act on our senses are too small and too great in number
for us to sort out this detail within the confusions. But if we had arrived at the inner
constitution of bodies, these [sensible qualities] would be traced back to their intelligible
causes ([8] 403).
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Note that what Kant had identified as Leibniz's central error in the
Critique is here described as something which should not disturb us
once we have understood its point. But Kant of course does not
endorse the theory; he cannot accept that in addition to the mechanical
process of aggregation, and the psychological process of "composition"
belonging "not to sensibility's receptivity, but to the understanding as a
a priori concept" ([6] 85-7), there exists some wholly different type of
founding-procedure which takes simple substances as its material and
makes out of them divisible physical objects. The Leibnizians may have
got the doctrine all wrong in supposing the monads to be components
of physical objects, but there is no way of getting the doctrine right.
Kant is now in a position to introduce his own Appearance-andReality Scheme which differs significantly from A and C, while showing
certain noteworthy affinities with Leibniz's scheme B. Kant's intelligible
objects are limiting cases. They do not cause experiences, they do not
compose the objects we handle, they do not affect us. For the real,
intelligible object is simply the object of experience thOUght of in
abstraction from all possible empirical determinations, including causal
powers. Thus Kant can say, effectively shattering even the powerful
SchemeC:
239
Neither bodies nor motions are anything outside us; both alike are mere representations
in us; and it is not, therefore, the motion of matter that produces representations in us;
the motion itself is representation only, as also is the matter which makes itself known
in this way ([41 A387).
All this critical activity has its price. For both Leibniz and Kant - as
for the majority of seventeenth-century philosophers and perhaps for
everyone since - sensory experience presents a mystery. Why yellow,
why sweet, why violet-scented? Kant took Leibniz (who had no
tolerance for metaphysical mysteries) to be arguing that sensory
experience is possible and assumes the different forms it does because
it is a variety of something less inherently puzzling, namely thinking.
(Nobody asks: Why is it the nature of the mind to think?) In insisting
that cognition is not merely "logically" (i.e., as a matter of degree)
distinct from sensation, but typologically, Kant deprives himself of this
means of solving the mystery. The "secret of the source of our
sensibility" lies hidden "in the mind . . . so deeply concealed that we,
who after all know even ourselves only through inner sense and
therefore as appearance, can never be justified in treating sensibility as
being a suitable instrument of investigation ..." ([4] A278/B334).
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CATHERINE WILSON
241
The "intelligible world" is the moral world "in which we leave out of
account all the hindrances to morality" (the desires) creating thereby a
system "in which happiness is bound up with and proportioned to
morality". This "can be conceived as necessary" ([4) AS09/BS37). God
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CATHERINE WILSON
and a future life are thus "inseparable from the obligation which that
same reason imposes on us". Accustomed to Kant's minimalism in the
derivation of metaphysical necessities, we may be surprised to find that
the incommensurability between the ceremonies associated with human
generation and the spiritual dignity of man permits indeed the following
overwhelming transcendental hypothesis, a Plotinus-Leibniz-Swedenborg
gala production, to be asserted "defensively":
namely, that all life is, strictly speaking, intelligible only, is not subject to changes of
time, and neither begins in birth nor ends in death; that this life is an appearance only,
that is, a sensible representation of the purely spiritual life, and that the whole sensible
world is a mere picture which in our present mode of knowledge hovers before us, and
like a dream has in itself no objective reality ([4] A780/B808).
243
reason itself. They are thus incapable of recognizing beyond what the philosophers
actually said, what they really meant to say ([ 5J 160).
NOTES
I The author is grateful to the A. von Humboldt-Stiftung for support during the writing
of this paper in 1986.
2 Thus H. J. Paton presents Kant's analysis as follows: "because of his [Leibniz'sJ
uncritical assumption that pure concepts unaided by sense can give us knowledge of an
intelligible world, he is able to construct a theory - a very queer theory - of reality as
it is in itself" ([1 OJ 86). Kant does indeed describe pre-established harmony as "the
queerest invention" (das wunderlichste Figment). But Paton ignores the question
whether Leibniz did in fact uncritically assume that pure concepts unaided by sense
give us knowledge of an intelligible world, and as it turns out, Leibniz held no such
position .
.1 Specimen dynamicum (1695) ([7J 435-52).
4 Leibniz repeats these arguments against matter-and-motion frequently. See especially
the Correspondence with Arnauld ([7J 338,343); Specimen dynamicum ([7J 445).
5 [9J 39. Nietzsche described all such intelligible alternatives as "moral-optical illusion".
We discuss this problem below.
6 'On What is Independent of Sense and Matter' (1702) (Letter to Queen Sophie
Charlotte, 1702) ([71 549).
7 'On the True Theologia mystica' (c. I 690?)([71 368).
x 'Reply to the Thoughts on the System of Preestablished Harmony Contained in the
Second Edition of Mr. Bayle's Critical Dictionary, Article Rorarius' (1702) ([7J 584).
Y 'Reflections on the Common Concept of Justice' (1702?) (17J 563).
10 'On the Method of Distinguishing Real from Imaginary Phenomena' ([7J 364).
II 'What is Independent of Sense and Matter' ([71 548).
12 Fourth Letter to Clarke (1715-16) ([71 687).
IJ
14
15 [121 228f. This work was published after Kant had written his piece, which relied on
the 12-volume Arcana coelestia (1747-1753).
REFERENCES
I. Kant, Immanuel, Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1765), tr. J. Manolesco (New York:
Vantage, 1969).
2. Kant, Immanuel, 'Inaugural dissertation', in Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writings, tr.
and ed. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press,
1968).
3. Kant, Immanuel, 'Letter to M. Herz', in Philosophical Correspondence, 17591799, tr. and ed. A. Zweig (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1967).
4. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan,
1929).
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CATHERINE WILSON
5. Kant, Immanuel, 'On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure
reason has been made superfluous by an earlier one' (1790), in The KantEberhard Controversy, ed. H. E. Allison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973).
6. Kant, Immanuel, What Real Progress has Metaphysics made in Germany since the
Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (1793-1802?), tr. and ed. T. Humphrey (New York:
Abaris, 1983).
7. Leibniz, G. W., Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. E. Loemker (2nd
ed., Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969).
8. Leibniz, G. W., New Essays (1765), tr. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).
9. Nietzsche, F., Twilight of the Idols, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Middlesex: Penguin,
1968).
10. Paton, H. J., 'Kant on the errors of Leibniz', in Kant Studies Today, ed. L. W. Beck
(La Salle IL: Open Court, 1969).
11. Plotinus, Enneads, 6 vols, tr. A. H. Armstrong (London and Cambridge MA:
Heinemann, 1965).
12. Swedenborg, Emmanuel, Soul-Body Interaction (1769), in Emmanuel Swedenborg:
The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction, tr. and ed. G. F. Dole (New
York: Paulist, 1984).
OLIVER N. H. LEAMAN
Abstract. The human point of view is clearly an important topic for Kant, but is rarely
connected with his important discussion of indeterminacy. He makes a sharp distinction
between the precise notions of mathematics and the indeterminate notions of philosophy. Leibniz, by contrast, believed that a philosophy could usefully be constructed
consisting of determinate notions, with its paradigm God's clear and perfect view of
reality. What we perceive as confused is just a result of our limited view of what is
really clear and exact. Kant and Wittgenstein argue that we are obliged to base our
most important practices upon facts and not on a metaphysically sure foundation. Our
presuppositions will doubtless vary over time as our nature changes and develops, and
the validity of transcendental arguments will be accordingly limited. Justification must
take place within the same limited context as every other human activity, and cannot
transcend the bounds of possible experience.
In the many discussions which have taken place about what Kant means
by "object" or "transcendental idealism" or "the human standpoint" a
vital feature of Kant's thought is almost entirely ignored. This is his
thesis of indeterminacy. It is sometimes mentioned that Kant has something to say about indeterminate judgments, but this is never regarded
as being an important aspect of the critical philosophy. To a certain
extent this is because Kant's most developed comments on indeterminacy are placed towards the end of the Dialectic of the first Critique,
in the Discipline of Pure Reason, a region of the work which is
generally believed not to contain much of interest. Another reason for
treating this section with suspicion is that it is virtually identical to part
of a pre-critical work, and so on the "Patchwork Thesis" favoured by
Kemp Smith and many other commentators it may be regarded as not
integral to the critical thesis. But it will be argued here that it is
impossible to come to a complete appreciation of what Kant has to say
about idealism and objectivity without also taking into account what he
has to say about indeterminacy. In particular, his account of indeterminacy is closely related to his notion of the human standpoint and the
limitations which are involved in transcendental arguments. Yet this
doctrine of indeterminacy is generally ignored or even bluntly denied,
as in Korner's claim that "Kant also failed to consider the difference
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Eighteenth Centuries, 245-264.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Kant claims that empirical concepts are indefinable, and so indeterminate with respect to mathematical concepts. His definition of an
object of experience, though, is given in terms of the determination or
synthesis of a manifold in intuition. Once the elements that make up
experience are combined according to rule they make up an object, and
the rules only determine an object if they combine the experiences in
one way rather than another, so that they constitute one object or
sequence rather than another. The synthesis of a manifold in intuition
shows that an object can only be that kind of thing if it is determined in
just that way, and when undetermined the content of the intuition gives
us no idea of what characteristics the phenomenon possesses. But the
determinacy of the object of experience is only a relative determinacy;
it is relative to our point of view. Kant contrasts this limitation to a
point of view with Leibniz's notion of completeness. As we have seen,
Kant argued that a complete concept can only be given of invented
concepts. The seeds of this idea are to be found quite clearly in Leibniz.
Leibniz held that contingent propositions are only fully understood by
God, since any a priori proof of them would comprise an infinite
number of steps. We are essentially limited to a particular point of view,
or we have available to us a limited number of points of view, whereas
God knows the world from every possible point of view. It could be
said that God has no point of view, since any change in the distribution
of confusion involves a change in point of view and he is said to
perceive everything with complete clearness. It might be said that for
Leibniz's God all representations are perspicuous: nothing is hidden.
There is no confusion in the manner in which he maintains every
substance in existence by emanation, in the way that we produce our
thoughts. God is aware of the world in two ways not given to those
whose awareness is limited to a part of the world. He knows it as it
would appear to every possible point of view, as every possible monad
would perceive it, and he knows it in a way peculiar to himself ([5] sect.
14).
