In the past, experts have disagreed about whether Samuel Clarke accepted the idea that gravity is a power superadded to matter by God. Most scholars now agree that Clarke did not support superaddition. But the argumentation employed by Clarke to reject superaddition has not been studied before in detail. In this paper, I explicate Clarke's argumentation by relating it to an important discussion about the possibility of superadded gravity in the Clarke-Collins correspondence. I examine Clarke's responses to Collins and draw (...) on his other works to reconstruct Clarke's reasons for rejecting superadded gravity. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of physics, the Handbook contains (...) chapters on other dimensions that have their place in any rounded history. These include the role of lecturing and textbooks in the communication of knowledge, the contribution of instrument-makers and instrument-making companies in providing for the needs of both research and lecture demonstrations, and the growing importance of the many interfaces between academic physics, industry, and the military. (shrink)

Locke’s metaphysical commitments are a matter of some controversy. Further controversy attends the issue of whether and how Locke adapts his views in order to accommodate the success of Newton’s Principia. The chapter lays out an interpretation of Locke’s commitments according to which Locke’s response to Newton on gravity does not require the positing of brute powers and is consistent with his core essentialism. The chapter raises the question of how the hypothesis concerning the creation of matter, alluded to at (...) 4.10.18, fits with these commitments. The chapter concludes that the De grav hypothesis would represent a significant revision to the background metaphysical picture of the Essay, but that nevertheless its attractions to Locke are intelligible and illuminating. (shrink)

1. The restless mind[1] Like us, early modern philosophers, both natural and moral, didn’t always understand the springs of their own actions. They didn’t want to feel everything they felt, and couldn’t trace the sources of all their thoughts and imaginings. Events from past experience come to mind again unwilled: abstract thought is interrupted by fantastical images, like the ‘winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants’ by which Hume exemplified ‘the liberty of the imagination’[2]. Then, as now, a failure to (...) keep a train of thought on track could be blamed for both personal and social ills, for wasted lives and erratic policies. The ongoing struggle to distinguish the deliverances of reason from what Hume called ‘the loose and indolent reveries of a castle-builder’ (1739/ 1978, p.624) thus required scrutiny of daydream and fancy as much as belief and knowledge (see also Tierney- Hynes 2007 on the ‘castle-builder’). The mind’s tendencies to float and to roam were of great interest to early modern philosophers as well as to others concerned with medicine, mental health, morals, education, and taste. This paper sketches one local line of thinking and theorizing about ‘mind-wandering’ and its bodily causes in British philosophy over the first decades of the 18th century, as a small exemplar of a form of cognitive history intended to illuminate independent historical and contemporary concerns about our understanding of mental life. The dual aim is to see problems in our historical material that we might otherwise miss, and to use history to explore phenomena more or less marginalized by modern psychology[3]. (shrink)

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

Kant introduces empiricism as a deficient position that is unsuitable for the generation of scientific knowledge. The reason for this is that, according to him, empiricism fails to connect with the world by remaining trapped within the realm of appearances. If we follow Galen’s account of the debate ensuing among Hellenistic doctors in the third century B.C., empiricism presents itself in an entirely different light. It emerges as a position that criticises medical practitioners who stray away from the here and (...) now by indulging in theory-driven a priori forms of reasoning. In so doing empiricism remains at all times committed to the world and its agents. In this paper Galen’s account of empiricism will serve me as a means to unravel the dynamics of a discussion that aims to reassess the standards of a dogmatic scientific practice. By looking at Bacon’s and Gassendi’s perception of the ancient medical tradition I will furthermore show that the understanding of what empiricism is crucially depends on the understanding of what scepticism is. (shrink)

Early modern debates about the nature of matter interacted with debates about whether matter could think. In particular, some philosophers (e.g., Cudworth and Leibniz) objected to materialism about the human mind on the grounds that matter is passive, thinking things are active, and one cannot make an active thing out of passive material. This paper begins by looking at two seventeenth-century materialist views (Hobbes’s, and one suggested but not endorsed by Locke) before considering that objection (which I call here the (...) Activity Argument). In discussion, I note that several philosophers of the time believed that matter was active. That view opens up a possible response to the Activity Argument. The paper concludes by looking at the views of two materialists of the time who also believed that matter was active, Toland and Cavendish. (shrink)

This is the introduction to a collection of essays on 'embodied empiricism' in early modern philosophy and the life sciences - papers on Harvey, Glisson, Locke, Hume, Bonnet, Lamarck, on anatomy and physiology, on medicine and natural history, etc.

John Locke’s treatment of quantity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is not nearly as extensive or as well-known as his treatment of quality and his distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Yet I contend that a close examination of Locke’s comments on quantity in the Essay reveals that he endorses a general theory of quantity that not only distinguishes quantities from qualities, but also plays several other important roles in his overall philosophy—particularly in his treatments of infinity and demonstrative (...) knowledge. Moreover, I argue that this theory does not appear out of thin air, but is in certain respects one and the same as the approach to quantity found in Aristotle and developed by medieval Aristotelian thinkers. Identifying the core tenets of this approach in the texts of Aristotle and medieval Aristotelians, and formulating them clearly enough to shed light on Locke’s theory of quantity in the Essay, is the principal task of this paper. (shrink)