Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of Laws of Nature
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that the modern concept of laws of nature originates in Rene Descartes's work, and that this is why, at an early stage of his philosophical development, he had to turn to metaphysics.
Abstract: This paper draws attention to the crucial importance of a new kind of precisely defined law of nature in the Scientific Revolution. All explanations in the mechanical philosophy depend upon the interactions of moving material particles; the laws of nature stipulate precisely how these interact; therefore, such explanations rely on the laws of nature. While this is obvious, the radically innovatory nature of these laws is not fully acknowledged in the historical literature. Indeed, a number of scholars have tried to locate the origins of such laws in the medieval period. In the first part of this paper these claims are critically examined, and found at best to reveal important aspects of the background to the later idea, which could be drawn upon for legitimating purposes by the mechanical philosophers. The second part of the paper argues that the modern concept of laws of nature originates in Rene Descartes's work. It is shown that Descartes took his concept of laws of nature from the mathematical tradition, but recognized that he could not export it to the domain of physico-mathematics, to play a causal role, unless he could show that these laws were underwritten by God. It is argued that this is why, at an early stage of his philosophical development, Descartes had to turn to metaphysics.
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TL;DR: In this article, a comparative study of science and Islam in the West and the Middle East is presented, including Madrasas, universities, and sciences, and the rise of early modern science.
Abstract: List of illustrations New preface Preface - 1993 Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The comparative study of science 2. Arabic science and the Islamic world 3. Reason and rationality in Islam and the West 4. The European legal revolution 5. Madrasas, universities, and sciences 6. Cultural climates and the ethos of science 7. Science and civilization in China 8. Science and social organization in China 9. The rise of early modern science Epilogue: educational reform and attitudes towards science since the eighteenth century Selected bibliography Index.
220 citations
TL;DR: According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization as discussed by the authors, science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have...
Abstract: According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have ...
37 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: In the seventeenth century, a new science of motion emerged that later developed into what we call today classical mechanics as mentioned in this paper, which was a philosophical project to both preserve the theoretical and technical efficacy of this science and integrate it into a new world picture.
Abstract: In the seventeenth century a new science of motion emerged that later developed into what we call today classical mechanics. The epistemology of early modern mechanics was split between technical experimentation and mathematical formalisation. ‘Mechanicism’, Cartesianism in primis, was a philosophical project to both preserve the theoretical and technical efficacy of this science and integrate it into a new world picture. In this historical context mechanical philosophy therefore played a double role. On the one hand it was part of a revolutionary event opening new frontiers for materialist thought. On the other hand, as a world picture, it originated a new ideological framework for metaphysical dualism. This thesis uses this historical and philosophical background to radically reconsider the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. During the 1640s Hobbes’s scientia civilis progressively incorporated the dualistic epistemology of Descartes’s mechanicism into materialist philosophy by privileging one of the two structural features of modern science: the tendency towards ‘deduction’ rather than experimentation. This philosophical gesture, simultaneously epistemological and ideological, had considerable political consequences. For this reason Hobbes’s political theory will be read as an ideological response to the non-geometrical and non-mechanical functioning of ‘matter’, including ‘human matter’, evidenced by the threatening experimental practices carried on during the first half of the seventeenth century in both the Galilean science of nature and the English Civil War. My wider hypothesis is that this profoundly idealistic agenda still informs our understanding of nature and of the body politic. It reduces the open method of science to the outdated metaphysical picture of it provided by Descartes, and suffocates politics itself by neutralising the emergence of political conflict and experimentation, labelling them as not only inessential but also dangerous to the body politic. On the contrary, philosophical materialism invites us to understand the self-organising tendency of matter as an undeniable risk implicit in the functioning of all systems, the social system included.
37 citations
01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics.
Abstract: Author(s): Winning, Richard Jason | Advisor(s): Bechtel, William | Abstract: I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in a way that depends on an external perspective. Whether or not something counts as an agent depends on whether it is able to have a certain kind of perspective. My approach differs from many others by treating possession of a perspective as more basic than the possession of agency, representational content/vehicles, cognition, intentions, goals, concepts, or mental or psychological states; these latter capabilities require the former, not the other way around. I explain what it means for a system to be able to have a perspective at all, beginning with simple cases in biology, and show how self-contained normative perspectives about proper function and control can emerge from mechanisms with relatively simple dynamics. I then describe how increasingly complex control architectures can become organized that allow for more complex perspectives that approach agency. Next, I provide my own account of the kind of perspective that is necessary for agency itself, the goal being to provide a reference against which other accounts can be compared. Finally, I introduce a crucial distinction that is necessary for understanding human agency: that between inclinational and committal agency, and venture a hypothesis about how the normative perspective underlying committal agency might be mechanistically realized.
29 citations
Cites background from "Metaphysics and the Origins of Mode..."
...According to Henry (2004), it was Descartes who was primarily responsible for effecting a shift from the conception of causality as resulting from the intrinsic nature of things, as on the Aristotelian view, to a conception of causality as resulting from laws that are external to physical objects....
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...15 Historians such as John Henry have traced this tradition back to Descartes. According to Henry (2004), it was Descartes who was primarily responsible for effecting a shift from the conception of causality as resulting from the intrinsic nature of things, as on the Aristotelian view, to a conception of causality as resulting from laws that are external to physical objects....
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...The traditional way that philosophers have metaphysically characterized causal structures is by positing laws as something ontologically free-standing.15 Historians such as John Henry have traced this tradition back to Descartes....
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