Abstract
This chapter examines a number of conceptual and historiographical issues which frame the entire project. First of all, a model is constructed for how the increasingly competitive and turbulent culture of natural philosophizing worked in the era of Descartes. This model also addresses the question of the place of the subordinate mixed mathematical sciences, and the meaning Descartes, and others, attached to the idea of a physico-mathematics, that would render those mixed sciences more properly ‘natural philosophical’. Also presented are the generic rules of construction and contestation which governed natural philosophizing; a model for dealing with the problem of ‘external or contextual’ drivers of natural philosophical utterance; an heuristic model for assessing the nature and degree of ‘systematicity’ of a natural philosophy; and an outline of the main phases in the trajectory of natural philosophizing in the period of the Scientific Revolution, so that Descartes’ location and role can be better identified. Additionally, the basis is set down for the deconstruction of Descartes’ method, which takes place in Chap. 6.
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Notes
- 1.
The dates for Descartes’ attendance at La Flèche are notoriously disputed, several brackets of nine years’ study having been offered. In the view of most commentators, 1606–1614 seems to remain the most likely period, despite Rodis-Lewis having mounted considerable argument for the period 1607–1615 (Cf. Gouhier 1958, 158–19, but also 19–20 and Note 143; and Rodis-Lewis 1992, 25–7). The line of argument for 1607–1615 turns to a large degree on accepting Sirven’s (1928, 41–46) original correction of the identity of Descartes’ instructor for the 3 year philosophy course, showing it had not been the previously identified Père Fournet, but rather Descartes’ later friend and correspondent, Père Noël, who had been in charge 1612–1613 through 1614–1615. (Cf. Gilson 1947, 479) Three of the four most recent Anglophone biographies of Descartes (Gaukroger 1995; Watson (2007) and Grayling 2005) support the period 1606–1614, while Desmond Clark follows Rodis-Lewis. Garber (1992) p. 5 agrees Noël was Descartes’ philosophy instructor whilst not explicitly choosing between the two time frames. The outcome of this issue has little bearing on the key themes of this volume, unless, contingently, proof of one or the other time bracket also were to throw up evidence bearing on the way the dialectic of Descartes’ concerns for physico-mathematics, natural philosophy and method are depicted in this volume. It obviously does have consequences for understanding Descartes’ non-trivial later relations with Noël, renewed after the publication of the Discours.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
For an early and forceful statement, cf. Ravetz (1975) 369. Such points about Descartes’ generation may now be obvious to historians of science; they were not at the time, particularly in the Anglophonic world.
- 6.
This curriculum mix also contributed in some cases, including presumably Descartes’, to a growing awareness of new aspirations and values to be associated with natural philosophy, in particular an emphasis on operative, cumulative and correctable knowledge claims. Rossi (1970) 137–45 was perhaps the first to see the matter quite this way.
- 7.
AT VI, p.7; This translation is from Ian Maclean’s scholarly and vigorous rendering: Maclean (2006) 9.
- 8.
- 9.
Note, my terminology, ‘natural philosophizing’ invoking a ‘doing’ and ‘contesting’ by natural philosophers in a disciplinary domain.
- 10.
Anstey and Schuster (2005).
- 11.
To place the evolution of natural philosophy, and in particular the shifting patterns of its relations to other enterprises and disciplines, at the center of one’s conception of the Scientific Revolution is not novel, and more scholars are realizing the value of such a perspective, but neither is it obvious or agreed upon in the scholarly community. Many older discussions, and some contemporary ones, are marred by a tendency to lump the culture of natural philosophizing under an anachronistic label of ‘science’, thus obscuring the possibility of speaking convincingly about the internal texture and dynamics of the culture of natural philosophy and its patterns of change over the period. H. Floris Cohen’s massive survey of Scientific Revolution historiography (Cohen 1994) illustrates that the term ‘natural philosophy’ has been endemically present in the literature, but not systematically theorized, often serving as a synonym for ‘science’ or (some of) the sciences. Recent attempts to delineate the category of natural philosophy and deploy it in Scientific Revolution historiography include Schuster (1990, 1995); Schuster and Watchirs (1990), Andrew Cunningham (1988, 1991), Cunningham and Williams (1993), Dear (1991, 2001a), Peter Harrison (2000, 2002, 2005), and John Henry (2002). Cohen (2010) makes explicit use of a version of the category of natural philosophy in his comparative and macro historical analysis of the rise of modern science in seventeenth century Europe.
- 12.
- 13.
Thus, in this spirit, I would contend that Kuhn’s original notion of ‘normal science’ was such an ideal typical model of the structure and dynamics of how ‘a mature science’ functions over time and may change and be affected by endogenous and exogenous forces. His model has been modified in important subsequent theoretical, case study and historical work by ‘post-Kuhnian’ sociologists and historical sociologists of scientific knowledge. In this chapter, for reasons that will become clear, we shall have cause to mobilize both Kuhn’s own model and that suggested by his creative followers, respectively in Sects. 2.6 and 2.4.
- 14.
The common method training, allowing of course for the unending technical debates about method, its meaning, contents, scope etc., is of the upmost importance. This is not because knowledge was actually discovered and demonstrated by method. As noted earlier, modern sociology and philosophy of science has put paid to that notion, in the writings of Bachelard (1949), Kuhn (1970), Feyerabend (1975), Schuster and Yeo (1986a), Schuster (1986, 1993) and others. Rather method discourse provided universally understood packaging and rhetorical framing for claims of natural philosophical type, and by means of the tools of logic provided natural philosophical players, as subjective agents, the technical capability for reflexively criticizing, comparing, overthrowing and radically reworking the claims of others and of themselves.
- 15.
- 16.
Other contemporary knowledge systems, such as natural history and natural theology also need to be theorized in this manner and the entire set examined for their dynamics and articulations over time. For a cognate model of seventeenth century natural theology see Aldridge (2009).
- 17.
The distinguished historian of medieval science, David Lindberg, writes of the Christianized Scholastic Aristotelian undergraduate curriculum in the high medieval universities, ‘For the first time in history, there was an educational effort of international scope, undertaken by scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity, offering standardized higher education to an entire generation of students.’ Lindberg (1992) 212. He is pointing to the unique fact of the extensive European institutionalization of a religiously more or less acceptable version of one genus of ancient natural philosophy, Aristotelian. And we might add, generation upon generation of students was thus produced.
- 18.
We now know a lot more about neo-scholastic education at the turn of the seventeenth century, thanks to efforts of scholars like Ian Maclean (2007) and Dennis Des Cheyne (1996): especially about the tools and habituses of thought imbibed by years of study of the host of dense, printed neo-Scholastic texts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Picture the tens of thousands of educated men in each generation, who had been taught Aristotelian logic and related tools of thought as well as large swathes of natural philosophy derived from Aristotelian doctrine about cause, matter and how—methodologically—you get knowledge about them. That’s the core of what all the players were on about—even the rebels wanted ‘regime change’ in natural philosophy not total destruction. This ‘brute historical fact’ of institutionalized acculturation of educated European men into one genus of natural philosophy is a continuing, necessary bass line, underscoring a process best understood within a sharpened and refined understanding of what the field or culture of natural philosophizing in a larger sense was all about. Hence, I hold that most of what we conceive of as the process and the products of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ took place within patterns of change, internal contestation and contextual shaping in this evolving field or culture of natural philosophizing. I have written several overviews of the Scientific Revolution in this style. Schuster (2002), also Schuster and Watchirs (1990) and Schuster (1990).
- 19.