It is important to grasp what the nature of his perspicuity is meant to
be, since it will be used by Kant as the chief contrast notion to our own
way of knowing. According to Leibniz, when a subject-predicate expression (whether necessary or contingent) is true, the predicate is said to
be included in the subject, so that the concept of the predicate always
follows from the concept of the subject. Yet in a proposition like "All A
is P" the predicate "is a P" is not necessarily part of our understanding
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of the whole. Our understanding, as opposed to the divine understanding, is finite and does not possess an immediate recognition of its
own unity. Kant's distinction should be between two different kinds of
unity, not one kind of unity and something entirely other than unity.
This contrast between tbe intuitive intellect and the finite consciousness
tben can be used to bring out more clearly the nature of tbe limitations
of our point of view.
One might wonder, as Kant often does, how we could talk about the
intuitive intellect or the divine understanding, since is is clear that it is
not an object of possible experience. We might then insist that not even
the modal categories apply to it, since the categories apply only to what
is given in experience. The synthetic trutbs like the Axioms of Intuition,
the Analogies of Experience and the categories are necessary "relative
to tbe possibility of experience" ([2) A217/B264). To say that such
truths hold only of possible experience is to say that we can know
propositions like
(x) (x is an extended magnitude), and
(x) (if a state of x changes, that change in x has a cause)
to hold only if the values of tbeir variables are explicitly restricted to
empirical objects. But Kant argues in the Dialectic of the first Critique
and throughout the other two Critiques that the notion of God is
logically possible, and the use that can be made of it as a presupposition of the search for unity in nature and the possibility of moral action
being fully rational entitles us to regard it as actual and necessary as
well. The Fourtb Antinomy is supposed to prove that the notion of God
as creator of tbe world is free from contradiction, and so possible. Kant
often repeats this conclusion, that the concept of God is not selfcontradictory and that we may make it clearer by analogous reasoning,
yet it is evident tbat he does not in tbis way seek to derive the God of
religion. The last few chapters of the third Critique are particularly
explicit and almost violent on this point (see, for instance, the description of praying to God as "idolatry" at [3) 459). When Kant claims that
a particular concept of a thing in itself, such as God, the causa
noumenon, immortality, etc., acts as a necessary condition of the
possibility of adopting a certain point of view, he does not mean that
the entire concepts of these things in themselves must be presupposed.
That is why his discussions of concepts like that of God seem often so
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hollow. For instance, at one point he suggests that the meaning of the
regulative Idea of God is to be understood in terms of "divine wisdom"
or "a principle of its [nature's] systematic and purposive unity"
([2] B727). We are supposed to use just those aspects of the concept of
the thing in itself which are necessary conditions of what we seek to
justify, and ignore the rest of the concept which has no such use. We
are thus forbidden to "allow an exacted presupposition to masquerade
as a free insight" ([ 1] 8, 13 7).
There is, then, good reason to think that Kant felt himself only
entitled to postulate the possibility of the existence of such things in
themselves, in the same way as in the Refutation of Idealism only the
possibility of an external object's existence is presupposed. His claim
that we are entitled to think of things in themselves implicitly follows an
aspect of Leibniz's approach to the ontological argument, in which the
latter would accept the Anselmian formulation of the argument only
with the addition of a proof of the freedom from logical contradiction
of the concept of a most perfect being ([1]1, 386). Kant thought that
such a proof could be provided by the unschematized categories, which
can be applied to anything at all ([2] A254/B309). It is only when these
principles are mediated by the form of space and time and thereby
related to possible experience that they are limited to possible objects
of experience. As we have seen, Kant has two notions of possibility, one
of which is the logical notion which calls possible any proposition or
concept which is in accordance with the principle of contradiction. He
argued that the Wolffians did not realize that this principle is merely
logical and abstracts from all considerations of the relation between
thought and its object. It is a logical principle which determines our
concepts of objects and so does not extend our knowledge of the
character of such objects. In the Amphiboly Kant challenged the
Leibnizian philosophy for identifying our concepts of things with the
things themselves:
Leibniz erected an intellectual system of the world, or rather, believed that he could
obtain knowledge of the inner nature of things by comparing all objects merely with the
understanding and with the separated, formal concepts of its thought [leaving] sensibility ... only a confused mode of representation ([2] A2701B326).
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It is important to realize that one way of characterizing the difference between Kant and Leibniz may be expressed in terms of their
different views on determinacy. Leibniz thought that metaphysics
should consist of an investigation of concepts which are quite determinate, and since the most determinate view of the world that can be
adopted is God's, then the system of objects should be analysed from
God's point of view. God has organized the world in such a way that
the existence and nature of everything in it can be deduced from a few
supremely rational principles which represent the ground or explanation for the existence and properties of objects. Any more restricted
view which we adopt is a result of our being limited to a particular,
human, point of view, but even though we may not be capable of fully
grasping God's system and the place of everything in it, we can be sure
that behind what we regard as indeterminate there lies something quite
determinate, and what we see as inexact is really just our confused
apprehension of what is exact. Now, Kant's account is presented within
this context, and yet is radically different. For Kant, the non-mathematical concepts which we use are not indeterminate because we are
restricted in our point of view and so miss what is determinate about
such concepts. There is nothing precise "behind" the use of such
concepts, although there may be precise features of them. It is not as
though such concepts referred to objects, the hard and fast contours of
which the concepts imperfectly picture. Kant obviously thinks that
philosophical explanation in terms of such concepts is perfectly adequate, and that the implied Leibnizian move from the looseness of a
concept to its unsatisfactoriness is invalid. As he points out, this
Leibnizian move involves regarding objects of possible experience as
though they are logical objects, or things in themselves. Kant argues
that there is a vast difference between an object of experience and a
thing in itself. But Kant was enough of a Leibnizian to think that we
could only talk about being limited to a point of view if we can
conceive of not being limited to a point of view, and that talking about
objects as appearances presupposes being able to contrast them with
what a complete or perfect view of them would reveal.
Kant actually develops this point when he presents an account of the
indeterminate concept which characterizes aesthetic judgement. He uses
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the indeterminate concept to suggest that starting from different empirical premisses would lead to different conclusions about what the
conditions of possible experience would be. Aesthetic judgement is said
to be based on indeterminate concepts because in a type of aesthetic
contemplation no specific concepts are involved. We react to the
aesthetic object freely, where the imagination and understanding operate
in a free way in producing aesthetic pleasure. Our pleasure in beauty is
precisely the result of viewing an object as coming under some concept
or other. That is, we are free to see a work of art from different points
of view; some concept must be employed, but it is indeterminate which.
It is possible to have this free reaction because it is possible to see the
object from anyone of an infinite possible points of view. From such
points of view we cannot derive information nor produce objectively
valid judgements (although we do make claims for the assent of others).
This is why Kant thinks that art is the expression of the basic but
unavailable concept of man. The best means we have of grasping this
concept is through whatever it is that produces images of changing
patterns of purposive wholes without an underlying concept of purpose.
It is important to emphasise the freedom with which we construct such
patterns; there is nothing necessary about the sort of pattern we apply
to the object of aesthetic contemplation. We can produce no generally
valid theoretical propositions about the object as seen from such points
of view. The contingency of each act of aesthetic contemplation, in the
sense that it necessarily contains no particular concept, represents the
contingency of the human substratum. Art reveals what man is, but
never finally, because the fact that we have to use indeterminate
concepts means that nothing universally valid is produced, nor could it
ever be produced. The use of indeterminate concepts in aesthetic
appreciation reveals the lack of determinate knowledge we can have of
human potentialities, and so of the sorts of experience persons could
have. A note of caution should be introduced at this point. Kant is not
arguing that there are no limits on the type of experiences which we
could have of objects - he would be very much opposed to such a
thesis. He is arguing that our reactions to certain kinds of aesthetic
objects is such that no determinate concept is to be used as a description of such objects.
If our concept of man were determinate and perspicuously related to
other concepts, then we should not be limited in our point of view. The
determinate concept of man would be the same for anyone seeing it
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TRANSCENDENT AL REASONING
261
interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?
- Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very
general facts of nature.... But our interest does not fall back upon these possible
causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science. . . . I am not
saying: if such-and-such facts were different people would have different concepts (in
the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely
the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something
that we realize - then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be
different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the
usual ones will become intelligible to him ([ II] II. xii).
We should not take it that just because a change in such very general
facts has been noted that our practices must change - after all, we may
not consider such a change as being important. The point of discussing
such facts is to see what changes in our practices become intelligible. It
is not as though our practices are justified by their correspondence to
certain facts, until perhaps it is discovered that such facts no longer (or
never did) hold. When such facts break down we often, although
certainly not always, have a choice as to how to go on. There is no
general purpose with which our practices must accord, and so these
facts are not in general to be regarded as justifying such practices.
Such a state of anarchy would not be permitted to exist from a
perspicuous point of view, since the nature of both the world and our
concepts would be perfectly well known. There would be no room
for the uncertainty and various possibilities which exist in our limited
point of view with respect both to the world and to our concepts.
Wittgenstein's many discussions of the loose and yet somewhat obscure
relationship between the facts and our concepts brings out this point
well. If the notion of our point of view is to be taken seriously, and not
merely as something which requires analysing away into something
more perspicuous, then the indeterminate view we have both of the
world and of our concepts must be taken seriously too. On the
perspicuous point of view it is clear that the beliefs which are held are
certain and based upon something rational and necessary, such as the
metaphysical character of reality, and it would be illogical to challenge
such beliefs. The physical world, in Leibniz's view, has no reality in
itself but is merely a confused representation of something whose
essence could be apprehended by pure intellect alone. The monad is
not a sensible but an intelligible entity, and so could be viewed as the
ultimate subject of predicates. Reason can inform us of the principles
which characterize the world, and so we may class the confused view of
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OLIVER N. H. LEAMAN
The supremely rational basis which Leibniz provides for our criteria
of aesthetic appreciation, and for our investigation of the nature of
reality itself, is not available to us in Kant's view. From our limited
point of view only a very restricted class of propositions are logically
undeniable, and these do not significantly extend our knowledge in the
ways that Leibniz thinks possible. In addition, most of the propositions
which we call certain are based ultimately on an empirical fact, namely,
that we have certain characteristics. These characteristics and our
training lead us to accept that some propositions stand fast, while
others are dubitable. Yet as Wittgenstein argues in On Certainty, the
contingency of a proposition is no bar to its certainty and basicity in a
system. Such propositions may be doubted, but all that doubting does is
produce
concepts the possibility of which is altogether groundless, as they cannot be based on
experience and its known laws; and without such confirmation they are arbitrary
combinations of thought, which although indeed free from contradiction, can make no
claim to objective reality ([21 A223/B270).
