Abstract
This Chapter concludes the argument and has two segments: First, a ‘Coda’ rounds out and underlines the key themes of this study, with special emphasis on what Descartes himself could have understood as the ‘mathematical’ bent of his natural philosophical enterprise, given what we have discovered in this volume. Then, an ‘Epilogue’ surveys some salient points about the subsequent career of the mature Descartes, illuminated by our study of his earlier career. In addition, we discover his (somewhat surprising) relations to the next phase in the Scientific Revolution, and hypothesize about what might have happened, had he lived into that phase (whose contours were analyzed as part of the conceptual and historiographical foundations set down in Chap. 2).
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. above Chap. 6, note 19.
- 2.
For extended argument along these lines see Schuster (2009).
- 3.
Descartes habitually displayed a secretive, reclusive, publicly masked and overtly tricky persona. This was a man who lived by the mottos ‘he lives well who is well hidden’ and ‘masked I go forth.’ Descartes announced ‘Bene vixit, bene qui latuit’ as his motto to Mersenne in April 1634 (AT I, p. 286). (Descartes proclaimed ‘larvatus prodeo’ (masked I go forth) in the middle of some fragmentary youthful ruminations preserved in AT X, p.213.) There is excellent evidence on these points for his mature career, and hints and clues about it for the earlier period. (Clarke 2006) Part of this, no doubt, was cultural, conditioned, in Descartes and others, by the superheated political and religious tensions of the Baroque age, which also elicited intense and elaborate courtesy as a defence against incipient social breakdown and chaos Schuster (2012a).
- 4.
- 5.
The reader should recall our delineation of several species of physico-mathematician above, Sect. 2.5.3. Notable exceptions actually prove the point. Consider those master practical mathematicians, such as Simon Stevin, who played upon mixed mathematical fields from outside the realm of natural philosophizing, aiming not to make natural philosophical capital, but to expand and systematize the realm of practical mathematics. Indeed the mixed mathematical disciplines can be seen as a contested borderland in play between certain practical mathematicians and, as we have seen mathematically adept, ambitious natural philosophers. On this topic, see also J.A. Schuster, ‘Consuming and appropriating the mixed mathematical fields, or, being ‘influenced’ by them: the case of the young Descartes’, available on my website http://descartes-agonistes.com.
- 6.
- 7.
Above, Sect. 2.7.
- 8.
For example: hard results in mixed mathematics were to be used in physico-mathematics; his respect for the way the sheer opacity of raw experience of fall nullified his initiatives on a physico-mathematics of fall; his concern for what would count as empirically grounded and workable measures of dimensions in later Regulae; and the multiple ways Le Monde and the path to it were strewn with interest in and respect shown to putatively agreed experiences or matters of fact, as we have seen in Chap. 8, passim.
- 9.
However, see above, Sect. 12.12, point [3] on how Descartes’ mature style of cosmographical explanatory/descriptive narrative created a situation in which factual detail tended to shape narrative detail, rather than prompt alterations in the structure of basic concepts.
- 10.
- 11.
Shapin (1994) famously announced the advent at the early Royal Society of London, from the early 1660s onward, of an atheoretical ‘experimental science’ of ‘matters of fact’ exchanged in a culture of gentlemanly trust. He ignored the continuation of heated natural philosophical contestation, in muted circumstances and under a public rhetoric of ‘matters of fact only’. Moreover, no fact in natural philosophy or any science is not ‘theory-loaded’, as almost any first year student in History and Philosophy of Science or Science and Technology Studies anywhere in the world can tell you. On the myth of merely matter of fact science at the Royal Society, see Schuster and Taylor (1997). For a clear demonstration that the contemporary Florentine Accademia del Cimento was also rife with natural philosophical agendas and conflicts, hidden below a public façade, see the important work of Boschiero (2007).
- 12.
Well canvassed in Clarke (2006), pp.535–60
- 13.
In his two somewhat contrasting accounts of the terrain traditionally covered by theses concerning a ‘crisis’ of the seventeenth century, Theodore K. Rabb (1975, 2006) has drawn attention to the contrasts— psychological, attitudinal and cultural—across varied intellectual and artistic pursuits (including what he calls ‘science’) between the tense, anguished and deeply contested generations of the earlier seventeenth century and the modulated, controlled and more confident generations of the later seventeenth century. These map onto our Scientific Revolution phases of ‘civil war in natural philosophy’ and its contrasted sequel, the ‘CMF’ phase. As Descartes might have bridged these phases in a more mellow old age, so in fact did figures who had lived on into the Restoration following upon the more immediately manifested English political and religious crisis, such as Walter Charleton (Booth 2004), John Wilkins, Henry More, Seth Ward, or even the considerably younger Boyle, who inflected from a youthful van Helmontian with Puritan leanings into an impeccably establishment Restoration Anglican and carefully hedged corpuscular-mechanical natural philosopher. The Royal Society was founded by, and for a long time included in its membership, individuals who had survived the generation long English crisis, not those too young to have experienced it.
- 14.
Gabbey (1980). More generally on Descartes’ unintended contributions to later developments in physical optics and the emerging ‘classical mechanics’, see Schuster, ‘Cartesian Physics’ in J.Z. Buchwald and R. Fox, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics (OUP forthcoming). Also cf. above, Chap. 11, note 2.
- 15.
- 16.
Chapter 6 Note 19.
- 17.
On Newton, Feyerabend (1970) and discussion of same above, Sect. 6.3. In this counter-factual conceit about a ‘Restoration Descartes’, it is certainly the case that in committing to a piecemeal, hypothetical corpuscular-mechanism, he would have had to give up not only metaphysical grounding, as mentioned, but also his mature practice in the Principles, of weaving large cosmographical explanatory narratives, just what Huygens criticized him for (Chap. 12, note 105. On how laws of nature and generalized grasp of facts fed into this mode of explanation in the Principles cf. also Sect. 12.12, point [3], and Sect. 12.9, note 78) .
- 18.
John Henry (1986) was perhaps the most important early advocate of this important insight.
- 19.
I believe that Thomas Kuhn first made the sorts of points which follow, although I have not been able to find a statement of these points in his published work. He may well have argued them informally, in graduate seminars, or in personal discussion, during the time I studied in the Princeton HPS Program he headed (1969–1974).
- 20.
Alternatively, we can drop the hypothetical conceit and state these points as the results of a deconstruction of Descartes’ natural philosophy: Completely mechanist and anti-spirit at the declaratory level, Cartesianism harbored the curious ‘first matter’ which Descartes insisted behaves fully mechanically, but which just as easily might on occasion have been argued to have non-mechanical capabilities. This is because consistency between declaratory glosses of the entire system and the meaning and function of particular parts thereof, was, as usual, up for negotiation amongst actors, including the author of the discourse. No rule, logic or imperative controlling the construction and negotiation of natural philosophical discourse could or did impose a single ‘correct conclusion’ about such matters.
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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])
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Schuster, J. (2012). Conclusion: The Young and the Mature Descartes Agonistes . In: Descartes-Agonistes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_13
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