Hence, my category modeling can lead to the production of heuristic advice for historiographical practice. For example, whether one studies Descartes, as I do here, or the Royal Society, as I sometimes do elsewhere, A site where natural philosophers natural philosophize is a natural philosophical site, not a non-natural philosophical site. Since the field is pan–European and cosmopolitan, a natural philosopher even alone in his study is in a natural philosophical site, and at the very least virtually in communication with some intended sub-set of the pan European natural philosophical audience. He is not a ‘mind alone’, opposed to some new form of communicatable and networked knowledge making/breaking in the new scientific organizations, which are also natural philosophical sites. There might have been some new registers of natural philosophizing at the early Royal Society, as we mention below in Sect. 2.7 but no break or rupture had occurred in the ongoing dynamics of the culture. See Schuster and Taylor (1996) and Boschiero (2007) for parallel results for the Florentine Accademia del Cimento.
- 20.
Below, in Sect. 2.5, when we return to more detailed modeling of natural philosophizing, we will learn more about the relations that hold between a particular system of natural philosophy and its particular selection and weighting of subordinate disciplines; in other words what is meant in Fig. 2.2 by the indications (1) that subordinate disciplines can supply support for a system and even shape its content and direction, whilst (2) a given system orders, prioritizes and imposes core concepts upon its entourage of subordinate disciplines.
- 21.
Mechanics meant something different to Galileo and to Descartes, and both had left behind Stevin or Benedetti’s notions of the domain. A mutant novelty, a discourse of ‘celestial physics’ emerged in Kepler and Descartes. See below Sects. 2.5.3 and 2.5.4, Schuster (2005), and above all Chap. 10 below.
- 22.
- 23.
This manner of conceptualizing a competitive creative ‘field’, or fields of modern science, of course derives originally from the seminal and suggestive work of Bourdieu (1971a, b, 1975) to be discussed in Sect. 2.4. It has some analogical applicability inside our model of natural philosophizing, which will be more apparent after our discussion of contestation in modern sciences in the next section, and when we return to the dynamics of natural philosophizing in Sect. 2.5.
- 24.
I put the matter this way because my full model of natural philosophizing has five major theoretical dimensions, of which this is only one. Limitations of space mean that even the more developed model to follow in Sect. 2.5 will not canvass these issues. For the record, the five theoretical dimensions of the model are: (i) natural philosophy as intellectual tradition in the manner of post-Kuhnian science dynamics with a dash of Quentin Skinner; (ii) as a competitive creative field in the manner of Bourdieu; (iii) as an evolving field of claims governed by rules of utterance, with apologies to the younger Foucault; (iv) as an historically dynamic sub-culture of the larger culture in the manner of Marshall Sahlins; (v) and as a network of institutions, in a much revised manner of Mertonian sociology as refracted through my work with Alan Taylor on the ‘organization of the experimental life’ at the early Royal Society. The full version of the model will be presented in my work in progress on ‘The Fate of Natural Philosophy at the Dawn of Modern Science: A recasting of the plot of The Scientific Revolution.’
- 25.
Sahlins (1993) at pp. 25,15. ‘[Cultural orders] reveal their properties by the way they respond to diverse circumstances, organizing those circumstances in specific forms and in the event changing their forms in specific ways. Here, then, in a historical ethnography—an ethnography that extends, say, over a couple of centuries—here is a method for reconciling form and function in a logic of meaning, for discovering the relatively invariant and mutable dimensions of structures….the currently fashionable idea that there is nothing usefully called “a culture”—no such reified entity—since the limits of the supposed “cultures” are indeterminate and permeable…paradoxically…misreads a cultural power of inclusion as the inability to maintain a boundary. It is based on an underestimate of the scope and systematicity of cultures, which are always universal in compass and thereby able to subsume alien objects and persons in logically coherent relationships.’ Shapin (1992) speaks of sciences as cultures in process in analogous ways.
- 26.
On internalism/externalism, Schuster (2000a), Shapin (1992). These ideas are applied to the problems of externalist explanations of the role of practical mathematics and mathematicians in the Scientific Revolution in J.A. Schuster, ‘Consuming and Appropriating Practical Mathematics and the Mixed Mathematical Field, or Being ‘Influenced’ by Them: The Case of the Young Descartes’, available on my website: http://descartes-agonistes.com.
- 27.
The model presented below is ideal typical. It is not meant to capture the precise social and cognitive dynamics of any particular modern (that is, post early nineteenth century) scientific discipline. As an ideal model, it invites complexification on a case by case basis by considering variants, deviances and even emerging long term shifts affecting the sciences as a whole. One suspects that the sorts of ideal models arising from post-Kuhnian thinking in HPS and SSK are better attuned to what Ravetz (1971) called the classical academic science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rather than the industrial/military science of the mid and late twentieth century or the emerging post-modern transdisciplinary sciences of today, which are more than ever deeply engrafted onto government and corporate funding drivers, and strongly tinged by deliberate plays for attention from the educated public and elite policy makers, thus diluting and shifting the classical point of reference in peer competition and approval, via expert communication networks and status systems.
- 28.
I put the matter this way, because where the writ of ‘revolution and rupture’ has not run in imagining ‘Science’, it has not been unusual to think of Science, or the sciences as old fashioned history of ideas traditions, consisting in so-called filiations of ideas, plays of ‘forerunners’ and ‘final accomplishers’ and the like. Cf above Chapter I, Note 25.
- 29.
For the literature on the politics and rhetoric of scientific method, see above, Chapter I, Notes 16 and 17. ‘Method-talk’, as I call it, is flexibly used by players inside science to account for achievements, failures and allocate credit. It is part of the self-identity of many practicing scientists and an important part of the public imaging of science and its constituent disciplines. We shall see that much of this also applies not only to Descartes’ own illusions about method, but also to those of some of his loyal scholars.
- 30.
- 31.
Of course the form of the discovery claim negotiated into place, and accounted back to the presumed individual discoverer, can differ greatly from that originally published, let alone imagined, by the first inventor[s] of the claim.
- 32.
The expression ‘(intellectually constructed) objects of inquiry’ is Ravetz’s (1971) term of art in his own early and brilliant sophistication of Kuhn’s original model of ‘normal science’.
- 33.
This ‘post-Kuhnifies’ the partially separate development of the so-called attributional model of scientific discovery. (Brannigan 1980, 1981; Schaffer 1986); For a textbook level exposition of a case study of these issues of post-Kuhnian notions of discovery and ‘revolution’ see Schuster (1995a) Chaps. 4 and 5.
- 34.
Again standard HPS fare: a claim to a significant discovery is not just a claim to have found some atheoretical nugget of fact in the world (not possible in any case); but a claim, simultaneously, to introduce new or changed reports about external affairs linked to some modification/renegotiation of previously accepted conceptual framework. As Kuhn more or less said many years ago, a discovery claim is not just in the form ‘that x is the case’ but also ‘what therefore in revised theory terms is at stake’. (Kuhn 1977) If nobody’s previous or newly minted theories are at stake, the discovery claim is about everyday trivia stated in ordinary language: e.g., ‘I found the pencil I lost yesterday’; rather than a really big and significant discovery claim like this one made by Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century: ‘Gents, ‘phlogiston’ does not exist, but ‘oxygen’ and the ‘weightless fluid of heat’ (caloric) do.’ See Schuster (1995a) Chaps. 4 and 5.
- 35.