TRANSCENDENT AL REASONING
263
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MICHAEL K. POWER
Abstract. Richard Rorty's recent challenges to the professional philosopher flow from
his distinctive interpretation of the modern tradition. He argues that its deepest and
most questionable presupposition is the notion of the mind as a mirror of nature - a
notion that requires "deconstruction" if philosophy is to return to the good faith of its
ancient role. Against Rorty I argue that his programme cannot be sustained in the
context of his account of Kant. I draw upon Buchdahl's reading of the Kantian text
which seems to offer an alternative "constructivist" path between the extremes of
foundationalism and relativism. Buchdahl's idea of philosophy as a multi-levelled and
hermeneutic enterprise underpins his model of the structure of Kant's thought. In turn
this model facilitates an interpretation that cuts though a number of the Gordian knots
that have obsessed Kant scholars - particularly those of the "thing-in-itself" and of the
concept of matter. On closer inspection there may be little here that Rorty's pragmatism
can dispute.
1. INTRODUCTION
265
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 265-279.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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MICHAEL K. POWER
267
Rorty claims that it is a short step from the "invention" of the mind as
an inner arena to the notion that such a mind can know itself and its
inner contents with (quasi-mathematical) certainty. By contrast, knowledge of an external world, a world that the mind's ideas purport to
represent or "mirror" faithfully, cannot match this degree of certainty. It
is the difference between these two modes of knowing that generates
the problems of scepticism. If all that the mind can truly know is its
own immediate contents, then how can it claim to go beyond? How can
we be sure that its ideas accurately represent the world as it is?
According to Rorty most modern philosophy addresses this problem
of "accurate representation" in one form or another. In contrast, those
thinkers who reject or deconstruct this central concern come to
recognize that philosophy has no special set of problems which give the
discipline any systematic unity. Rorty utilizes this schematic division
to categorize the leading historical figures. For example, the later
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Dewey were not centrally
concerned with the problem of accurate representation. Of their work it
has often been asked "But is it really philosophy?". The work of Hume,
Kant and Carnap does not evoke this question because it deals with a
recognizable set of philosophical issues at the heart of which lies that of
representation.
It is interesting to note that Rorty's categorization cuts across some
traditional distinctions between "Continental" and "Anglo-American"
philosophy. For example he concentrates upon the similarities between
positivists (e.g., Schlick) and transcendentalists (e.g., Husserl) which
serve to distinguish them from those features shared by pragmatists
(e.g., Dewey) and structuralists (e.g., Derrida). This provides a stimulating challenge to prevailing intuitions about the differences between
the Continental and Anglo-American traditions. However, the cutting
edge provided by the image of the mind as a mirror of nature is not
self-justifying and requires support from more localized analysis. I
propose therefore to consider Rorty's interpretation of Kant. While this
is essentially a separable discussion and not intended to prejudge his
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269
It is true that Kant seems to offer no arguments for his claim that
"combination" does not come to us through the senses. It is more a
central assumption in his system around which other claims are
constructed. Rorty pursues the point by arguing that the whole idea of
synthesis postulates an inner space in which the mechanics of combining take place. Thus Descartes had invented an inner space which
Kant further develops by ascribing to it an active role in the constitution of objectivity. However,
Why should we think sensibility "in its original receptivity" presents us with a manifold,
a manifold which, however, cannot be represented as a manifold until the understanding has used concepts to synthesise it? ([ 12]153).
Buchdahl's interpretation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy differs markedly from Rorty's. The problem of accurate representation implicit in the mirror of nature metaphor is supplanted by the
problem of intelligibility ([21 passim). Questions about the meaning of
the central concepts of the new sciences of mechanics are conducted at
the level of a meta-discourse. Rather than the quest for indubitable
foundations, Buchdahl offers the image of an emergent two-way
hermeneutic between science and philosophy in which each of the
central thinkers proceeds by way of model and analogy to sketch a
basic grammar of objectivity consistent with scientific discovery. Rorty
alludes to the self-defining nature of the epistemological language game
but this implies that it is a closed unity without connection to other
areas of intellectual endeavour. Such a view thereby understates the fact
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MICHAEL K. POWER
Kant's idea that human agents could only be capable of such access
counterfactually, i.e., if they were capable of intellectual intuition. This
counterfactual notion retains the logical form of rationalism without its
metaphysical substance. It only seems to posit a non-sensible realm of
"bjects until it is understood as Kant's explication of a necessary
component in the language of objectivity.
While objectivity is interpreted as that which appears, the "esse" of
objects is not solely "percipere". As is well known, Berkeley was forced
to modify his radical idealism and to utilize divine perception to
characterize reality. In other words he recognized that the ontological
status of objects could not be exhausted by their appearing relative
solely to human perceivers. Kant's notion of the thing-in-itself must be
understood as playing a similar role in serving to characterize that
aspect of experience for which we are not responsible, i.e., its givenness.
Appearing is always the appearing of something.
Buchdahl's distinction between phenomenology and ontology is
particularly important in making sense of this notion if it is not to
collapse under the almost Heideggerian pressures placed on the discourse. It can be said that in experience we are affected by objects.
Thus subjects do not (normally) create the experiences they undergo
but are affected by them. At the level of phenomenology such "affection" can only be understood as an oblique reference to the possibility
of a causal account being given of the physiological transactions
between perceiving subjects and a natural environment. While Locke
tries to invest this level of inquiry with metaphysical significance
Buchdahl wishes to distinguish it from Kant's position at the level of
ontology. Affection in this ontological sense is an aspect of objective
cognition as such. Part of the deep structure of objectivity is its capacity
to "affect" or to appear to SUbjects. Grammar appears to commit us to a
mysterious something that does the affecting, but Kant's intention is to
disregard any metaphysically realist interpretation of such a something,
retaining only its essential (transcendental) logic.
On the view expounded, the issue of the timelessness of the foundations of knowledge is secondary to the programme of providing a deep
interpretation of objectivity. In fact this is none other than a commitment to explicate the pragmatist's notion that "[m)ost of the world is as
it is whatever we think about it" ([13) xxvi). From Rorty's perspective,
attempts to supply interesting philosophical accounts of this claim are
riddled with confusion. From Buchdahl's perspective this is too super-
273
([141 15).
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MICHAEL K. POWER
A presupposes B
notA
ThereforeB
If one takes this as a schematization of "not-A is true" entails "B is
true" then this is valid as a presuppositional but not as a deductive
argument. This at least establishes some preliminary plausibility for a
distinctive notion of presupposition which is not reducible to implication. A more detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this essay but it
is worth stressing that even if a logic of presupposition holds together, it
is the content given to its symbols which conveys the substance of any
argument. For Kant's critical philosophy it is the idea of "capable of
being experienced by us" which guides that content. This has the effect
of moulding Kant into a verificationist until one recalls the specific
manner in which he requires a construction of the concept of matter in
sense experience. The concern for intelligibility or real possibility would
be unlikely to impress a verificationist for whom the phenomenological
fact of action-at-a-distance would probably be sufficient.
5. CONCLUSIONS
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Abstract. As the traditional criteria for the evaluation of hypotheses in terms of the
conceivability of their "inner nature" came into question towards the end of the
eighteenth century, Kant proposed in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
a new set of rational standards for the design of scientific explanation. Although this
work attracted a wider audience than has previously been suspected, it was poorly
understood, typically being caricatured as an a priori assertion of what must exist in
nature. The misconstruction of Kant's philosophy of science stemmed from radical
mistakes about the transcendental setting of the fundamental structures of the Critique
of Pure Reason, which prepared the way for Kant's views later to be merged with those
of the succeeding philosophical movement, Naturphilosophie.
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the MFNS ([31) 221 nl). The actual is much richer in detail than the
possible, and nature may always surprise us with subsets within,
refinements of, or developments from the merely possible, in which
instances our framing of hypotheses would have to advance beyond its
basic foundation in the MFNS, following nature into its own manifestations of the possible ([29) A87/B 120, A92/B 124, A 127, A165f/B206f).
Indeed, the significance of a metaphysics of nature is essentially negative ([29) A847f/B875f), showing what explanatory strategies would
not be able to argue for their acceptability by pointing to their relation
to the foundational factors of experience; though "non-possible" hypotheses of this sort are not for that reason impossible, just as "possible" hypotheses are not for that reason necessary ([32) 505f, 524).
Having thus detached the MFNS from the higher, necessary structures of the CPR above, it is now equally important to separate it from
the specific explanations of empirical physics below; for just as the
MFNS is not an integral part of the transcendental argument, so too it
does not belong to ordinary physics. Even the design of matter
proposed as a model in the MFNS only serves as a canon for the
development of lower-level, detailed hypotheses for physics - not
logically deduced from the argument of the MFNS, but merely confident that the imitation of its forms will at least yield "really possible"
hypotheses ([29) A847/B875 note a; (32) 525, 532). Specifically, the
picture of material extension offered, as consisting of opposed attracting and repelling forces in equilibrium, is not to be taken as positing
these forces as things really to be found in matter, or anywhere in
nature; rather, the MFNS only describes how the filling of space by
matter can be conceived: simultaneous movement in opposing directions, frozen in equilibrium, yielding extension. Forces cannot in any
case be posited a priori, but can only be given in experience
([29) A20f/B35, A206f/B252, A648ff/B676ff). When Kant urges that
the goal of simplification of empirically-given forces be their reduction
to such fundamental forces as are employed in the conceptual characterization of material extension, this does not mean that those fundamental forces are the general, physical basis of all others. Rather it is
just that the fundamental forces, having already shown their role in our
understanding of the most basic concept of physics - matter - now
emerge as well-founded constructs for the rest of physical theory, and
so are clearly to be favoured as concepts guiding the simplification
of nature. Kant himself seems to have taken his notion of fundamental
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this was known only in its relation to the individual, perceiving subject.
