Abstract
The dominant model of the unity of natural philosophy in the Middle Ages, namely scientia, collapsed in the early modern era, and the unity of natural philosophy was rethought in the seventeenth century in terms of a reductionist and foundationalist notion of common causation. I want to argue that, if we can identify the reasons for the collapse of the notion of scientia, then we can get a better sense of what was demanded of its successors, and that this will help us in understanding the subordination of all cognitive values to scientific ones so distinctive of the modern era.
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Notes
- 1.
Aquinas actually defines scientia as the state of mind one is in when one has successfully engaged in this process—see, for example, Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Part II, second part, qu. 49 art. 1 and qu. 50 art. 3—but it seems, by extension, to cover the process itself.
- 2.
See Charles H. Lohr, “Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy as Sciences: the Catholic and Protestant Views in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa, eds., Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 280–95.
- 3.
The question is dealt with in detail in José Antonio Maravall, Antiguos y Modernos: Visión de la historia e dia de progresso hasta el Renacimiento (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1966). See also Víctor Navarro Brotóns and Enrique Rodríguez Galdeano, Matemáticas, Cosmología y Humanismo en la España del Siglo XVI. Los Comentarios al Segundo Libro de la Historia Natural de Plinio de Jerónimo Muñoz (Valencia: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia Universitat de València, 1998); and more generally Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, “Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?”, Perspectives in Science vol. 12 (2004), 86–124: 96–8.
- 4.
There is a good discussion of these issues in William Charlton’s introduction and notes to his translation of the Physics: Aristotle’s Physics I, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), from which I have taken the example here. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Wolfgang Wieland, Die aristotelische Physik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), and Helen S. Lang, The Order of Nature in Aristotle’s Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- 5.
The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (14 vols, London: Longman & Co, 1857–1874), vol. 3, 29 [text]/vol. 5, 433 [trans].
- 6.
See Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44–57.
- 7.
The questions here are not as straightforward as they may seem. In the opening paragraphs of the Metaphysics (981b17–20), Aristotle seems to take uselessness as a sign of worth: “But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility”. Nevertheless, as Lloyd notes, “The picture of Greek intellectuals as being profoundly unconcerned with the practical applications of their ideas stems largely from texts that belong to a particular, Platonist, tradition.” G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70. Note also the dissenting position taken by John Wilkins, one of the main moving forces behind the establishment of the Royal Society, who sees Aristotle as defending practical against speculative knowledge: “And whereas the Mathematicians of those former ages, did possess all their learning, as covetous men doe their wealth, only in thought and notion; the judicious Aristotle, like a wise Steward, did lay it out to particular use and improvement, rightly preferring the reality and substance of publicke benefit, before the shadows of some retired speculation, or vulgar opinion.” Mathematicall Magick (London: Printed by M.F. for Sa. Gellibrand, 1648), 7.
- 8.
Bacon, Works, vol. 3, 20 [text]/vol. 5, 425 [trans]. Bacon is not alone in this approach. There are similar sentiments expressed, for example, in the preface to Guido Ubaldo del Monte, Mechanicorum Liber (Pesaro: Apud H. Concordiam, 1577), translated in Stillman Drake and I. E. Drabkin, ed. and trans., Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 241–7.
- 9.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 4.
- 10.
Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (2nd ed., 11 vols, Paris: Vrin, 1974–1986), vol. 11, 39 (Le Monde, ch. 7).
- 11.
Gassendi, Opera Omnia (6 vols, Lyon: Lavtentii Anisson & Ioan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658), vol. 3, 186 col. 2 (Adversus Aristoteleos, Lib II, ex. 5, art. 4).
- 12.
Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica: or, Confest Ignorance, the way to Science; in an Essay of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, and Confident Opinion (London: printed by E. Cotes for Henry Eversden, 1665), 126.
- 13.
David M. Balme, “Greek Science and Mechanism I”, Classical Quarterly vol. 33 (1939), 129–38.
- 14.
See the discussions in Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory (London: Duckworth, 1980); and Sarah Waterlow, Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
- 15.
It should be said that, from an observational and empirical point of view, this was always a wholly speculative hypothesis. It fared particularly badly in the wake of the development of microscopy, primarily because it was fundamental to micro-corpuscularianism that complexity was a feature of the macroscopic world, whereas at the microscopic level processes were extremely simple and economical: what the microscope actually revealed, however, as is evident from Hooke’s Micrographia, was a world not with less complexity but with significantly more complexity. See Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 16.
This raises the question of the difference between Renaissance and Enlightenment encyclopedism, one of the most striking features of which is the shift from presenting material starting from first principles to alphabetical ordering, reflecting a wholly different conception of the point of the exercise.
- 17.
See, for example, the contributions to vol. 1 of Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Morris, eds., Foundations of the Unity of Science (2 vols, Chicago: University of Chiaco Press, 1970). Neurath’s opening essay, “Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration”, 1–27 (first published 1938) gives the flavour of the project.
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Gaukroger, S. (2010). The Unity of Natural Philosophy and the End of Scientia . In: Sorell, T., Rogers, G., Kraye, J. (eds) Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3077-1_2
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