There are other important implications, crucial in comprehending post-Kuhnianism, but less important for our present concerns: For example, we have learned to see paradigms, the working core of a research tradition at a given point in time, as fluid and constantly open to greater or less renegotiation, around ‘significant discoveries’. Hence, ‘revolutions’ are merely relatively large renegotiations within continuing traditions, not battles between armies from incommensurable intellectual planets. Normal practice within a tradition should be seen as a process of social negotiation of change, continually shaped by the distribution of resources and power amongst the players.
- 36.
These traditions, by virtue of their own living dynamics, are not and cannot be frozen into shape over any significant period of time, and even the greatest authority is in principle, and in fact, subject to revision or even rejection as play unfolds. What is taught to initiates in advanced textbooks in one generation is typically radically different from what is taught in the next. However, this should not be read simplistically: At any given moment the cultural package in play in a scientific tradition is highly structured. Some tools, concepts, standards, and even instruments and protocols are more deeply sedimented into the main line of current research trajectories than others, and hence will be subject to revision and renegotiation in different ways, and on different time scales, than elements of the tradition that are more marginal and in play. Think of Newton’s laws of motion. Basic to mechanics and celestial mechanics as they have been since the early eighteenth century, they have been changed in mathematical expression (Euler) and generalization of systematic presentation (Lagrange, Hamilton); and they have been restricted or changed in domain of application (advent of special relativity, and trajectory of subsequent developments). So, fundamentals, the equivalent of holy writ, there may be, but only ‘for the time being and until further notice’, as the early Edinburgh and Bath ‘Schools’ of SSK taught us always to remember.
- 37.
Let us put this another way: There are multiple scientific traditions (another point always stressed by Kuhn). We now know that not one of them has an essence—by rupture or accretion—only endless, competitive claim-making and claim breaking and a shifting consensual tool kit of theory, standards and hardware. This plays into new understandings about supposedly general, universally efficacious ‘scientific methods’: they cannot explain what they claim to explain, the essence of scientific practice in any and all sciences. Rather, they are attractive, indeed, I would argue mythopoeically seductive accounting resources, deployed within these traditions by the members for self-understanding and for packaging of one’s own claims, and attacking those of opponents (as we shall see in detail in Chap. 6, on the basis of our preparations for the deconstruction of Descartes’ method in Sect. 1.3.1 and below Sect. 2.6.
- 38.
An application Bourdieu himself does not envision, indeed he writes as though Science were one generic field, rather than as though he were modeling, in a generic way, any given scientific field. His model of course is an ideal type to which empirical fields approximate. Bourdieu (1975, 1971a, b).
- 39.
Cf. the discussion above, at Note 23 and corresponding text. Bourdieu says the system is ‘objective’. We need to interpret this claim into the terms of historian’s craft: It means that the field exists as an analyst’s model, an historian’s model of the internal political economy of the field at a given moment. As in any model in historiography—for example my model of natural philosophy presented below, or the post-Kuhnian model of research dynamics in a scientific tradition—it is an intellectual construct, category, constellation of concepts, constructed using social theory, bits of other historical findings, and appeals to evidence about the field or discipline in question. It then functions, as Bourdieu suggests, as the ultimate object of study and as an explanatory resource for understanding particular plays and processes in the field. Such models of fields and traditions need to be constructed by historians as objects of inquiry/objects providing explanations. It is not a ‘bad’ thing for historians that fields or traditions exist in this manner—that is the condition of, and the nature of, our knowledge of them as historians. Nor does it mean as tendentious post-modernists proclaim, that no material reality past or present exists or can be referred to by these models (as first cousins to theories in natural sciences, they are as good or as bad about ‘reality’ as are the natural sciences) We shall apply these same methodological reflections to the model of natural philosophy as a tradition of practice/field of discourse.
- 40.
As noted earlier: the penultimate section of this chapter will outline the three main phases or stages in the Scientific Revolution correlative with this sort of modeling of natural philosophy and its dynamics. This will help us place Descartes in the critical or civil war phase, and also aid in our discussion of ‘what kind of natural philosopher Descartes was’ in the final Section of this chapter.
- 41.
The term ‘objective’ is used here in the sense of Bourdieu (see above Note 39), whereby we denote the (model-derived) organization and dynamics of a competitive field, existing above and beyond the immediate control, or even necessarily the understanding, of actors in the field, and not capable of being instantly or unilaterally modified by the actions of such players in their respective micro contexts. These notions may of course be related back to the iceberg metaphor offered earlier, at the commencement of Sect. 2.3 and the related historiographical observations laced into my argument.
- 42.
As is argued below in Sect. 2.7, in describing the main phases of the Scientific Revolution and Descartes’ place in that temporal process.
- 43.
Cf. Chap. 1 Note 12.
- 44.
I term the widely taught rule of subordination of mixed mathematics to natural philosophy ‘declaratory’ to denote that it was publicly proclaimed, but not necessarily binding or agreed to by relevant players, as we shall see in more detail in Sect. 2.5.3 below. The usage mirrors the distinction in U.S. cold war nuclear strategy, between publicly available and academically discussed declaratory doctrine, compared to then secret actual war plans within the military establishment. See Mark Rix (1997).
- 45.
This kind of move operated at an individual basis, but over time, such ‘physico-mathematizing’ moves could themselves aggregate and form patterns of largely unintended change in the subordinate disciplines in question, as we shall mention in Sect. 2.7 and Note 64 below.
- 46.
For example, what differentiated natural philosophies of a Chemical type from the wider set sharing neo-Platonic ontologies was the way they linked the more widely shared neo-Platonic ontology and commitment to the possibility of natural magic to their own particular concern with the content and value structure of chymical arts and practices, including especially the use of chymical knowledge in medicine. This, in effect, was the natural philosophical master stroke of Paracelsus, to whom the Chemical Philosophers of the critical period looked for inspiration. The varieties of mechanical philosophy battened upon and projected the supposed meanings and promise of mechanics, their construction upon metaphorical amplifications of the supposed content and meanings of various strands in the domain of mechanics being obvious, although space requirements mean we leave them tacit at this point. What were constructed were still natural philosophies, within the common field of natural philosophizing, but the Aristotelian limitations on the rules or terms of construction were being radically challenged and shifted. As we shall learn in Chap. 3, Beeckman’s corpuscular mechanism was keyed to a reading and amplification of dynamical interpretations of mechanics, as in the pseudo Aristotelian Mechanical Questions. Descartes’ corpuscular-mechanism, surprisingly was keyed in part to the purely static mechanics and hydrostatics of Stevin (and Archimedes) much overlaid as it developed with material from his own ‘physical’ optics. (Gaukroger and Schuster 2002; Schuster 2000, 2005)
- 47.
So, versions of the Chemical philosophy depended for both technical and value orientation on the notion of a spiritualized yet practically productive alchemy. In this energized and articulated spiritual form, alchemy powerfully expressed moral-psychological aspirations, a search for redemption through esoteric knowledge and successful practice. These powerful sentiments were partially shared, and certainly co-opted, in the programs of Bacon, Descartes and their later seventeenth century followers. For mechanists, the nature and ‘control’ of alchemy was therefore a particularly strategic issue. In Bacon, Descartes and their mechanist followers, the values and aims which Paracelsianism and later the Chemical philosophy invested in alchemy were co-opted, sanitized of radical political and religious resonances and made acceptable to intellectually progressive but socially conservative elites, a ready audience for the mechanical philosophy. Alchemy itself was de-spiritualized and reduced to applied mechanistic matter theory, whilst the search for personal justification and social benefit would now be achieved through proper method and well grounded results, rather than esoteric insight and wisdom.
- 48.