The categories were confined to appearances because these were taken
as all that the mind can grasp. But now an essential problem for the
MFNS emerges from this transcendental dislocation. Because reason,
understanding, and the transcendental determination of fundamental
order, together with ordinary scientific theorizing, all now find themselves displaced into the same location - the world of appearances "in
the mind" - there is no way to introduce that re-opening of the gulf
between subject and object in experience, which was so important to
Kant's argument. Because the control or lack of control of concept over
object was typically explained not logically but ontologically, once the
first and second applications of the categories were both crowded into
the same ontological setting, i.e., appearance for the individual subject,
there could be no difference between them ([20] 234f; [54] 97f). With
some few exceptions ([2]537; [55]2, 234f), Kant was thus seen as an
idealist ([80] 43), \0 and the problem of the CPR became one of bridging
from the functions of the mind and the appearances it "possessed" on
the one side to the world of "real objects" on the other ([69] 374ff). The
irresistible habit of conducting all philosophical analysis in terms of a
presupposed opposition of self and world, automatically taken as the
relevant framework for every topic, was the ultimate source of this
misinterpretation ([3] 36). Even the refutation of the idealism offered in
the second edition of the CPR was habitually analysed in terms of
the opposing self-in-itself and world-in-itself that very argument was
designed to overcome ([76] 225f; [82]178-183). This dualism reappeared as the ultimate context defining every argument, even if within
the argument the dichotomy had been eliminated. Armed with nothing
more than the crude opposition of "the mindlike" and "the thinglike",
Kant's contemporaries missed his fine distinction of varying levels and
modes of the encounter between the conceptual and the empirical,
essential to an understanding of the relation of the CPR and MFNS.
The ultimate result of the promotion of the work of the understanding, with its necessitating force, into the realm of ordinary
theorizing about nature - thus overlapping with or even displacing the
work of the MFNS which properly occupies this territory - is our
central concern. The first avenue to the promotion of the understanding
was the difficulty in visualizing how the first promptings to action on
the categories could be as dimensionless as Kant needed them to be.
The simple solution was to imagine them to be ordinary objects
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Pure natural science contains merely general laws a priori, without which no nature,
that is, no whole of the objects of experience can exist. It arises through the development of the necessary conditions under which an object can be sensibly intuited (given)
and conceived, that is, under which its manifold can be connected in a determinate
fashion. The subjectively necessary conditions of knowledge (experience) of an object
which lie in the human sensibility and in the human mind, are referred to things as
objects of sensibly understood knowledge, represented as conditions of their existence,
that is, a.s appearances. A priori, however, we cannot determine anything of the
particular kinds of natural objects, of what necessarily applies to them ... as natural
objects ([65[ 1,49f)Y
And in his dictionary guide to Kant, he can only formulate their difference as follows:
Theory of Nature: (a) General, pure, transcendental metaphysics of nature, ontology the investigation of the general and pure laws which make a nature in general possible,
without reference to particular, given natural things.... (b) Special, applied, metaphysical natural science; ... the application of those general laws of nature a priori to
particular, empirically-given objects of sense ([67] 277f, 392).
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the real forms through which empirical matter must come into being.
Then, curiously, all the Critical conceptual moments having been
hypostatized as the real, "empirical object of matter," this is in turn
taken as constraining us to interpret it as we do in the MFNS, because
it is "really given" to us as such ([171 SOf)!
Yet Eschenmayer is remarkable for having embraced the long
history of incorrect interpretation of Kant's philosophy of science and
transformed it into the beginning of a new perspective, a deliberate
confounding of the CPR and MFNS, opening a path by which Kantian
scientists could cross to Naturphilosophie. Where other interpreters of
the MFNS had wandered by error, Eschenmayer, like Schelling, would
go by design, and the following passage marks the historical transition
from the MFNS to Naturphilosophie. Only because he understood the
resistance of the MFNS to its accepted interpretation could he clarify
the nature of the step away from it:
In these various passages [in which Kant seemed to support both deductivist and
non-deductivist understandings of the MFNS[ a certain swaying from one side to the
other is noticeable. On the one hand it emerges that the possibility of all explanations in
nature should follow from the principles presented .... But on the other hand it is said
"that no law either of attracting or repelling forces may be ventured on a priori
assumptions, but that everything may be inferred only from the data of experience" ....
It suffices to understand the necessary assumption of those fundamental forces ... if we
put ourselves in the position of transcendental philosophy, giving to each of these
forces the exact qualities which could apply to it alone, in order to have sufficient
material for constructions in natural science. If we could still not comprehend ... the
possibility of the [application off the categories ... there must still be somewhere an
absolute proposition in which problem and solution, statement and proof coincide, in
which the conceivable comes to its conclusion ([ 17] 65-70).
This confidence that the first moment of the real is the identity of
concept and object is the credo of Naturphilosophie; but in contrast to
Kant, who sees this integration only at the foundation of transcendental
analysis and not in ordinary experience, Naturphilosophie, operating
with only one stage of analysis, sees the possible realization of concepti
object identity throughout experience. Eschenmayer continues:
There is no more in the concept of matter than we ourselves can put into it, that is, the
whole manifold of appearances belonging to material nature. .., [T]he sphere of
possible laws in general must be correctly delimited in a metaphysics of nature, and it
must contain the moments for every possible construction in natural science. Were
there to be other moments not in it and yet necessary for explaining natural phenomena, the question arises, in what area are they to be found? ... [T]he possibility of
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I Heidegger begins from a similar perspective, holding subject and object to be termini
only first isolated by analysis from what is phenomenologically always a single, unified
experience of subject-object relation in the process of knowing. Among Kant's contemporaries, Sieyes seems to have understood this same interpretive strategy (see [26]14,
484f).
2 Letter from G. C. Lichtenberg to Heyne, 27 April 1788 ([41] 2, 335).
3 Cf. Letter from D. Jenisch to Kant, 20 April 1796 ([27]12, 76).
4 Letter from L. H. Jakob to Kant, 24 January 1792 ([27)11, 305f).
5 Letterfrom H. Steffens to Schelling, January 1808 ([57]1,401).
6 Letterfrom Schelling to Hegel, 1795 ([52)1, 73).
7 Letter from C. S. Weiss to Oersted ([51]1, 309).
8 E.g. letter from C. G. Selle to Kant, 29 December 1787 ([27]10, 516f).
9 Cf.letter from Heinrich von Kleist, March 1801 ([48]8).
10 Letter from Reimarus to Mendelssohn, 14 June 1784 ([45]197).
II Asserted, for example, in Werner's paraphrasing of Girtanner's Ausfiihrliche
Darstellung des Brownischen Systems (Gottingen, 1797) ([85]1, 215f).
12 The same position is still being defended today (see [6]144, 147-150, 157).
13 A similar notion has been advanced recently (see [25]53).
14 Letterfrom Kant to J. S. Beck, 18 August 1793 ([27]11, 441).
303
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JOHN G. McEVOY
The Chemical Revolution occurred towards the end of the Enlightenment. The conflict between the antiphlogistic system of chemistry and
its phlogistic rival is usually associated with the names of two scientists,
Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley, who shared the rational and
liberal principles of the philosophes. Both men paid a high price Lavoisier with his life and Priestley with his home and country - when
they carried these ideals into the political arena. Despite the significant
philosophical and scientific differences that separated these two men,
the shared context of their similar political destinies points to deeper
levels of congruence between them. The unitary nature of the Enlightenment mind, and especially its view of the methodological unity of all
rational thought and action, signals the existence of significant links
307
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 307-325.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
308
JOHN G. McEVOY
between the scientific activities and the other views and practices of
these famous protagonists in the history of chemistry. Some of these
connections are already known to the historian, who can point to the
different rhetorical uses that Priestley and Lavoisier made of parallels
between the Chemical Revolution and the French Revolution ([9] chap.
14; [31] 57), to the influence that the philosophical views of Locke and
Condillac exerted on Lavoisier's chemical thought ([I]; [16]), and to the
relation between Priestley's theological, philosophical and political
interests and his work in electricity and pneumatic chemistry ([26][30]). With a view to a more extensive study of the Chemical Revolution
and its place in the wider scheme of eighteenth-century life, this essay
will concentrate on a comparative analysis of the thought of Priestley
and Lavoisier in order to elucidate the interconnections between some
of the core theoretical disputes of the Chemical Revolution and the
ideals and values which are generally taken as characteristic of the
philosophical mind of the Enlightenment. In this manner, the dialectical
relation between Lavoisier, the leader of the antiphlogistic party, and
Priestley, the lone defender of phlogiston, will be shown to recapitulate
the unity-in-diversity that characterized the Enlightenment as a whole.
The first point to be made about the relation between the Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution is an historiographical one. The
concept of a Chemical Revolution and the more general notion of a
scientific revolution did not flow ineluctably from the events they
sought to describe and were not generated in a historical vacuum.
Rather they were formed by forces inherent in the sociocultural
environment of eighteenth-century Europe. The Enlightenment was a
revolutionary ideology, in spite of the political moderation of its
champions. In the name of a rationalist and progressive individualism,
the philosophes sought to abolish the prevailing social and political
order, which shackled the free development of individual human beings
([19]34-5). These aspirations played a crucial ideological role in the
French Revolution, which was the most dramatic and significant event
in a wave of democratic revolutions which shook Europe during the last
quarter of the eighteenth century ([19]74-5, 79). These political
events exerted a powerful influence on the thought of the day, encouraging the emergence and development of new concepts and theories of
soCial and intellectual revolution; and these views were applied to the
articulation of a new historiography of the sciences. Towards the end of
the eighteenth century, an "older sense of 'revolution' as a cyclical
309
310
JOHN G. McEVOY
311
pursued radically different scientific objectives and reached fundamentally opposed conclusions within a shared framework of regulative
principles lends support to the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a
coherent and self-conscious movement of epistemological and methodological reform which encompassed a wide range of opinions and
doctrines about the world. As with other aspects and dimensions of the
Enlightenment, the philosophical and scientific differences between
Lavoisier and Priestley encompassed variations in cultural patterns and
procedures, as well as divergences in personal predilections and presuppositions. At the core of this dialectic was the polarity between
Lavoisier's notion of an active, social, hierarchical subject and Priestley's
concept of a passive, individualistic, egalitarian self. In this fashion, the
Enlightenment view of the self-defining subject was shaped according
to different structural and organizational features of French and British
science and society. The international unity of Enlightenment thought
encompassed considerable diversity at the levels of national and
individual consciousness ([36]).
THE ONTOLOGY OF CHEMISTRY
312
JOHN G. McEVOY
313
314
JOHN G. McEVOY
315
316
JOHN G. McEVOY
317
318
JOHN G. McEVOY
319
characteristic differences between his own empiricist orientation towards observation and experience and Lavoisier's rationalist preference
for theorising and reasoning.
Implicit in Priestley's criticism of Lavoisier's reform of the chemical
nomenclature was a rejection of the Classical identification of thought
and language with the construction of a conventional system of signs.
This strategy did not, however, lead Priestley back to the doctrine of
signatures, but to a third, intermediary position. He did not view words
as inhering in and resembling things; nor did he view them as constituted by the system of knowledge in which they occurred. For
Priestley, signs were neither resident in nature nor constituted by
thought. Instead they were anchored in facts and derived their signification from experience, which grounded thought in nature. In this
manner, Priestley's view of the cognitive status and function of language
marks an empiricist half-way point between the Renaissance doctrine of
natural signatures and the Classical theory of conventional signs.
