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Philosophical and Scientific Empiricism and Rationalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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What Does it Mean to be an Empiricist?

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 331))

Abstract

The paper critically evaluates two commonplaces of historiography. One is that Empiricism as a philosophical movement of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was opposed to Rationalism corresponding to an English-Continental division of personnel. The other commonplace is the view that the main accomplishments of eighteenth century science were mainly taxonomic in contrast to the remarkable conceptual innovations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. I point instead, as characteristic of eighteenth century science, to an energetic blend of hands-on experimentalism, methodological caution about the employment of metaphysical concepts, and imaginative speculation where the powers of ‘matter’ unassisted by God were concerned, with Buffon playing a leading role. Kant’s attempt to confine empirical reasoning and the Newtonian system to the (mere) appearances reflects widely held views about the ‘veiling’ of nature behind our ideas in eighteenth century methodological reflection but serves mainly to ground his appeals to the supersensible element in human agency.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Review of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle in: Bibliotheque Raisonnée (Oct-Dec 1750), 243–263, repr. in Lyons and Sloan (1981), 257.

  2. 2.

    Gauvin (2011), 315–337. Also Turner (1998).

  3. 3.

    Daston and Galison (2007), passim. Also Jones (2006).

  4. 4.

    Daston and Galison (2007), 229.

  5. 5.

    Berkeley is a problematic case, for it is widely agreed that he has more in common with Malebranche than with Locke or Hume; see Loeb (1981), ch. 1, ch. VI. See below, note 43.

  6. 6.

    Anstey (2005), 215–42.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 238.

  8. 8.

    Newton (1999), 385. Richard Westfall agreed. “The mechanical philosophy” he said, “which dominated chemical thought in the second half of the century, offered only a language in which to describe reactions…” (Westfall 1971, 81).

  9. 9.

    William Molyneux, Letter to Locke, 15 January 1694/5, quoted in Cranston (1957), 388.

  10. 10.

    Leibniz (1960–1966), VII, 347–442.

  11. 11.

    Locke (1975), Epistle to the Reader, 9–10.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., I: III: 9. G.A.J. Rogers argues that while Locke may have had some influence on Newton, Newton’s Principia had no significant influence on the epistemology of the Essay. Locke’s epistemology is on the whole derived from Gassendi’s Epicurean empiricism; see Lennon (1991), 259–71.

  13. 13.

    Hume (1983), 362.

  14. 14.

    Locke (1706), IV: III: 16.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., IV:VI: 11.

  16. 16.

    Ibid.

  17. 17.

    Berkeley (1948–57), I: 206. English pessimism about the experimental sciences is also apparent in Cavendish (2001). On microscope-skepticism in Locke and Berkeley see Wilson (1995, repr. 2015), 240–250.

  18. 18.

    Hume (1983), I: 541–2.

  19. 19.

    Hume (2007), § IV.

  20. 20.

    Locke (1706), II:XXII:1–2; III:V, 6. On idea theory as a strain of empiricism, see Schliesser, Chap. 2, in this volume.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., IV: XII: 11.

  22. 22.

    Grene and Nails (1986).

  23. 23.

    Locke (1706), IV:XII: 10.

  24. 24.

    Leibniz (1982) 453.

  25. 25.

    Newton (1952), 369, Pt. 1, Query 27.

  26. 26.

    Newton (1999), 795. Rule IV insists that the mere availability of rival hypotheses should not threaten “propositions gathered from phenomena” unless those hypotheses are backed by other phenomena. Ibid., 796. See Hamou, Chap. 4, this volume, on the Newtonian conception of the role of experiment.

  27. 27.

    Descartes (1985b), II: 22; Descartes (1965) VII: 34; Cf. II:54; AT VII: 78.

  28. 28.

    Descartes (1985a), II, § 3–4, I: 224; AT VIII A 40.

  29. 29.

    “Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas.

    The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. The reasoners [rationales] resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course. It gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments, and lay it up in the memory whole as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested.” Bacon, New Organon I: XCV, 18, Spedding and Heath (1858) IV:92–3.

  30. 30.

    Louw (2006), 181–202.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 188.