As we shall see later, in the succeeding phase in the late seventeenth century, the emphasis falls more on production of one’s own novel facts and experimental outcomes. This contrast correlates with there having been more contestation about systems in the critical period, and more contestation within and about crystallizing more narrow domains of inquiry in the later seventeenth century.
- 49.
Cunningham (1985).
- 50.
William Gilbert’s On the Magnet (1600) is arguably the most influential and impressive new natural philosophical gambit of the turn of the seventeenth century. To call Gilbert ‘the father of electrical or magnetic science’ rather misses the point that his program involved a new natural philosophical agenda and content, on which see below, Note 55, as well as, Sect. 12.5, where we discuss Descartes’ co-optation of Gilbert’s work in the Principia philosophiae.
- 51.
Chemical natural philosophies were not bereft of new claims that were quite plausible to a wide range of contemporaries, as illustrated by Paracelsus’s iatrochemical treatments and later by van Helmont’s chemical novelties, such as the beginning of the construction of the concept of ‘gas’. Pagel (1982), Hannaway (1975).
- 52.
Descartes, Treatise on Man, AT XI, 123–6, 167–70.
- 53.
- 54.
For example, Gassendi’s observational claim only confirms Galen, and is subservient to the larger natural philosophical contestation in which he is involved.
- 55.
Descartes’ extended strategic encounter with Gilbert’s work on magnetism, in his Principles of Philosophy, a case of massive co-optation of previously claimed, often dramatic novelties, illustrates all the above points. What was novel in Gilbert’s experimentation was co-opted by Descartes, without the addition of a single new experiment. For Descartes the nub of the encounter lay elsewhere. Gilbert’s natural philosophical exploitation of the magnet was dictated by his concern to establish a novel system of Magnetic natural philosophy of distinctly neo-Platonic flavor and embodying and supporting a modified Tychonic cosmology. This was the ‘significance’ of the magnet work that had to be appropriated, reframed, and tamed to the imperatives of Descartes’ program. Gilbert’s natural philosophizing of the magnet was too important and impressive a gambit in the natural philosophical field to be ignored by his natural philosophical competitors. So, Descartes efforts were directed at re-glossing Gilbert’s experimental work in mechanistic terms, rather than at extending the number and type of magnetic experiments. Descartes devoted considerable attention to preserving and capturing the ‘cosmic’ significance of magnetism, the keynote of Gilbert’s system. He replaced Gilbert’s story of the cosmos making and binding role of the spiritual magnetic force with a mechanist’s story of an equally cosmic magnetism which was now the purely mechanical effect of a species of corpuscle of particular, and peculiar, shape and size, moving in and through suitably configured aggregations of ordinary ‘third matter’. We shall recur to some of these points when commenting on the ‘system-binding’ strategies of Descartes in Chap. 12, but there we will go beyond the above mentioned rather defensive tactics of Descartes to show how his co-optation of Gilbert was actually part of a hitherto little noticed, but vast, novel systematizing gambit which resides at the heart of the Principia.
- 56.
The category of ‘physico-mathematics’ was first systematically explored as a thread in the process of the Scientific Revolution by Dear (1995). Gaukroger and Schuster (2002) first explored in detail what the category meant to the young Descartes in relation to his work on hydrostatics, with Beeckman (See Chap. 3 below).
- 57.
On the terminology of ‘physicalization’ of the mixed mathematical sciences, rather than mathematization of natural philosophy, the following genealogy should be noted: Gaukroger and Schuster (2002) 538, 545, 547 came close to saying this, as did Schuster (2002) 347. The conception has thus far been made clear in the following conference papers: J.A. Schuster, ‘Descartes agonistes—The ‘Real’ Descartes Stands Up: How the agendas, identities, rebellions, successes, failures and delusions of ‘youth’ (1618–1633) generated the historians ‘mature Descartes’, Invited Lecture for ‘Nacht van Descartes’, Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Utrecht, and Studium Generale, University of Utrecht, October 2008; John Schuster, ‘What was Seventeenth-Century Physico-Mathematics?’ for the session on ‘Connecting Disciplines: Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Reason in the Early Modern Era,’ Sixth Joint US/UK/Canadian History of Science Societies Quadrennial Conference, Oxford University, July 2008; J.A. Schuster, ‘From Natural Philosophy to Science(s): Transformations (Intended and Unintended), Not Ruptures, in Early Modern Knowledge Network—the Disputed Case of the Early Royal Society,’ First International Conference of ARC Network of Early European Researchers (NEER), University of Western Australia, July 2007; and J.A. Schuster, ‘What was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy,’ Second International Workshop of the Baroque Science Project, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, February 2008. The conception of physicalization of the mixed mathematical sciences is discussed in John Schuster, ‘Consuming and Appropriating Practical Mathematics and the Mixed Mathematical Fields, or Being ‘Influenced’ by Them: The Case of the Young Descartes 1619–1637’, available on my website: http://descartes-agonistes and has been explicitly and categorically stated in print in Schuster (2012, 2012a).
- 58.
- 59.
Peter Dear (1995)
- 60.
- 61.
In regard to Galileo historiography, it is worth adding that he presents a difficult case, in that he was every bit as avid as other radical players to appropriate and make natural philosophical capital out of mixed mathematics, and quite technically expert at this tactic as well. But, because he did not pursue a systematic natural philosophy throughout his career, as opposed to trying to establish a realist Copernican cosmology and a strong anti-Aristotelian stance, his strategy and results look more modern to us than do the strivings of a Kepler or Descartes. But, if we think the issue through in contemporary categories, we can plausibly conclude that Galileo, like Kepler and Descartes, was specifically and pointedly breaking the declaratory Scholastic rules about subordination of mixed mathematics, and that his pro-realist Copernican cosmology campaign and anti-Aristotelian agenda amount to substantial gambits in the field of natural philosophizing, short of advocating a ‘new system’.
- 62.
Kepler practiced geometrical optics under, and in the service of, a neo-Platonic natural philosophy and conception of light. He got brilliant results in the theory of the camera obscura, theory of vision, and, to some degree, the theory of refraction and the telescope. Descartes, as we shall see in later chapters, emulated Kepler’s technical optical achievements but in competition with his neo-Platonic natural philosophical program, practiced geometrical optics under his version of a mechanical conception of light. He achieved a simple and workable version of the law of refraction and a general theory of lenses. Conversely, as we shall also see, essential details of Descartes’ mechanistic system were shaped by his optical successes. Cf. also Schuster (2000, 2005).
- 63.
Hence, what was involved was the long term emergence of a more autonomous new field of ‘physico-mathematical’ optics, which, like other such fields, tended to become more autonomous of natural philosophizing per se, and develop embryonic tendencies toward disciplinary independence, as we shall see in a bit more detail in Sect. 2.7 below.)
- 64.
Of course at a macroscopic level, these sorts of individual and local gambits contributed to a pattern of change in the field of natural philosophy which involved consequences and outcomes unintended by any particular player or group of players, the most important of which was the long term tendency for specialist disciplines (emergent physico-mathematical ones, as well as new experimentally based ones) to crystallize off from natural philosophizing and for the latter to dissipate over time, as we shall discuss briefly in Sect. 2.7 below. Cf Schuster and Watchirs (1990), Schuster (2002).
- 65.