THE INSTITUTIONS OF CHEMISTRY
320
JOHN G. McEVOY
321
322
JOHN G. McEVOY
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3.
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6.
323
324
JOHN G. McEVOY
28. McEvoy, John G., 'Joseph Priestley: "Aerial philosopher" ... Part 3', Ambix 25
(1978),153-75.
29. McEvoy, John G., 'Joseph Priestley: "Aerial philosopher" ... Part 4', Ambix 26
(1979),16-38.
30. McEvoy, John G., 'Electricity, knowledge, and the nature of progress in Priestley's
thought', British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979), 1-29.
31. McEvoy, John G., 'Enlightenment and dissent in science: Joseph Priestley and the
limits oftheoretical reasoning', Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983), 47-67.
32. McEvoy, John G., 'Causes and laws, powers and principles: The metaphysical
foundations of Priestley's concept of phlogiston', in Science, Medicine and Dissent,
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), eds. Robert Anderson and Christopher Lawrence
(London: The Wellcome Trust and the Science Museum, 1987),55-71.
33. McEvoy, John G., 'The chemical revolution: Continuity and discontinuity in
scientific change', in New Perspectives on the Chemical Revolution. Osiris, volume
4, ed. Arthur Donovan (Philadelphia: The History of Science Society, 1988).
34. Oldroyd, David R., 'An examination of G. E. Stahl's philosophical principles of
universal chemistry', Ambix 20 (1973),36-57.
35. Perrin, C. E., 'Lavoisier's table of the elements: A reappraisal', Ambix 20 (1973),
95-105.
36. Porter, Roy, and Mikulas Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).
37. Priestley, Joseph, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original
Experiments (London, 1767).
38. Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 3 vols
(London, 1774-7).
39. Priestley, Joseph, 'Experiments relating to phlogiston and the seeming conversion
of water into air', Philosophical Transactions 73 (1783), 398-434.
40. Priestley, Joseph, 'Further experiments relating to the decomposition of dephlogisticated and inflammable air', Philosophical Transactions 81 (1791), 213-22.
41. Priestley, Joseph, Heads of Lectures on a Course of Experimental Philosophy
(London, 1794).
42. Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations Relating to the Analysis of
Atmospherical Air. . .. To which are added Considerations on the Doctrine of
Phlogiston, and the Decomposition of Water (London, 1796).
43. Priestley, Joseph, Considerations on the Doctrine of Phlogiston and the Decomposition of Water, Part 11 (London, 1797).
44. Priestley, Joseph, 'Experiments relating to the calces of metals', New York Medical
Repository 2 (1799),249-57.
45. Priestley, Joseph, 'Experiments on the production of air by the freezing of water',
New York Medical Repository 4 (1801), 17-21.
46. Priestley, Joseph, The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established and that of the Composition of Water Refuted (Northumberland P A., 1803).
47. Schaffer, Simon, 'Priestley and the politics of spirit', in Science, Medicine, and
Dissent, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), eds. Robert Anderson and Christopher
Lawrence (London: The Well come Trust and the Science Museum, 1987),39-53.
48. Siegfried, Robert, and Betty Jo Dobbs, 'Composition: a neglected aspect of the
chemical revolution', Annals of Science 24 (1968), 275-93.
325
NICHOLAS JARDINE
Abstract. This essay argues for the fruitfulness of a historiography of the sciences
centred on changes in the horizons of disciplines through realization and dissolution of
questions. The approach is illustrated by an interpretation of certain developments in
natural history in the German lands in the years 1780-1811.
"By this, indeed, such a system finds the surest touchstone of its truth, that it not only provides a ready
solution to problems hitherto insoluble, but actually
generates entirely new problems ..." (Schelling,
System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) ([63[ 3,
330; tr. [64[ 1
1. INTRODUCTION
In the first part of my essay I shall tell a story about certain developments that occurred in the field of natural history in the German states
around the tum of the eighteenth century. My narration will be
deliberately thin and uninterpretive, a bare rehearsal of opinions and
speculations of a series of authors on the issues of development and
differentiation of living beings. In the second part I shall raise questions
about this chronicle of developments in German natural history. How is
the narrative to be read? What is going on in it? What is its plot? How
may it be elaborated, thickened up into a tale worth telling?
2. A TRANSFORMATION IN NATURAL HISTORY, 1780-1811
328
NICHOLAS JARDINE
ing to which the parts of the adult are formed by accretion of material
to parts preformed in the male or female germ. Instead he defends an
epigenetic account according to which parts are formed by concretion
and organization of originally homogeneous living matter. 2 In the much
revised 1789 edition he declares the following conviction based on
experiment and reflection.
That there is no such thing in nature, as pre-existing germs: but that the unorganized
matter of generation, after being duly prepared, and having arrived at its place of
destination takes on a particular action, or nisus, which nisus continues to act through
the whole life of the animal, and that by it the first form of the animal, or plant is not
only determined, but afterwards preserved, and when deranged, is again restored. A
nisus, which seems therefore to depend on the powers of life, but which is distinct from
the other qualities of living bodies (sensibility, irritability, and contractility), as from the
common properties of dead matter: that it is the chief principle of generation, growth,
nutrition, and reproduction, and that to distinguish it from all others, it may be
denominated the Formative Nisus (Bildungstrieb, or Nisus formativus).3
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
329
330
NICHOLAS JARDINE
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
331
332
NICHOLAS JARDINE
the force of sensibility ([34) 261). All this is very much in the
Blumenbachian manner. In notable respects, however, Kielmeyer's
Address transgresses the boundaries set by the BlumenbachlKant
scheme for research. Explicit transgressions include a passing remark
about the way in which one might seek to understand the emergence of
the first organizations on earth ([33) 262), and a tentative speculation
about a Grundkraft of which all forces in nature, organic and inorganic,
are manifestations ([33) 264; cf. [77)70). Implicit violations include the
recurrent reference to organs as "expressions" (Aeusserungen) of organic
forces and the claim that the entire course and condition of living
nature must "arise from" ( hervorgehen ) this balance of forces
([33) 265). Taken literally such language is entirely at variance with the
BlumenbachlKant scheme according to which the vital forces regulate
the organization of living matter and the functions of living organs, but
certainly do not constitute living matter or living organs.
In On the World-Soul of 1798, Schelling's second major essay in
Naturphilosophie, both Kielmeyer's law of succession of organic forces
and his speculations about a Grundkraft are cited with approval. Future
ages, Schelling claims, will recognise Kielmeyer's Address as marking
"the epoch of a wholly new natural history" ([63)2, 565). In his First
Outline of a System of Naturphilosophie of the following year these
themes are much elaborated. The inorganic Kriifte, magnetism, electricity and chemical process, are constructed as successive manifestations of a primordial conflict of forces; the vital Kriifte, sensibility,
irritability and the galvanic or life process are in tum constructed as
their higher analogues; and Kielmeyer's law of succession of vital forces
is derived a priori. Further, the priority of vital forces over vital organs,
adumbrated in Kielmeyer, becomes explicit: "Sensibility is there before
its organs have been formed; brain and nerves rather than being causes
of sensibility are themselves already its product" ([63)3,155).
In this context the programme for the ''wholly new natural history" is
set out. Schelling notes that some have misinterpreted the succession
of organizations (Stufenfolge der Organisationen) as evidence of a
genealogy of types, even supposing all types of living beings to be
progeny of a single ancestral type ([63)3, 62). This is impossible
Schelling claims:
The distinctness of the stages at which we now see the organizations fixed evidently
presupposes a ratio of the original forces peculiar to each one; whence it follows that
nature must have initiated anew each product that appears fixed to us ... ([63) 3,63).
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
333
334
NICHOLAS JARDINE
when their power falls short of their understanding ([551264 ff). Such
is the natural history elaborated by Oken in his Lehrbuch der
Naturphilosophie, 1809-11.16
Oken's Textbook is ambitious. In it he offers nothing less than a
derivation, from the original zero and its polarization into the positive
and negative series of numbers, of the whole system of "products of
nature", organic and inorganic, together with their principal activities
and functions. The number three plays a central role. From the first,
second and third "potencies" of nature there emanate three histories of
development and differentiation, a history of the heavens, a history of
the earth, and a history of "the organic". The work is set out in 3562
numbered paragraphs, some consisting of single pronouncements, some
containing a cluster of related pronouncements. Many of Oken's dicta
are on a first reading opaque: "The organic must be a vesicle because it is
the image of the planet"; "The animal kingdom is but a dismemberment
of the highest animal, man"; "A fish is a mussel from between whose
shells a monstrous abdomen has grown".
The third volume of the Textbook deals with the development of the
animal kingdom. In its preface Oken boasts that he has "established for
natural history grounds of classification that are entirely new, covering
the whole body and applying to all animals" and that he has "on that
basis arranged all the animals according to their faculties" ([521 3,
iv-v). He goes on, in an aggrieved vein, to insist that he does not dash
off just anything that comes into his head, but that his work is considered and methodical. 17 One of the methods he has followed he calls
"the factual (siichlich) method". It is a constructive method which
"always links the object which follows with the most important of the
preceding ones". His other method, the naturphilosophisch, exploits
correspondences between part and whole in the cosmos. To exemplify
the two methods Oken instances his two derivations of the thesis that
the primordial organism from which all others are composed is a
vesicle (Bliischen). According to the siichlich method "the organic must
become a vesicle, since it is a galvanic process which can take place
only between the elements. The action of air is necessarily an external
one, so it divides the slime inwards into the earthy and the watery, cell
wall and cell content". According to the naturphilosophisch method
"the organic must be a vesicle because it is the image of the planet".
The core of Schelling's technique of Konstruktion is a dialectical
procedure whereby successively "higher" and more specialized natural
335
336
NICHOLAS JARDINE
TABLE I
Oken's construction of the series of classes of animals (based on 152, 1843 ed.1 484-5.
In the earlier editions only four circles are recognized).
