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Descartes's Experimental Journey Past the Prism and Through the Invisible World to the Rainbow

Jed Z. Buchwald

Annals of Science 65 (1):1-46 (2008)

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Obscurity and confusion: Nonreductionism in Descartes's biology and philosophy.Barnaby Hutchins - 2016 - Dissertation, Ghent Universitydetails Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
Descartes’s Deduction of the Law of Refraction and the Shape of the Anaclastic Lens in Rule 8.Tarek R. Dika - 2022 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (2):395-446.details Descartes’s most extensive discussion of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens is contained in Rule 8 of "Rules for the Direction of the Mind". Few reconstructions of Descartes’s discovery of the law of refraction take Rule 8 as their basis. In Rule 8, Descartes denies that the law of refraction can be discovered by purely mathematical means, and he requires that the law of refraction be deduced from physical principles about natural power or force, the (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 1 citation
The Analogy between Light and Sound in the History of Optics from the ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton. Part 2†.Olivier Darrigol - 2010 - Centaurus 52 (3):206-257.details Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 2 citations
Analogy and falsification in Descartes’ physics.Gideon Manning - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (2):402-411.details In this paper I address Descartes’ use of analogy in physics. First, I introduce Descartes’ hypothetical reasoning, distinguishing between analogy and hypothesis. Second, I examine in detail Descartes’ use of analogy to both discover causes and add plausibility to his hypotheses—even though not always explicitly stated, Descartes’ practice assumes a unified view of the subject matter of physics as the extension of bodies in terms of their size, shape and the motion of their parts. Third, I present Descartes’ unique “philosophy (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 5 citations
Meteors and mixtures. Problems of hylomorphic composition.Lucian Petrescu - 2014 - Dissertation, Ghent Universitydetails Download Export citation Bookmark
Descartes, Corpuscles and Reductionism: Mechanism and Systems in Descartes' Physiology.Barnaby R. Hutchins - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (261):669-689.details I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’ proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular–mechanical explanations in Descartes’ physics, which have been taken to be representative of his treatment of all natural phenomena. However, Descartes’ explanations of the (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 7 citations

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