Innovation in natural philosophy, as in any particular more narrow scientific tradition, then or now, is not limited to significantly new claims about conceptual content, or technique. Innovation can also be pursued in regard to rules and values. We need to know how to calibrate and describe such radical gambits. Furthermore, we have observed (in the spirit of interpretive sociology) that Aristotle’s rules about natural philosophy and the mixed mathematical sciences were actually ‘declaratory’ rules; formally invoked and usually obeyed in practice; but constantly open to renegotiation in practice and challenge at the level of formal principle. The letter of Aristotle’s distinction was hard to practice and was violated in many instances such as astronomy, where natural philosophical and mixed mathematical commitments at least overlapped, and where the entire issue eventually became inflamed by the realist Copernican challenge—a mixed mathematical theory that claimed natural philosophical truth and demanded perforce the overthrow of Aristotelianism to achieve it. Similarly, it was open for non-Aristotelian rebels like Descartes and Beeckman to try to renegotiate the rule.
- 66.
Hence, the salience of significant novelties and discoveries, immediately up for contestation in the field. As interesting novelties emerged across increasingly dynamic and interrelating subordinate fields, the struggles over them increased. Merely gazing at, or hording or collecting curious new facts may have been a popular pastime, but it was not central to the natural philosophical agon—contention about curiosities was!
- 67.
- 68.
The Ptolemaic cosmos was finite and spherical with a motionless, spherical earth more or less centrally located. Combinations of uniform circular motion prevailed and the celestial and the terrestrial realms were distinct.
- 69.
What is meant in Descartes’ case by his having a discourse on celestial mechanics or physics will be fully discussed when we arrive at his vortex celestial mechanics in Le Monde, in Chap. 10. For the moment, it can be foreshadowed that in Le Monde Descartes had a complex articulation strategy spanning astronomy, optics and a new challenging utterance in natural philosophy. His vortex theory of celestial motion, which formed the core of the natural philosophy, was the engine room of a now ‘infinite universe’ realist Copernicanism, and also explained the higher registers of the theory of light, and hence, he hoped, articulated onto his dazzling physico-mathematical achievements in geometrical optics. See also Schuster (2005).
- 70.
The rhythm of this process is fascinating, and important. Copernicus, a realist himself, staked his claims about the natural philosophical truth of his mixed mathematical theory upon the truth value of the ‘cosmic harmonies’ his astronomical models for the motions of each of the planets displayed when considered together as a ‘cosmological’ package or assemblage. Copernicus himself was either too timid, or unprepared, to force the realist issue more deeply into natural philosophical issues of cosmic matter and cause—What were planets, including the earth, that they could so move, and what moved them? His own answers were famously lame, even in contemporary terms, rather poor attempts at twisting Aristotelian matter and cause discourse to finesse the natural philosophical problems of his system. Instead, it was Tycho who, toward the end of the century, kicked off the eventual crisis of natural philosophy/astronomy articulation by linking his favored version of quasi Copernican astronomy to significantly altered (Aristotelian) claims in natural philosophy. Gilbert weighed into the contest with arguably the most innovative and consequential natural philosophical vision of his generation. Then, in short order, Kepler subsumed his brand of Copernicanism within physico-mathematical explanations which in turn resided at the centre of his version of a neo-Platonic natural philosophy. The situation was similar with Descartes, for in Le Monde he staked the truth of his natural philosophy on the truth of his version of a physically explained Copernicanism. (Schuster 2005; Gaukroger 1995; and below, Chap. 10).
- 71.
The natural philosophical strivings of Descartes and Kepler, which were pursued with special attention to the subsumption of astronomy, i.e., Copernican astronomy, variously interpreted, and to its problem of celestial causation, raised a number of crucial topics and opportunities for natural philosophical inquiry and construction, quite apart from what arose later and was taken on board as a result of the use of the telescope: What was the nature of the earth as a planet, what could be gathered about the earth, for example, about its structure, its magnetism (Gilbert), its tides (Galileo and Descartes), the nature of local fall, that would support its construal as a planet amongst planets and allow for the motions realist Copernicanism required of it; what caused the celestial motions; what physical role did the sun (and all stars in multiple planet system versions of Copernicanism) play in those motions; did the nature and behaviour of comets throw any light on these problems? We shall later see that both Le Monde (Chap. 11) and the Principles (Chap. 12) intentionally played upon these issues.
- 72.
An outcome occluded and hidden in the turbulence of early and mid seventeenth century natural philosophy, but quite clear in the wake of the reception of Newton’s work two generations later.
- 73.
Additionally, by offering us a view of what systematizing was about, particularly in the heated critical phase of the Scientific Revolution, it gives us a set of interpretive measures by which to perceive and gauge the processes that set in after the critical phase. As we shall see in Sect. 2.7, one of those later seventeenth century trends was the muting of contestation over systems and the tendency for quasi-autonomous, more narrow successor fields of inquiry to emerge from natural philosophy, along fault lines forming amongst subordinate fields and domains previously pursued, in part at least, for systematizing ends, thus signaling the slow but inevitable dissolution of the field of natural philosophizing.
- 74.
For example, we shall see in Chap. 11 in the case of Descartes’ system of corpuscular mechanism in Le Monde, we mean the matter/element theory, the dynamical principles and laws of motion and, as an exemplary explanatory case, his vortex celestial mechanics itself. Then in Chap. 12, we shall uncover a hitherto unnoticed vast system-binding strategy in the Principles, far outstripping Descartes’ accomplishment in Le Monde.
- 75.
‘Arguable’ means, of course, that there is no essentially correct or final answer. We can observe actors struggling over such judgments and as historians may sometimes have to evaluate for ourselves in the interest of explanation.
- 76.
For example, when we study Le Monde in Chaps. 10 and 11, we shall see that Descartes makes a number of elegant and clever moves that arguably bind the system together and lend extra theoretical credibility to some of his claims. Things that look rather ad hoc from one angle, look highly systematic, almost inevitable, if we tease out the system binding logic with a perspective informed by a category of systematicity
- 77.
The assertions in the last four sentences of this paragraph will be canvassed in a bit more detail below in Sect. 2.7, where we overview the key phases and stages in the process of the Scientific Revolution.
- 78.
On internalism/externalism, see the literature cited Note 26 above.
- 79.
This part of the model and its historiographical applications, including to the problem of the crisis of the seventeenth century, will therefore play a large role in my study in progress of ‘The Fate of Natural Philosophy at the Dawn of Modern Science: A recasting of the plot of The Scientific Revolution’.
- 80.
See J.A. Schuster, ‘Consuming and Appropriating Practical Mathematics and the Mixed Mathematical Field, or Being ‘Influenced’ by Them: The Case of the Young Descartes’, cited above note 26. Nor do we want to follow normal intellectual history practice, as evidenced in this particular area by, for example, Popkin (1964) with his hypostatized, growing then resolved ‘sceptical crisis’. The technique is to give thick enough, untheorized descriptions so that a de facto and largely tacit explanation emerges something along the psychologistic lines of ‘great thinkers somehow get it into their heads to address the great challenges hanging about in the cultural atmosphere, and hence their intellectual output somehow reflects or is shaped by them’. (We shall encounter this sort of difficulty below in Chap. 8 in reconstructing Descartes’ path of inscription of Le Monde.) On the problems of the older style socio-economic ‘imprinting’ Marxist historiography of science, see Schuster (2000a); on transcending the older history of earlier ideas or thinkers influencing later ideas or thinkers, see above, Chap. 1, Note 25.
- 81.
Note also that nobody is being naively essentialist about these macro entities. Historians’ representations of them are also categorical constructions, woven out of relevant evidence, previously accepted claims, metaphors, and arguments. As we said in Chap. 1, ‘historians must also manufacture models of relevant aspects of context, proximate or distant’. However, as also previously stressed, this no more means that these constructs completely lack real reference than that the theoretically couched objects of natural scientific inquiry do so as well. There was a French economy in the seventeenth century, and a French state. We know them through the evidence based, conjectural and revisable models we make of them, exactly as the case with ‘natural philosophy’. We judge and revise those models in the light of expert debate concerning the explanations and narratives we offer using them.