DOMINANT DOMINANT DOMINANT
ELEMENT SENSE
ORGAN-SYSTEM
Gastric
Alimentary Intestinal Protozoa
Absorbent
Earth
Water
Tactile
Air
Fire
I
I
I
CIRCLES
Taste
Smell
Hearing
Sight
Venous
Vascular Arterial
Cardiac
Conchozoa
Cutaneous
Respiratory Branchial Ancyliozoa
Tracheal
Osseous
Muscular
Sarcozoa
Nervous
Sensory
Aesthesiozoa
CLASSES
I
I
I
I
Infusorians
Polyps
Jellyfishes
Shellfishes
Snails and Slugs
Squids
Worms
Crustaceans
Insects
Fishes
Reptiles
Birds
Mammals
337
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
are iteratively applied within each class to determine and rank orders,
families, genera and species. The resultant scheme is of extraordinary
complexity. In it there are correspondences between types of different
categories in the hierarchy: such is the parallel between classes of
animals and families of birds and fishes shown in Table II. There are
also correspondences between "lower" and "higher" types of the same
category: such are the parallels between orders of fishes and orders of
birds and between families of fishes and families of birds shown in
Table II. Finally, there are correspondences between stages in the
development of the individual organism and the stages of development
of the entire animal kingdom. In the course of its development an
organism of a given type passes in tum through stages representative of
each of the classes that rank below the class to which it belongs.
All these correspondences are reflected in "analogies" of anatomical
structure; and it is in connection with such analogies that Oken makes
some of his most bizarre-sounding claims - that the limbs of insects
are the ribs of mammals, that the fish is a mussel from between whose
shells a monstrous abdomen has grown, and so-on.
TABLE II
Parallelisms in Oken's system (based on [52, 1831 ed.[ 40; in the first edition only
parallelisms of orders of animals are worked out).
CIRCLES
CLASSES
ORDERS
FAMILIES ORDERS FAMILIES
OF ANIMALS OF ANIMALS OF FISHES OF FISHES OF BIRDS OF BIRDS
Protozoa
Conchozoa
Ancyliozoa
Sarcozoa
Aesthesiozoa
!
!
Infusorians
Polyps
Jellyfishes
II
Worms
Crustaceans
Insects
III
Fishes
Reptiles
Birds
Mammals
IV
V
Eels
Haddock
Gobies
II
Tunnies
Bream
Perch
III
Herrings
Salmon
Pike
IV
Sharks
I
I
!
!
Tree-creepers
Woodpeckers
Cuckoos
Lampreys
Pipefishes
Shad
Shellfishes
Snails and Slugs
Squids
I
I
!
!
Sparrows
Crows
Parrots
I
I
Song-birds
Fly-catchers
Hawks
Geese
Herons
Fowl
Bustards
338
NICHOLAS JARDINE
3. READINGS AND ELABORATIONS
What kind of story has just been told? What is the significance of this
chronicle of opinions on the scope, content and methods of natural
history?
One type of answer can be ruled out with confidence. This can
hardly be read as a story of scientific progress. From the standpoint of
our biology the natural historical concerns of Blumenbach, Kant,
Kielmeyer, Schelling and Oken are entirely alien. This alienation does
not arise from their having given what are, from the standpoint of our
biology, largely false answers to genuine questions. Nor does it arise
from their having addressed what are, from the standpoint of our
biology, genuine but eccentric or uninteresting questions. Rather, I
suggest, the alienation is engendered by their having addressed what are
for the most part, from our standpoint, unreal questions, questions that
do not have true direct answers. If pressed to pass judgement on the
developments retailed here, we may well conclude that in the relevant
period German natural history was not by present-day standards "on
the secure path of a science". But there is little scope for further
evaluation - too few of the protagonists' beliefs were, by our lights,
even candidates for truth.
More profitable perhaps are readings that would cast our story into
one of the various genres of "history of ideas"; for these are genres that
can be pursued without undue regard to the reality of questions or the
truth of answers. In accordance with the traditional type of history of
ideas one may read the story in terms of motifs, themes and topoi, their
sources and their fortunes. To thicken our story into an interesting
specimen of this genre we would have to undertake some prosopography: Who taught whom? Who read whom? Who corresponded with
whom? etc. We would have to embark on some philology, investigating
in detail the roles and connotations of key terms - Organisation,
Stufenfolge, Dijferenzierung, etc. Above all, we would have greatly to
refine (and doubtless correct and qualify) our account of the various
authors' natural historical beliefs, as well as attempting to relate them to
their entire systems of beliefs. In fact, there is a substantial body of
distinguished work in which parts of our story are elaborated along
such lines. I have particularly in mind Reinhard Low's work on Kant's
treatment of living beings, Dorothea Kuhn's studies of Kielmeyer's ideas
about vital forces, the accounts of Kuno Fischer and Dietrich von
Engelhardt of aspects of Schelling's conception of the living world, and
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
339
Gunther Busse's study of Oken's natural system ([46], [36], [37], [22],
[21], [11 ]).
In accordance with the currently more fashionable "collectivised"
mode of history of ideas our story would be read as a sketch for an
account of the development of certain research programmes (schools,
traditions) in natural history. To thicken the narrative into such an
account the primary task would be to show that the beliefs retailed are
suitably representative of consensuses in communities of inquirers in
natural history and cognate fields. Timothy Lenoir, to whose work this
essay is greatly indebted, has documented the existence of a "Gottingen
School", whose natural historical and physiological researches were
prosecuted under the aegis of the Blumenbach/Kant scheme ([43]). It
is my impression that a school of comparable extent pursued natural
historical activities under the aegis of Schelling's Naturphilosophie in
the German states in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.
Of the many objections that may be levelled against "history of
ideas" approaches to the historiography of science, I believe two to be
of special cogency. First there is the now standard objection that such
approaches are too "intellectualist", failing as they do to take account of
the socially-embodied practices that engender and sustain scientific
beliefs. A second objection is that such approaches skip too blithely
over the dark abyss of time: with their emphasis on continuity, they
familiarize and assimilate too facilely past beliefs that are, properly
understood, entirely alien. The two weaknesses are intimately related,
or so I shall suggest.
Consider yet again some of Oken's wondrous pronouncements: ''The
organic must be a vesicle because it is the image of the planet"; "The
animal kingdom is but a dismemberment of the highest animal, man";
"A fish is a mussel from between whose shells a monstrous abdomen
has grown". I hope my story has shown that the way in which we are
alienated from Oken's beliefs does not have to do primarily with
understanding. We come to understand the questions Oken addressed
by seeing how his methods of inquiry enable him to get to grips with
them. But such understanding does not make the questions any the more
real for us. Nor is the problem one of interest, salience or centrality. The
unreality of Oken's questions for us does not result from our finding
them dull, obscure or marginal. The problem is rather that from our
standpoint the questions Oken addressed simply do not have true direct
answers.
The reading of the story that I advocate construes it as having the
340
NICHOLAS JARDINE
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
341
of the formative drive and mediate its operations. On the other hand a
considerable body of fundamental questions is explicitly invalidated,
being declared to be in principle beyond the range of evidential
considerations. Types of questions thus invalidated include: questions
about the underlying reasons for the apparent harmony between
mechanism and purposive formation in living beings; questions about
the inner nature of the formative drive and its immanence in living
matter; and questions about the way in which the original organizations
themselves came into being.
Kielmeyer's Address appears on this reading as in the most literal
sense an original work. His metaphors and speculations render vivid
and challenging questions about the genesis of living organizations and
the inner nature of the vital forces, questions that the Blumenbach/Kant
scheme had ruled out.
In Schelling's early works there is elaborated a rich and powerful
methodology designed to engage with questions of types that the
BlumenbachlKant scheme had placed beyond "the bounds of sense".
Here we find fully articulated and validated questions about the
underlying grounds of purposive development and differentiation in
nature; questions about the origin and inner nature of the life forces;
questions about the ways in which the life forces are materialized as
functioning organs; questions about the genesis of the entire sequence
of living beings. Schelling leaves us in no doubt that his breaching of the
barriers erected by the BlumenbachlKant scheme is a deliberate one:
for example, he remarks bluntly that the answer to those who assume
that it is impossible to "go beyond" the Bildungstrieb are best answered
by doing so ([63) 2, 529).
Oken's Textbook of Naturphilosophie appears on this account as one
of the many attempts by Schelling's followers to answer the vast range
of questions about the origin and differentiation of living beings
validated by the Schellingian methodology.
How should we proceed in fattening up our slender narrative into a
proper essay on change in the horizon of a discipline? An obvious
requirement here, as in the case of the "collectivised" version of the
"history of ideas", is the identification of communities of inquirers
whose researches were guided and informed by the beliefs we have
retailed. As mentioned above, a "Gottingen School" of natural history
and physiology has been well documented; but much further research
on naturphilosophisch natural history and physiology is needed to
342
NICHOLAS JARDINE
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
343
344
NICHOLAS JARDINE
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
345
346
NICHOLAS JARDINE
REALIZATION OF QUESTIONS
347
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35. Kieser, D. G., Entwurf einer philosophischen Geschichte der Medicin (Halle,
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40. Lenoir, T., 'Kant, Blumenbach, and vital materialism in German biology " Isis 71
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42. Lenoir, T., 'Teleology without regrets. The transformation of physiology in
Germany: 1790-1847', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 12 (1981),
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43. Lenoir, T., The Strategy ofLife (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982).
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45. Leupoldt, J. M., Allgemeine Geschichte der Heilkunde (Erlangen, 1825).
46. Low, R., Philosophie des Lebendigen. Der BegrijJ des Organischen bei Kant, sein
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(1982),357-72.
48. Oersted, H. c., 'Betrachtungen iiber die Geschichte der Chemie', lournal for die
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49. Oken, L., Obersicht des Grundrisses des Systems der Naturphilosophie und der
damit entstehenden Theorie der Sinne (Frankfurt, 1804).
50. Oken, L., Abriss der Naturphi/osophie bestimmt zur Grundlage seiner Vorlesungen
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53. Oken, L., Principles of Physiophilosophy, tf. A. Tulk (London, 1847) (Translation
of 152, 3rd ed.1)
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350
NICHOLAS JARDINE
DWIGHT BARNABY studied German literature, history and philosophy at Harvard, M.LT. and Yale before doing research at Cambridge in
the history and philosophy of science under Gerd Buchdahl's guidance.
He has more recently been a student of natural science at the Universities of Berlin and Dusseldorf.
ROBERT BUTTS studied at Syracuse University and the University of
Pennsylvania. He has taught at a number of universities in the United
States of America and in Canada where he is now at the University of
Western Ontario. He is editor of Philosophy of Science, and has written
Kant and the Double Government Methodology (1984), and edited
William Whewell's Theory of Scientific Method (1968), The Methodological Heritage of Newton (1970), and Kant's Philosophy of Physical
Science (1986).
