Abstract
At the end of the eighteenth century, Ernst Platner, an eminent German physician and anthropologist, was asked by a noblewoman to explain Kantian philosophy. He began his exposition with the statement that all sound contemporary philosophy and natural philosophy, including his and Kant’s, had been founded upon the principles of skepticism. For skepticism served, he asserted, as the only sure method to avoid the dangers of formal, speculative reason. Platner was not alone in sounding this theme. It formed one of the staples of late Enlightenment thought. Throughout this period thinkers as diverse as d’Alembert, Buffon, Hume, Lessing, and Ferguson would decry the dangers posed by the spirit of systems, by a one sided reliance upon discursive, abstract and hypothetical reasoning in constructing a coherent picture of reality. For many leading thinkers of the late Enlightenment, deductive philosophy was deemed incapable of accounting for nature’s vast variety. Hume announced this theme in the opening paragraph of his essay on “the skeptic.”
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References
David Hume, “The Sceptic,” The Philosophical Works,ed. Thomas H. Green and Thomas H. Grose, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1874–75), 3:213–14.
This is Boyle’s phrase, quoted by Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge, 1977), 66.
Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science,33.
Georges Buffon, Allgemeine Historie der Natur,tr. Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner (Leipzig, 1750), 1:36. “…es ist genug, bewiesen zu haben, daß die mathematischen Wahrheiten bloss Erklärungs—oder Definitionswahrheiten sind, oder wenn man es verlanget, verschiedene Ausdrückungen von einerley Sache, und daß sie nur, in Beziehung auf diejenigen Erklärungen, die wir selbst gemacht haben, Wahrheit sind. Aus dieser Ursache haben sie den besondem Vorzug, daß sie allezeit richtig und bindig, zugleich aber abstrakt, geistig und willkührlich sind.”
Ibid.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, The Philosophical Works,ed. Green and Grose, 4:63.
Ibid., 4:62.
Traité des Extrêmes ou éléments de la science de la réalité(Amsterdam, 1768), 232.
Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,4:51.
The disinclination to engage in the regnant questions of the early eighteenth century was made evident by the German mathematician W.J.C. Karsten in his discussion of the earlier disputes concerning matter. “Earlier, when one spoke about the elemental properties of matter, one introduced the question of its divisibility.… This idea has generated a host of treatises that appeared very learned but were, in fact, totally useless.” Karsten then listed the “useless” questions he claimed had been posed. They included: “whether matter was infinitely divisible or only divisible down to a minute point: whether this indivisible point could be considered as totally simple (without form and mass) or whether one should accept very minute indivisible particles: whether these points be called monads, atoms, physical points or whatever else one could call them.” Thus, Karsten continued, “one occupied oneself with these and similar questions as if one didn’t know better.” Obviously, Karsten believed the contemporary natural philosopher now knew better. He “is indifferent to the questions of whether matter can be divided to infinity or to a minuscule point.” Instead of these theoretical considerations, “he knows other types of divisibility, or better said, other types of decompositions of physical matter into non-identical elemental matter This type of matter belongs to reality.” Wenceslaus J.G. Karsten, Physisch-chemischen Abhandlungen$12 vols. (Halle, 1786 ), 2: 69.