- 82.
The term articulation is used here in extension of our use of it in Sects. 2.3 and 2.5 above, partly as inspired by Sahlins’ model of cultural process and, as some readers will note, in partial emulation of the young Foucault (1972). My thinking about this began a number of years ago in conjunction with suggestions from, and collaboration with, Dr Ivan Crozier, formerly of the Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, now in the Department of History, University of Sydney.
- 83.
Our own models of the relevant macro structures and processes can therefore enter into our overall explanation, but not as drivers or printers of natural philosophical ideas. Rather, we use our knowledge or modeling of contextual structure and process to deepen our understanding of a given natural philosophical gambit. Such a gambit will initially be explained by appealing to the actor’s decisions to mobilize into natural philosophical utterance bits and pieces of his representations of the kinds of things we denominate as larger contextual features. We can then extend our understanding by locating the actor’s representations of those features, in a realm unknown to him in our form, but known to us through considered, evidence based, rational model building, that is, by framing our description of the situation with our models of the contextual features in play. Descartes did not think about natural philosophy the way he did because he was influenced by the rise of the noblesse de robe. But, there is much about his own cognitive make up and self understandings that arguably was sedimented through his experience in, and reflection about, the lives and training of many of his relatives and himself. We see him mobilizing bits and pieces of these available representations into his discourse in, and about, natural philosophy, for example in his autobiography in the Discourse on Method. Similarly, Descartes built the values of utility and progress in domination of nature into his natural philosophizing. He was not forced to do this by the rise of the commercial capitalist economy or centralization of the state, nor did these macro processes imprint the ideas in his head. Rather he himself imbibed rhetoric and literature by others already representing things about the changing commercial and political situation of the time. That is how he thought about such things, and when he wanted to bring such wider considerations into natural philosophizing, he did not wait to be driven or impressed, rather he decided to mobilize certain representations for certain agendas and types of claims in natural philosophy.
- 84.
To this end, I have also benefited from post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge scholars’ concept of ‘boundary work’ in disciplines or professions (Gieryn 1983), but, as some readers will sense, my conceptions of boundary maintenance and work upon field or disciplinary boundaries are wider, more historical and tempered by a much modified ‘Foucault’ passed through the filter of Bourdieuian sociology of agonistic fields.
- 85.
Hence, shifting views in this regard can be seen as involving tacit or explicit ‘rules’ for natural philosophizing.
- 86.
My emphasis on selection, weighting and content of boundary articulations seems to me an important conceptual point, requiring more ‘articulation’ on my part. I can say, however, that I believe it pushes beyond the customary ‘boundaries’ in how sociology of scientific knowledge work on boundary management has been conceived and applied in case studies.
- 87.
This is what we mean by challenging the choice, depth and weighting of an articulation. Similar points attach to politics, or more particularly to issues about the nature and role of ‘the state’, and the contemporary tortured issues of sovereignty, church governance vis à vis the state, and issues of civil order and legitimate rebellion (all of which could count as elements in a larger ‘crisis’ perceived and responded to by some natural philosophical players). Most Aristotelian teachers of natural philosophy in the university environment would have left largely unsaid within natural philosophy its linkages to the local political status quo, and to the institutional arrangements that supported the very existence of that particular university and its natural philosophical functions. A Bacon or Hobbes, however, articulated natural philosophical utterance in part upon such particular evaluations of these political issues. But this is not to say that politics or political doctrines or agendas ‘influenced’ the natural philosophical utterances of Bacon or Hobbes. Rather, it is to say in the first instance that within the field of natural philosophy they saw fit to mobilize and deploy such articulations in an effort to win the natural philosophical agon, and through it, partially to support their properly political aims, now recursively expressed, amongst other ways, through natural philosophy. So we do not deny their aims and aspirations in the actual domain of politics—but, we must demarcate and understand before we associate and explain. Hobbes would have liked to have won in politics as well as natural philosophy, and his possession of a natural philosophy well articulated to a particular view of the state, and the causes and cures of civil wars, was in his view a weapon in the real political field, as his novel articulation upon politics was in his view a weapon and argument in his favor in the natural philosophical field. To conflate the two fields of play or link them by ‘influence’, contextual imprinting’ or an intimate psychology of motive may paint a pretty picture of Hobbes, but it will probably ruin our ability to do the history of either natural philosophy or politics (or their precise modes of interrelation in the actions and discourse of such interestingly innovative figures).
To recur to the parallel ruminations of Marshall Sahlins (1993) on the need for an historical category of culture: This is analogous to his critique of post-modernist views of indigenous cultures as simply the decrepit or sad results of a steamrollering impact or imprinting by Western imperialism. He argues that such pessimistic sentimentality systematically neglects the specificity of response to Western impingement from an indigenous culture, and the fact that even the history of imperialism must take note of the dispersion and effects of such culture specific responses over time. Similarly ‘politics’ or ‘social factors’ impinging upon natural philosophy and philosophers did not denature, or collapse the latter. Rather, politics were played by some natural philosophers, as part of doing natural philosophy and often as part of their engagement with politics. Correlatively, natural philosophy as a (sub-)culture needs to be studied historically, with close attention to contestations within it, including responses to, and articulations upon, ‘contextual factors’—large and small, structural or ephemeral.
- 88.
Similarly, it can be argued that the practical arts and their practitioners did not influence natural philosophers, but rather that certain natural philosophers articulated their natural philosophical utterances in part upon resources from and about the domain of practical arts. I apply similar arguments to the more specific issue of the relation between practical mathematics and mathematicians and the ‘Scientific Revolution’ in J.A. Schuster, ‘Consuming and Appropriating Practical Mathematics and the Mixed Mathematical Field, or Being ‘Influenced’ by Them: The Case of the Young Descartes’, cited above note 26. Cf. also Note 107 below, on the suggestive findings of Paolo Rossi which can also now be interpreted along these lines.
- 89.
- 90.
- 91.
- 92.
- 93.
Koyré (1939, 1978, 1956, 1969).
- 94.
Koyré (1956).
- 95.
- 96.
- 97.
- 98.
The parallel to Bachelard’s conception is particular strong at this point. Bachelard saw the various ‘philosophical’ glosses on scientific practice, such as instrumentalism, empiricism, rationalism and conventionalism as each, in a specific manner, missing the ‘point’ of how real sciences are constituted by phénoméno-techniques. Bachelard (1949) 4–5, Bachelard (1975b) 61.
- 99.
In more colloquial terms, I instruct undergraduates on these points with the following axioms and conclusions: (1) There are scores of scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines. Each one has its own unique research ‘coalface’. (2) Workers at each different coalface use theories, assumptions and techniques specific to that discipline or sub-discipline. (3) Even experimental techniques and instruments are shaped or loaded by theories. (4) So, each coalface is constituted by a collection of theories, assumptions and techniques unique to that coalface. (5) Each coalface has its own ‘method’ of going on with research. (6) The idea of a unique, single, transferable simple method for each and every coalface, past, present and future is highly implausible.
- 100.
- 101.
- 102.
- 103.
- 104.