  32. 32.

    Boyle (1664), 386.

  33. 33.

    Boyle (1662) Preface.

  34. 34.

    “[I]t seems probable to me, that God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard impenetrable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures … as most conduc’d to the End for which he form’d them … It seems to be farther, that these Particles have not only a vis inertia … but that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as is that of Gravity, and that which causes Fermentation, and the cohesion of Bodies.” Newton (1952), 402.

  35. 35.

    Clarke (2011), 266.

  36. 36.

    Thackray (1968).

  37. 37.

    Hankins (1985). On DuFay, Franklin, and others; see Heilbron, (1979).

  38. 38.

    Quoted by Hunter (1991), 193–4; also noted by Anstey (2005), 225.

  39. 39.

    Descartes (1985a), III, § 47, I: 258; AT VIIIA; 103. Ibid., Pt III, § 43–4, I: 255; AT VIIIA; 99.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., § 43–4. I: 255; AT VIIIA; 99.

  41. 41.

    Newton, Query 31 (1952), 402.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 402–3.

  43. 43.

    Berkeley (1951), IV:51.

  44. 44.

    van Musschenbroek (1726), 15.

  45. 45.

    See Le Ru (2001), 149. “In the (17th) C. Spinoza said we do not know what body can do; in the 18th, Mme du Chatelet. Voltaire, Maupertuis, and d’Alembert said we do not know what body is.” In the nineteenth century “One no longer tried to define matter or body in general”.

  46. 46.

    Buffon in Lyons and Sloan (1981), 125.

  47. 47.

    Buffon (1797), IX:128.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 101.

  49. 49.

    See Daniel (1963).

  50. 50.

    Leibniz (2008).

  51. 51.

    See the contemporary reviews of Buffon’s Natural History in Lyons and Sloan, op. cit. Voltaire, though not a theologian, found it easy to ridicule transformism. See Gregory (2008), 186–93.

  52. 52.

    Vanzo (2011).

  53. 53.

    Kant (1965), 667. Kant may have picked up the distinction from Leibniz’s Preface to his New Essays, op. cit 47.

  54. 54.

    Kant (1965) A 854–5/B 862–3, Smith (1941), 667–8. See as well the discussion of Loeb (1981), ch. 1.

  55. 55.

    Hobbes (1996), ch. 21, 146–7. Locke (1975) II:XXI:9–11, 238–9.

  56. 56.

    Hume (1751), chs. 5–9.

  57. 57.

    La Mettrie (1996), 63–6. On the significance of materialism—and La Mettrie in particular--for Kant, see Brandt (2007), 143.

  58. 58.

    Maillet (1748). Buffon and Needham defended spontaneous generation on an experimental basis; see Roe, Isis, 74 (1983) 158–184.

  59. 59.

    Buffon in his customary careful and ambiguous way emphasizes the continuities in nature, and the strong anatomical similarity between man and ape, hinting at their relatedness, but he allows a thinking principle in humans and observes that it has pleased the Creator to unite a soul to the body of man. Buffon (1797), IX: 138 ff. Kant enters into the discussion with his review of Moscati’s Of the Corporeal Essential Differences Between the Structure of Animals and Humans (1771). Kant (2007), 78–81.

  60. 60.

    Buffon (1797) X: 340–2 and X: 343–8.

  61. 61.

    See Wolfe, Chap. 13, this volume, on French materialism and its relationship with Locke’s empiricism, also Moravia, (1978) 45–60.

  62. 62.

    Kant (2004), 4:294–5, 46–8.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 4:327, 79.

  64. 64.

    See, for example, the remark about the Spinozist in his Critique of the Power of Judgement (Kant 2000, 5:452, 317–8).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of York, York, UK

    Catherine Wilson

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  1. Department of History, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Siegfried Bodenmann

  2. History and Philosophy of Science, Lille University/Marie Curie Individual Fellowship Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium

    Anne-Lise Rey

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Wilson, C. (2018). Philosophical and Scientific Empiricism and Rationalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In: Bodenmann, S., Rey, AL. (eds) What Does it Mean to be an Empiricist?. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69860-1_7

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