The vis viva controversy was fueled by contradictory ideas about mechanistic definitions of force, about the way to determine transferred motion, and about the indivisibility or inelasticity of matter. It was laid to rest in the mid-eighteenth century by d’Alembert using a rhetorical tactic that seemed to make the whole question irrelevant. He simply denied the applicability of the concept of force for physics and considered the conservation of vital force and the conservation of momentum, around which the controversy raged, as two separate phenomena, with two separate types of measurement. The literature on the vis viva controversy is immense. The works that have given me the clearest picture of it are: Thomas L. Hankins, “Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Resolve the Vis Viva Controversy, ” Isis,56 (1965); Carolyn Iltis (Merchant), “D’Alembert and the Vis Viva Controversy,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1 (1970); “The Decline of Cartesianism in Mechanics: The Leibnizian-Cartesian Debates,” Isis,64 (1973); “The Leibnizian-Newtonian Debates: Natural Philosophy and Social Psychology,” The British Journal for the History of Science,6 (1973); “Madam du Chatelet’s Metaphysics and Mechanics, ” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science,8 (1977). David Papineau, “The Vis Viva Controversy: Do Meanings Matter?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science,8 (1977). Giorgio Tonelli, “Analysis and Syntheses in XVIIIth Century Philosophy Prior to Kant,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte,20 (1976); “Critiques of the Notion of Substance Prior to Kant,” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie,23 (June 1961); “The Philosophy of d’Alembert: A Sceptic beyond Scepticism,” Kant-Studien,67 (1976). Though this argument split the mechanists, usually along national lines, the French and English opting for the conservation of momentum, the Germans, Italians, and Dutch opting for the conservation of “living force,” they still shared a basic agreement upon what the types of questions should be posed. Pa-pineau makes this clear: “More central in the minds of mechanistic natural philosophers of the time was, of course, what happened in impacts between particles in motion. And it is in connection with the problem that the agreement on the dictum ‘effects equal causes’ can be seen in its true significance… They all took for granted that all impacts are to be accounted for by the transference of ’force’ from one body to the other, with the total force being conserved. Where they disagreed from Descartes, and from each other, was, of course, on the question of how exactly ’force’ should be measured, and what determined exactly how much ’force’ would be transferred in a given impact.” Papineau, “Vis Viva,” 27.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Elements of Physiology,tr. Charles Caldwell, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1795), 1:33.
Ibid., 1:22.
Kant was much more influenced by this explanatory model than is usually supposed. For an excellent discussion of the vitalistic influences on his philosophy see: Wolfgang Krohn and Günther Köppers, “Die natürlichen Ursachen der Zwecke: Kants Ansätze der Selbstorganisation,” Selbstorganisation: Jahrbuch für Komplexität in den Natur-, Sozial-und Geisteswissenschaften, 3 (1992), 7–15.
Both Blumenbach and Barthez called their respective concepts of the Bildungstrieb and the Princip Vital occult powers and both turned to the authority of Newton. Yet both acknowledged that the only way the powers could be recognized was by their effects and these were beyond quantification.
Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, “Entwicklunggeschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften,ed. Fritz-Heinz Holler (Berlin, 1938), 125.
Der beobachtende Verstand und die dichtende Einbildungskraft müssen in harmonischen Bunde stehen.“ Wilhelm von Humboldt, ”Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert,“ (1796–97), Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften,ed. Albert Leitzmann, 17 vols. (Berlin, 1903–36), 2:2.
Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” History and Theory, 6 (1967), 59. The German reads as follows: “Zwei Wege also müssen zugleich eingeschlagen werden, sich der historischen Wahrheit zu nähern, die genaue, partheilose, kritische Ergründung des Geschehenen, und das Verbinden des Erforschten, das Ahnden des durch jene Mittel nicht Erreichbaren… Auch die schlichte Naturbeschreibung kommt nicht aus mit der Herzählung und Schilderung der Theile, dem Messen der Seiten und Winkel, es liegt noch ein lebendiger Hauch auf dem Ganzen, es spricht ein innere Charakter aus ihm, die sich beide nicht messen, nicht beschreiben lassen.” “Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers,” (1821), Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, 4: 37–38.
Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen,(1786), 66: “der Mittelweg, auf welchem allein gründliche Erkenntnis entstehen kann, der Weg sorgfältiger Beobachtung der innern und äussern Natur, und vorsichtiger analogischer Vermuthung.”
Blumenbach, Ueber den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (Göttingen, 1781), 65–66 n.
Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves, Frederick Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature, with the first English edition of the complete Medical and Physiological Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978), 152.
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Reill, P.H. (1998). Analogy, Comparison, and Active Living Forces: Late Enlightenment Responses to the Skeptical Critique of Causal Analysis. In: van der Zande, J., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3465-3_16
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