STEPHEN GAUKROGER studied philosophy at Birkbeck College,
London, and then at Cambridge where his PhD. (1977) work on
scientific explanation was supervised by Gerd Buchdahl. He has been a
Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge and at the University of
Melbourne. Since 1981 he has taught at the University of Sydney. He
has written Explanatory Structures (1978) and edited Descartes (1980).
PETER HARMAN was a colleague of Gerd Buchdahl at Cambridge in
the early 1970s. He is now in the Department of History at the
University of Lancaster. He has written Energy, Force, and Matter. The
Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (1982) and Metaphysics
and Natural Philosophy (1982), and edited Wranglers and Physicists.
Studies on Cambridge Physics in the Nineteenth Century (1985).
MARY HESSE studied mathematics at Imperial College, London and
history and philosophy of science at University College, London. She
has lectured in mathematics at London and Leeds Universities and
in philosophy of science at London and at Cambridge. From 1960
351
R. S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, 351-354.
1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
352
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
353
354
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Humanities. Her contact with Gerd Buchdahl began in 1980 when she
attended his Kant lectures. Since 1978 she has taught at the University
of Oregon. She has written articles on Descartes, and is working on a
book on Leibniz's natural philosophy.
ROGER WOOLHOUSE graduated in philosophy at University College, London, and then went to Cambridge where he worked on
Locke's philosophy of science for a PhD. (1968) under the supervision
of Gerd Buchdahl. He has taught at University College, Cardiff, and,
since 1968, at the University of York. He has written Locke's Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (1971), Locke (1983), The Empiricists
(1988), and edited Leibniz: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science
(1981).
INDEX
Aarsleff, H. 210
Abel, J. 346, 347
Abrams, M. 210
Adam 79,186,188,189,199
Aepinus 287
Aggiunti, N. 54, 70
Agricola, R. 108, 109
Agrippa, H. 22,78,79,94
Aiton, E. 224
Albury, W. 322
Aldobrandini, Cardinal 63
Alsted, J. 108
Anselm 256
Apel, K-O. 210
Apelles 54, 67
Apuleius, L. 34, 39
Aquinas, T. 34,39,109,112-14,123,
Baier, K 2
Baillet, A. 73,75-77,81,86,88,97,
98
Baker, K 322
Balan, D. 347
Barberini, F. 50,51
Bardi, G. 71
Barnaby, D. 351
Barnouw,J. 210
Baron, W. 39
Bavaria, Duke of 49
Bayle,P. 136,147,169-71,178,180-
82,243
Bayley,S. 174,182
de Beauval, B. 169
Beck, J. 294,297,302,303
Beck,L. 12
Beekman, I. 78,79,94,97
Bellarmine, R. 57,60,62,63
Bennett, J. 12
Bentivogii, O. 47,68
Bergin, T. 192, 208
Berkeley, G. 12,219,249,272,275
Berlin, I. 210
Bernegger, M. 71
Bernoulli, J. 152, 154, 181, 213-24,
124,129
Arbib, M. 210,352
Archimedes 52,69
d'Argensola 70
Aristotle 2, 17-23, 28, 29, 32-5, 39,
58,75,83,91,96,98,105-11,11315,11~121,122,13~15~19~ 194,
197,201,207,209
Arnauld, A. 115, 152, 165, 167-72,
176,177,180,181
Arnold,P. 98
Astrabel 97
Augustine 20,23,24, 39,249
de l'Aunay, G. 95
Ausonius 86
Averroes 19,39,112
Aversa, R. 114
Avicenna 39, 112
238,243
Bird,G. 12
Blanch, J. 114
Blumenbach, J. 327-32,338-42,345,
347
Boethius 107, 108
B6hme,J. 22
Bolgar, R. 39
Bonaventura G. 34,39
Boole, G. 127
Borghese, Cardinal 66
Borgia, Cardinal 63
Borromeo, Cardinal 63,70
Borsche, T. 39
192,197,205,207-9,319
Bacon, R. 96, 98
355
356
INDEX
Bos, H. 224
des Bosses, B. 137,158
Boyle, R. 17,32,33,38,39,209,234
Bramer, B. 97
Brastberger, M. 303
Braun, L. 347
Brengger,1. 37
Brittan, G. 12, 13,275-77,279,303
Broad, C. 182
Brown, S. 182
Brumfitt,l. 322
Bruno, G. 22,25, 39
Bryk, O. 303
Buchdahl, E. 1
Buchdahl, G. 1-7,9-16,93,98,128,
130, 157, 163, 185, 213, 214, 224,
225, 265, 266, 269-74, 276-80,
303,322,345,347,351-4
Buchdahl, M. 1
Buonamici, F. 68
Burke, P. 210
Burman, F. 95,120
Burton, R. 96, 98
Buscherus 108
Busse, F. 288,303
Busse, G. 339, 347
Butterfield, H. 2
Butts, R. 12, 351
Cabero, C. 114
Caccini, T. 55,56,64
Caesarius 109
Calcidius 25, 34, 36, 39
Calvin, 1. 68
Campanella, T. 22,24,27,35,39,84
de Candalle, F. 77
Cantelli, G. 206,210
Capella, M. 36, 39
Cardano,l. 22,23,88
de Careil, F. 74
Carnap, R. 267
Carugo, A. 71
Carus, C. 347
Casilius, A. 114
Cassirer, E. 274,279,322,323
Castelli, B. 50-6,60,68,70
Caton, H. 130
Cesarini, V. 64,65.70
Cesi, F. 49,63,64,68
Chanut, H.-P. 74
Chastel, A. 98
Chiaramonti, S. 54
Christina, Grand Duchess of Lorraine
54,55
Ciampoli, G. 70,71
Cicero, M. 97,98,107,109,206
Cigoli, L. 55,68,70
Clagett, M. 39
Clarke, D. 98, 130, 150
Clarke, S. 135,143,144,151,174,182,
214,223,224,243,275
Clavius, C. 36,37,58,60,67,70
Clerselier, C. 74,95
Cohen, I. 39, 323
Colanna, G. 71
Coleman, W. 347
Coleridge, S. 300,303
Collingwood, R. 188
Collins, H. 348
dele Colombe, L. 51-3, 69
Compotista, G. 108
Conant,J. 2
de Condillac, E. 308, 312, 314. 315,
317,320,323
Conti, Cardinal 55,70
Copernicus, N. 24, 26, 40, 46, 54, 55,
60-67,69,70,299,301
Cornmann,1. 182
Costabel, P. 97,98
Cotes, R. 39
Couturat, L. 150
Cratippus 97
Crombie, A. 71
Crosland, M. 323
Cross, S. 346, 348
Cunningham, A. 345
Curti us, E. 130
Cusanus, N. 17,21,22,24-27,35,40
Cuvier 336,345,347
de Dainville, F. 71
Daudin, H. 348
Davidson, D. 268
Debus, A. 98
INDEX
Dee, J. 77,78,94
De Mas, E. 210
De Mauro, T. 210
Derrida, J. 267
Descartes, R. 12, 29, 30, 33, 37, 40,
66, 71, 73-98, 101-30, 141, 144,
165, 166, 172-79, 181, 182, 188,
197, 201, 207, 209, 229, 234, 26567,269,271,313,353
Desmaizeaux, P. 95
Dewey, J. 267,268
Dicaearchus 97
Diderot, D. 30,40
Diemer, A. 40
Dieteriei, F. 40
Digby, K. 95
Dijksterhuis, E. 40
Dilthey, W. 209,283, 303
Dini,P. 70
Diodati, E. 68,71
Dobbs, B. 324
Donovan, A. 323
Dortles, G. 203,210
Drake, S. 40
Ducasse, C. 182
Duchesneau, F. 348
Dummett, M. 130
Duns Scotus, J. 124
Eagleton, T. 323
Eberhard 238,242
von Eberstein, W. 303
Ecker, A. 348
Eckhart, J. 34,40
von Eckhartshausen, K. 303
Edwards, P. 2
d'Elci, A. 52
d'Elci, O. 70
Elizabeth, Princess 88, 97
Ellis, B. 128, 130
Emerson, W. 38
von Engelhardt, D. 303,338, 348
Eriugena,1. 19,34
Eschenmayer, A. 297-300,303
d'Este, Cardinal 63,70
Euclid 77
Eugen, K. 331
357
Euler, L. 221
Faber, B. 36
Faber, J. 49,68
Fabri, H. 139
Faulhaber, J. 77,85,97
Ferrier,1. 78
Fichte, J. 295,299, 300, 303
Fieino, M. 23,25,40
Fillipi 181
Fiorontino, F. 40
Fisch, M. 192, 195, 208, 210
Fischer 288
Fischer, K. 338,342, 348
Fludd, R. 81
Fonesca, P. 114
de Fontenelle, B. 137
Forster, E. 37
Foscarini, P. 62,65
Foucault,M.317,323
Frankel, M. 208, 210
Frascatoro, H. 22, 96, 99
de Foix de Candalle, F. 77
Foucher, S. 165, 180
Frege,G. 105,127,128,130
de Fresnoy, L. 93
Friedman, M. 13
Fries, J. 303
Funkenstein, A. 211
Gabrieli, G. 71
Gadamer, H.-G. 211
Gale, G. 182
Galen 23,75,113
Galilei, G. 23, 25, 26, 28-30, 36, 40,
45-72, 82, 90, 94, 125, 187, 195,
209,218
Garasse, F. 76,77,94
Garber, D. 174, 182
Gardiner, P. 190, 211
Gasking, E. 348
Gassendi, P. 49,68,82,139,141
Gaukroger, S. 130, 351
Gebhard, H. 149
Gentzen, G. 117
Ghisilieri, F. 64,65
Gibson, B. 2
358
Giggi 70
Gilbert, L. 304
Gillies, S. 33
Gilson, E. 40,82,99,129,130
Girtanner 302
Giuliani, A. 211
Goclenius, R. 40
von Goethe, J. 331,344,347,348
Goldbeck, J. 304
Giirres, J. 346
Gouhier, H. 84, 85, 88, 99
Gould, S. 348