In mathematical astronomy, the Renaissance phase is discernible from the late fifteenth century, whilst in mathematics and geometrical optics the pace of the Renaissance phase only accelerates in the later sixteenth century. In astronomy Copernicus could enter into the highly technical tradition of planetary astronomy basing himself on the prior labors of Regiomontanus and Peurbach, the late fifteenth century renovators of the field, who themselves had tried to appropriate and perfect the tradition as it had emerged from the later Middle Ages. In geometry the process of assimilation and purification is even easier to discern, for the century saw not only improved texts and commentaries on Euclid’s Elements, but the recovery, translation and edition of the texts of higher Greek mathematics, of Apollonius, Archimedes and Pappus, not to mention Diophantus, who was critically important for the typically Renaissance development of the emergence of the mathematical art of algebra as a subject of theoretical import and structure. Anatomy and medical theory followed more closely upon astronomy, the program of editing and publishing the complete body of Galen’s works culminating in the 1520s and 1530s. In each case, there was an initial stage of recovery, improvement, and, if necessary, translation of texts.
- 105.
The great stature, and frequently Whiggish interpretation of these men, and the Janus-like quality of their work, stems from their engagement with the classical subordinate sciences, mixed mathematical and ‘bio-medical’, at just the moment when characteristic lines of sixteenth century work were pushed to their apparent limits, and intended or unintended steps through these limits unexpectedly opened radically altered conditions and possibilities of investigation. H. Floris Cohen (2010) in his multi-phased interpretation of the process called the Scientific Revolution, also emphasizes the first generation of the seventeenth century as the crucial moment (consisting of three overlapping transformations, in realist mathematical science; corpuscular-mechanism; and a ‘Baconian’ style of experimentation) which took European natural philosophy and sciences for the first time beyond any previous revival of classical sources, such as had occurred in medieval Islam, high medieval Europe or even the European Renaissance itself, without in any of these previous cases reaching such a transformative watershed. A short version of part of this argument appeared in Cohen (2005). See my essay review of Cohen [DOI 10.1007/s11016-012-9645-6] in Metascience (2012), focused upon his conceptualization of this phase of the Scientific Revolution.
- 106.
About the earlier historiography of this heightened contestation, the following can be said in summary fashion: It has been obvious since Lenoble’s (1943) work that in what we are calling the period of ‘civil war in natural philosophy’, families of natural philosophies competed in respect of the values, aspirations and religious resonances they endorsed and condemned. The classic work of Rattansi (1963, 1964) and Easlea (1980) took up this topos. However, we really begin to see the contestation in play when we contemplate the inter and intra family competition, arising from the fact that natural philosophy had that entourage of subordinate, more narrow traditions of science-like practice, including the mixed mathematical sciences, and the ‘bio-medical’ domains, such as anatomy, medical theorizing, and proto physiology in the manner of Galen. Hence, all the competition and contestation in the critical period was more serious than even the traditional literature suggests, since it is obvious that the competing families of natural philosophies actually consisted of quite individual systems, and that the situation was actually more like every man for himself. The existence of clear genera did not prevent, and indeed it undoubtedly enflamed, a tendency, even for natural philosophers of similar genealogical stripe—neo-Platonic, proto or emerging mechanist, ‘magnetic’, or chemical—to compete with each other as well: Kepler vs. Fludd; Descartes vs. Gassendi vs. Hobbes; Libavius and other latter day Paracelsians vs. the heritage of Paracelsus himself.
- 107.
This sense of appropriation by natural philosophers of pre-existing discourse and rhetoric of the practical arts was the great insight of Paolo Rossi (1970) which becomes all the move obvious when one superimposes our model of natural philosophy onto his interpretation. Rossi’s book, after all, is one of the great works on the Scientific Revolution. A naive summary runs like this: In the sixteenth century lots of books were written extolling the value of practical knowledge and the status of men of practice. These books issued from pedagogues, master artisans, courtiers, physicians, surgeons and others. Later these same revaluations and images become central in Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes. Most readers take this as an improvement on the vulgar Marxist notion of imprinting by structures upon actors. But how exactly should we understand Rossi? Do the new values float into Bacon’s and Descartes minds, do they ‘influence’ these thinkers in some way: Is this a parallelism of ideas, or some contextual imprinting of them? Is this in the end a history of ideas, or some sort of mitigated Marxist account, or what? It is hard to answer, unless one has a model of the structure and dynamics of the field of natural philosophizing. Using it, we can interpret Rossi as having described a diffuse sixteenth century field of non-natural philosophical discourse on the practical arts. That discourse was itself articulated upon structural changes in sixteenth century Europe: changes in state and economy, to be modeled in state of the art social and economic history. Utterances in that discourse, that is, representations of the practical arts and their values, were later co-opted and redeployed, by Bacon and Descartes, into debates inside the natural philosophical field, as part of their respective strategies for advancing their overall claims in the natural philosophical agon. They were now articulating upon ‘the practical arts’ in this mediated sense. We need no implausible direct constitution of Science or natural philosophy by technical demands of a changing economy and state structure, à la Hessen (1931) or Zilsel (1942a, b). Similarly, we do not need a history of ideas notion of the ‘influence’ of this literature upon Descartes and Bacon. They were not being influenced by something in the society or economy that others were missing; nor were they ‘reflecting’ the interests of some particular group or class magically imprinted upon them. They were simply re-working, and projecting in the natural philosophical field, already available discursively embodied representations and revaluations of the meaning of the practical arts. In the first instance, the explanation of their behavior arises from their positions, tactics, resources and goals in the field of natural philosophy. Recalling our appeal to Sahlins’ call to historicize the understanding of ‘culture’ in anthropology, we, like Sahlins, would see these natural philosophical ‘natives’ adapting to big, hard changes and forces by culturally specific moves; moves that are not determined by a universal logic, and may even possess novelty, but which are specific to the (evolving) culture. Finally, if all this reminds us of the discussion in Sect. 2.5.6 of ‘the mechanics of responding to outside challenges’, that is because precisely the same model and strategy of explanation are in play here.
- 108.
All of the major innovators in natural philosophy, whether or not part of the eventually triumphant mechanist party, should be viewed as actors responding to the context of religio-political-cultural ‘crisis’ of their generation. The careers of all the major figures in natural philosophy display certain similar strategies and aims, shaped by the needs of innovating in natural philosophy, because natural philosophy itself was thus placed in the turbulent culture of the age. They all aimed to fill a perceived void of natural philosophical authority, and they all overtly rejected Scholastic Aristotelianism, whilst remaining to varying degrees dependent upon its vocabulary and conceptual resources (hence giving endless work to historians of the continuity of ideas). Additionally, they all resonated, on the plane of natural philosophical discourse, some positive interpretation of the sixteenth century revaluation of the practical arts; and they all drew models and exemplars from the accrued catalogue of achievements in the practical arts and subordinate sciences of that century, although the choice and weighting of privileged items did vary greatly. In addition, most of the innovators stressed proper method and pedagogy as a salient feature of a new natural philosophy, as being necessary for establishing its truth and facilitating its dissemination and triumph. Their strivings grew in all cases from a sensitivity to the apparently irreconcilable divisions within the politics, religion (and natural philosophy) of the age. They also shared the perception that Aristotelianism could neither deal with those divisions, nor grasp or stimulate the proliferation of novelties in the practical arts and subordinate sciences. Beyond all this there was the suspicion, characteristic of the self-understanding of natural philosophers, that natural philosophical dissension was itself a conditioning cause of the larger political and religious conflicts, which, accordingly, could be wholly or partially cured by the installation of a true philosophy.
- 109.
Some of the points in this and the next paragraph were stimulated by participation in some of the Workshops and Seminars of the Baroque Science Project, headed by Ofer Gal at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney. Working papers in this area by me may be found at the Project website: www.usyd.edu.au/baroquescience/ The final result is Schuster (2012a).