Griiffe, J. 289,304
Grassi, E. 211
Grassi, O. 60,61, 65-8, 70
di Grazia, V. 68
Gregory XIII, Pope 57
Gregory of Nyssa 36
Grienberger, C. 60,67
Grohmann, J. 304
Grosseteste, R. 26, 30, 36, 40
Griinder, K. 42
Gualdo, P. 48,68
Guerlac, H. 323
Guicciardini, P. 70, 71
Guidicci, M. 45,46,67,68
Habermas, J. 211
Hacking, I. 103-5, 128, 131
Hall, A. R. 3,225
von Haller, A. 345
Hankins, T. 323
Hannaway, O. 323
Hanson,N. 3
Hardy, G. 103
Harman, P. 225, 351
Harney, M. 71
Harre, R. 38, 40, 304
Harris, J. 31
Hartley, D. 314
Harvey, E. 131
Hedwig, K. 40
Hegel, G. 33,40,266,302
Heidegger, M. 267,272,302
Heimann, see Harman
Heimsoeth, H. 348
Heischkel, E. 348
INDEX
van Helmont, F. 22, 35
van Helmont, J. 22,35,88,99,141
Hentisbury, J. 77
Herbert, E. 117
Herder, J. 346,348
Herz, M. 232
Hesse,M.21O,211,274,279,351
von Hessen-Rheinfels, E. 151
Hevelius,1. 26
Heydon, C. 37
Heyne, C. 302
Hintikka,J. 12,128
Hobbes, T. 139, 142, 144, 148, 18689,192,195,205,209,211,266
Hobsbawn, E. 323
Hiiffding, H. 182
von Hohenburg, H. 27,37
Hollis, C. 71
Homer 195
Hooke, R. 38,40
Horvarth, J. 37
Howell, W. 129,131,211
Hiibner, K. 41
Huet,D. 81
Hugh of St. Victor 36
von Humboldt, W. 304
Hume, D. 10, 12, 267, 275, 291,
293
Hungerland, I. 209
Hunter, J. 346
Husserl, E. 41,267,270
Huygens, Christiaan 38,41,172,219,
222,223,225
Huygens, Constantijn 81,95,96
Ingoli, F. 70
Isensee, E. 348
Jackson, A. 2
Jakob, L. 288, 302
Jammer, M. 41
Jaquelot, I. 165, 180
Jardine, L. 131
Jardine, N. 348,352
Joad, C. 2
Kambartel, F. 41
INDEX
Kant, L 1, 9, 11-16, 199, 213, 221,
225, 227-304, 329-33, 338-42,
345,346,348,352-54
Kapp, E. 107,131
Karsten, W. 304
Keckermann 108
Kemp Smith, N. 99,245
Kepler, J. 27-30,33,37,41,125
Kielmeyer, K. 331, 332, 338, 341, 342,
345,346,348
Kieser, D. 344, 349
Kirwan, R. 317,323
Kitcher, P. 13
von Kleist, H. 302
Kliigel 288
Kneale,M. 131
Kneale, W. 131
Knowlson,l. 99
Kollner,l. 297,304
Korner, S. 245,264
Krafft, F. 41
Kristeller, P. 41
Kriinitz,1. 304
Kuhn, D. 338,349
Kuhn, T. 299
Laird,1. 2
Lambert of Auxerre 109
Land, S. 211
Larmore, C. 128,129,131
Larson, J. 349
Laudan, L. 131
Lavine, T. 304
Lavoisier, A-L. 307-24
Leaman, O. 352
Lehmann, G. 349
Lehrer, K. 182
Leibniz, G. 12, 13, 15, 35, 37, 38,41,
74,78,84,86,91,99,101,104,12428, 130, 131, 133-62, 165-83, 186,
213-25,227-64,270,352-54
Lenoir, T. 330,339,349
Lepenies, W. 349
Leupoldt, J. 349
Le Vasseur, N. 93
Livarius, A 108
Lichtenberg, G. 287, 302, 304
359
de Lille, A 36, 41
Linceus 48
Lipstorp, D. 85,97
Locke, 1. 12, 106, 153, 191,230,234,
249, 264, 272, 275, 308, 310-12,
314,318,320
Lorini, N. 55, 56, 60-70
Low, R. 338, 342, 349
Loyola, L 56,57,60
Lucretius Carus, T. 25,41
Lukasiewicz, 1. 106, 131
Lully, R. 79, 94
Luther, M. 68,77
McCann, H. 323
MacDonald Ross, G. 352
McEvoy,1. 323, 324, 352
McGuire, J. 323
Mach,E.2,33,41
MacIntyre, A 266,279
McLaughlin, P. 349
MacLaurin, C. 213-15,219-25
MacLean, J. 320
McMullin, E. 197, 211
McRae, R. 12
Macraelius, 1. 41
Magalotti, F. 45,46
Maier, A 41
Maimon, S. 304
Mako,P. 37
Malebranche, N. 165-68, 176, 178,
180
Manzoni, A 46
Marion,l.-L. 99,123,124,129,131
Martin, G. 12
Martin, R. 180
Marzimedici, A 68
Maull, N. 131
de' Medici, C. 63
de Medici, C. 54,71
Melanchthon, P. 109
Mellin, G. 293,305
Mendelssohn, M. 302, 305
Menne, A. 41
Mersenne, M. 38, 66, 71, 82, 89, 90,
94-99,103,104,117,125,129
Mesland, D. 104
360
INDEX
Paul V, Pope 63
Paul of Venice 109
Paul,G. 2
Paulson, F. 183
Pauly, A. 107
Peghaire, J. 131
Peiresc, N. 49,65,68,71
Pemberton, H. 38
Perez 137
Perrin, C. 324
du Perron 94
Peter of Spain 108, 109
Pfannensteil, M. 346, 349
Pfeiffer, F. 42
Phillip IV, King of Spain 49-51
Phillips, E. 25
Philo of Alexandria 20,42
Philoponus, J. 20,35,42
Picchena, C. 70, 71
Piccolomini, A. 37
Pico della Mirandola, G. 23-27,42
Picot, C. 81, 96
Pigeaud,J. 131
Plass, P. 12
Plato 2, 17-25,27, 31, 36, 37, 110,
113, 129, 141, 142, 153, 194,209,
230,233,235,237,238,265
Plempius, V.-F. 94
Plitt, G. L. 305
Plotinus 20,34,42,227, 242, 244
Poisson, N. 81
Polybius 84, 85
Pompa, L. 197,207,209,211
della Porta, J. 78,83,94,96,99
Porter, R. 324
Power, M. 353
Priestly,J. 307-24
Protagoras 119
Ptolemy 69
Putnam, H. 274
de Puy 94
Pythagoras 22,87,94,96,97
Querengo, A. 63,70
Querner, H. 350
Quine, W. 276,277
Quintillian 110
INDEX
de Raconis, C. 26
Ramus, P. 108-11,113-15,119,120,
122,129,201
Randall, J. 42
Rapp, F. 42
Rehbock, P. 350
Reichenbach, H. 277
Reimarus 302
Reinhardt, L. 128
Reinhold, C. 305
Remond,N. 151,181
Reuss, M. 305
Riccardi, N. 45,46
Rinuccini,G. 61,70,71
Risse,W.113,129,132
Ritter, J. 42
Rocco, A. 69
Rodis-Lewis, G. 99
Roe, S. 350
Rorty, R. 211,265-70,272-74,276,
279-80
Rossi, P. 94,99, 132,211
Roth,P. 97
Ruschio 52
Russell, B. 150, 175, 178, 179, 183.
249,264
Russell, E. 350
Saarinen, E. 132
de Sacrobosco, J. 26, 36, 42
Sakellariadis, S. 99
di Santillana, G. 71
Sarsi, L. 69,70
del Sarto, A. 68
de Saumaise, C. 94
Scaliger, J. 22
Schafer, L. 12
Schaffer, S. 324, 350
Schapiro, B. 211
Schegel, F. 305
Scheiner, C. 54, 66, 67
Schelling, F. 281,289,297,298,30002,305,327, 330, 332-35, 338-44,
346
Schenkel, L. 94
Scherer, A. 305
Schickhardt 68
361
Schlick, M. 267
Schmid, C. 295-97,305
Schmidt-Biggemann, W. 42
Schmitt, J. 288
Schook, M. 95
Schultz, J. 294,305
Schulze, G. 305
Schumacher, I. 350
Schuster, J. 99, 132
Schwab, J. 288, 306
Scot,M. 19
Scott-Taggart, M. 12
von Seemen, H. 350
Sellars, R. 183
Selle, C. 302, 306
Sextus Empiricus 97, 99
Shea, W. 353
Sibson, R. 352
Siegfried, R. 324
Sieyes 302
Simmel, G. 283,301,306
Slaughter, M. 99,211
Sloan, P. 350
Socrates 22,23,89,209
Sophie, Electress of Hanover 141
Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia 243
Spinoza, B. 165,175,178-80,183
Spix,J. 350
Stahl, D. 138, 140, 144
Stahl, G. 313
StalIo, J. 350
Staurophorus, R. 87
von der Stein, A. 42
St Hilaire, G. 347
Steffens, H. 289,302, 344-46, 350
Steno, N. 230
Stichweh, R. 306
Strawson, P. 12,283
Strohl, J. 350
Strong, C. 181,183
Stump, E. 132
Sturm, C. 171
Suarez, F. 57, 114, 123, 124, 149,
152
Swammerdam, J. 230
Swedenborg,E. 240,242,244
Swineshead, R. 77
362
INDEX
65,267,268,271,273,282,283
Wolff, C. 247,256,350
Wolters, G. 43
Woolhouse, R. 354
Wren, C. 172
Yates, F. 94,99,132,212
Yolton,J. 128
211,212
Vick,G. 209
Vico,G. 31,43,185-210
Villoslada, R. 72
Vincent of Beauvais 43
Vinta, B. 38,68
Virgil 148
Zeller, E. 43
Zeno 194
Zizka,J. 96
von Zollem, Cardinal 49
Zuniga, D. 62,65
Managing Editor:
ROBERT E. BurrS
Editorial Board:
J. BUB, L. 1. COHEN, W. DEMOPOULOS, W. HARPER, 1. HINTIKKA,
C. A. HOOKER, H. E. KYBURG, Jr., A. MARRAS, 1. MITTELSTRASS,
J. M. NICHOLAS, G. A. PEARCE, B. C. VAN FRAAS SEN
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J. Leach, R. Butts, and G. Pearche (eds.), Science, Decision and Value. lY73,
vii +219 pp.
C. A. Hooker (ed), Contemporary Research in the Foundo.tions and
Philosophy of Quantum Theory. 1973, xx + 385 pp.
J. Bub, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. 1974, ix + 155 pp.
D. Hockney, W. Harper, and B. Freed (eds.), Contemporary Research in
Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics. 1975, vii + 332 pp.
C. A. Hooker (ed.), The Logico-Algebraic Approach to Qunatum Mechanics.
1975, xv + 607 pp.
W. L. H;uper and C. A. Hooker (eds.), Foundations of Probability Theory,
Statistical Inference, and Statistical Theories of Science. 3 Volumes. Vol. I:
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