- 110.
Clark (1992)
- 111.
Toulmin (1990)
- 112.
- 113.
Friedrich (1962) 41–46 and passim.
- 114.
With the exception of the gentle, genial (and resigned to unending crisis?) Gassendi, a man for that reason well recognized by historians as interestingly generationally displaced (too late for the scientific renaissance, too early for the age of consensus, muting and fragmentation). I thank my former University of New South Wales colleague, Dr. Barry Brundell for enlightening discussions on this and related points. See Brundell (1987).
- 115.
- 116.
Another, related ironic upshot of the ‘civil war in natural philosophizing’ was that natural philosophizing as a whole—the entire field of all these plays and turbulence—became, from the mid–seventeenth century, more autonomous of other cultural forms such as theology, as well as other branches of philosophy, whilst, at the same time beginning to undergo the process of fragmentation and dissolution just mentioned. (Schuster 2002)
- 117.
As to Newton, I hold that we misunderstand the rhythm of the development of early modern science by focusing too intently upon Newtonian celestial mechanics and physics. It is arguable that given the state of the natural philosophical field, including the subordinate sciences, the consensually held experimental form of corpuscular-mechanism, and its attendant sciences in their institutional, rhetorical and technical garb of the CMF stage, might have proceeded qualitatively rather undeterred for some considerable time had Newton not contingently intervened. Our periodization and plot—focusing on the trials of natural philosophy—should take this into account, seeing the process in terms of three phases or moments, punctuated, contingently by Newton, rather than aiming for him, or finding some clear closure in him. See Schuster and Watchirs (1990), Schuster (1990, 2002). Material in this and the preceding note implicitly touch upon the problem of how to think through the eighteenth century fragmentation and dissolution of natural philosophy into successor experimental and physico-mathematical sciences. Kuhn and Bachelard initially, if problematically, theorized this issue, later addressed and revised in Schuster and Watchirs (1990); Schuster (2002) as well as Schuster and Taylor (1996, 1997). See also Chap. 11 Note 11.
- 118.
By the late eighteenth century, all these tendencies contributed to the dissolution of the 500 year long European culture of systematic natural philosophizing and the emergence in its wake of that more typically nineteenth century institutional, professional and disciplinary ecology of the sciences which we might actually call ‘modern’. Thus giving us the well known historiographical problem of the so-called ‘Second Scientific Revolution’, which, of course, was not a revolution at all. But, that is another story in the macro history of the natural sciences.
- 119.
The best treatment of these larger processes, with an emphasis on the intertwining of intellectual and social history is Gaukroger (2006), whose central motif may perhaps be captured by the notion that late in the Scientific Revolution, Scientia had definitely died, but the processes leading to the emergence of our modern, more socially and institutionally encompassing ‘scientific culture’ had begun to germinate.
- 120.
The term derives of course from Andrew Pickering’s (1995) brilliant and illuminating study of knowledge construction in modern physics.
- 121.
These conclusions also involve important insights about the history and deployment of ‘method-talk’ in the CMF stage of the Scientific Revolution. As the processes we have ascribed to the CMF period continued, actors’ legitimatory and packaging rhetorics (typically rhetorics of method, as I have argued in previous publications on this issue) evolved to meet the needs of players with these new sorts of aims and agendas. For example, even before being further popularized by Newton, a method–discourse concerning ‘speculative’ vs. ‘experimental’ (natural) philosophy flourished in late seventeenth century England and was deployed, mainly by self-styled advocates of the latter, against real or imagined adversaries of the former stripe (Anstey 2005). All mid to late seventeenth century users of this rhetoric were inside the field of natural philosophizing—they had not really escaped to some other space. And, although those favoring the ‘experimentalist’ side of the rhetoric might have proclaimed the death and overcoming of natural philosophy (and fooled some subsequent historians), it was in fact a way of positioning themselves and their work in a field still inhabited not only by themselves, but by others, including a few players and texts of overtly theoretical, systematic and contentious natures. Once we understand that, we see that the ongoing secular process toward fragmentation of natural philosophy, and crystallization of more narrow and more modern looking successor fields, makes no difference to the argument, as some domains became more autonomous, sui generis and discipline–like, they still enjoyed the genetic endowment of this rhetoric of experimental method.
As a result, an interesting macro picture of the evolution of methodological accounting rhetoric emerges, which can now embrace the picture of the Scientific Revolution explored here. The matter might be envisioned as follows: The history of method discourse tracked and reflected the shifting dynamics and contents of natural philosophizing, and its fate—a long process running from the sixteenth century dominance of neo-Scholastic discussions of method, through the methodological prophets of ‘the Baroque’ such as Bacon and Descartes, with then some new threads of method–discourse being forged and deployed as the mid and later seventeenth century history of natural philosophizing unfolded. Later, with deepening fragmentation of the field and emergence of descendant fields, virtually the only dimension of natural philosophizing (of the original four—matter, cause, cosmology and method) that survived into the nineteenth century with its rationale and practice little changed was the dimension of ‘method’. It became the last vanishing ghost of the living field of natural philosophizing. All the issues and implications involved in this Note are being pursued as part of my present project on: ‘The Fate of Natural Philosophy at the Dawn of Modern Science: A recasting of the plot of The Scientific Revolution.’
- 122.
Notwithstanding the acquaintance he would have made with the very conservative form of physico-mathematics advanced by some of the Jesuit mathematicians. Cf. above, text accompanying Note 59, point [1] concerned with Peter Dear’s important findings on the topic.
- 123.
- 124.
Observations on Descartes’ later career, and his relations with the emergent tendencies of the succeeding CMF period, will be reserved for our concluding ‘Coda and Epilogue’ in Chap. 13.
References
Works of Descartes and Their Abbreviations
AT = Oeuvres de Descartes (revised edition, 12 vols.), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris, 1964–76). References are by volume number (in roman) and page number (in Arabic).
SG = The World and Other Writings, edited and translated by Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge,1998).
MM = René Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, translated by V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (Dordrecht, 1991)
MSM = Rene Descartes, Le Monde, ou Traité de la lumière, translated by Michael S. Mahoney (New York, 1979).
CSM(K) = The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes, 3 vols., translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, and (for vol. 3) Anthony Kenny, (Cambridge, 1988) References are by volume number (in roman) and page number (in arabic).
HR = The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol I translated by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge, 1968 [1st ed. 1911])
Other
Aldridge, Larissa. 2009. ‘Kaleidoscopic natural theology: The dynamics of natural theological discourse in seventeenth and early eighteenth century-England,’ Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of New South Wales.
Anstey, Peter. 2000. Descartes’ cardiology and its reception in english physiology. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, ed. S. Gaukroger, J.A. Schuster, and J. Sutton, 420–444. London: Routledge.
Anstey, Peter. 2005. Experimental versus speculative natural philosophy. In The science of nature in the seventeenth century: Changing patterns of early modern natural philosophy, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster, 215–242. Dordrecht: Springer.
Anstey, Peter, and John Schuster. 2005. Introduction. In The science of nature in the seventeenth century: Patterns of change in early modern natural philosophy, ed. P. Anstey and J.A. Schuster, 1–7. Dordrecht: Springer.
Arieu, R. 1999. Descartes and the late scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell Universiety Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1949. Le rationalisme appliqué. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bachelard, G. 1975a. Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, 13th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
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Schuster, J. (2012). Conceptual and Historiographical Foundations—Natural Philosophy, Mixed Mathematics, Physico-mathematics, Method. In: Descartes-Agonistes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_2
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