The conception of René Descartes as the arch-rationalist has been sufficiently exploded in recent literature; however, there is still a large lacuna in our understanding of how empirical research and experimentation fits within his philosophy. My dissertation is directed at addressing just this problem. I contend that Descartes’ famed method is not a singular monolith but instead two interdependent methods: one directed at metaphysical and epistemological truth, while the other directed at empirical questions and contingent facts of the world. I (...) claim there is evidence for this position not only in his actual scientific practice, but also in the rhetorical structure of the Discourse on Method and the Principles of Philosophy. In exploring the empirical side of Descartes’ method, I show how his unusual system produces a system of experiment designed to serve both as a discovery and verification tool at the same time. As a further application of my interpretation, I argue that the Passions of the Soul and Descartes’ ethical theory expressed in his correspondence must also be seen as part of his two-fold methodology. Instead of attempting to cast Descartes as a virtue ethicist or deontologist, as is normally done, I emphasize that Descartes’ ethics is centered on the mind-body union, and therefore, includes an empirical element as well. The end result is an ethics that requires a detailed study of mechanics, anatomy, physics, as well as medicine. Lastly, I show how this methodology can help us understand the works of some of his early followers: Claude Gadroys and Jacques Rohault. Both of these philosophers not only serve to ground my interpretation, but also to highlight aspects of Cartesian that have often been passed over. I show how the experimentalism of Jacques Rohault goes beyond the epistemological boundaries set up by Descartes, as signifies a new direction that will ultimately eclipse the Cartesian school of thought. In the case of Claude Gadroys, I present a concrete example of the exploitation of the over generality of Cartesian principles. In so doing, I show that while Descartes’ experimentalism was intended to rule out the possibility of occult causes, he in fact created a system that allowed for them, only under a different guise. (shrink)

In the early modern age, two causal models are clearly identifiable: action at a distance—a typical Renaissance paradigm, widespread among thinkers involved in natural magic and seventeenth-century Neoplatonists—and action by contact, on which both the Aristotelians and the Cartesians agreed. Pierre Gassendi too seems to endorse the motto: ‘Nihil agit in distans nisi prius agit in medium’ [Nothing acts at a distance unless it acts through a medium]. In this essay, it will be shown that a third causal model exists, (...) according to which material bodies are surrounded by ‘atmospheres’ of effluvia or qualities, which spread within a circumscribed ‘sphere of activity’, whose extension is peculiar to each body. In particular, it will be shown: what the third causal model was like, from an ontological point of view, that is, how it centred on the concepts of effluvium and spiritus, or qualitas; what this model was like, from a gnoseological point of view; how it was theorized by... (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

This study reassesses the occult philosophy of the British polymath John Dee. Focusing on his treatise Monas hieroglyphica and his notorious angelic conversations in the 1580s, it describes Dee’s philosophical career as a continuous search for a language which could yield knowledge of both nature and God. Situating Dee’s philosophy in the context of early modern “symbolic exegesis”, a group of discursive practices aimed at uncovering the creative principles of God by means of language, the study is an attempt to (...) show how Dee’s seemingly divergent interests were interrelated. In Monas hieroglyphica he treated such disciplines as grammar, biblical exegesis, kabbalah, astronomy, alchemy, and mathematics as grounded on a common foundation, identical to the Word of God. By conceiving a graphical symbol, expressing God’s Word in visual form, Dee believed that he could bring these sciences to perfection. In the later angelic conversations, Dee’s aim was to recover the language spoken by the prelapsarian Adam. The Adamic language was conceived of as representing accurately God’s creative Word, and Dee’s recovery of this tongue would ultimately result in a complete restitution of both religion and knowledge. Dee’s works provide an example of how metaphoric associations between the Word of God, language, nature and the human soul could be exploited in Renaissance occult thought. Such metaphoric associations had an important role in shaping and legitimizing early modern views of symbolism, mysticism, and magic. Relying on Dee’s own sources, many of which still survive with his annotations, this study tries to reconstruct Dee’s search for the perfect language, while simultaneously stressing the syncretistic character of his views. (shrink)

This dissertation discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, and has two main themes. The first is Hobbes's materialism, and the second is Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers, in particular his place in the mechanist movement that is said to have replaced Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy in the seventeenth century. -/- I argue that Hobbes does not, for most of his career, believe the general materialist view that bodies are the only substances. He believes, rather, that ideas, which are our (...) main mechanism for thinking about the world, allow us to understand many bodies, but not to understand every thing we recognize to exist. The incomprehensible things include God---and, early in Hobbes's career, the human mind. Discussing materialism and our knowledge of God leads me to engage with the debate over Hobbes's alleged atheism. I argue that the evidence for Hobbes's atheism is weak at best. Hobbes is a sincere theist, though his view is sometimes unusual. -/- My discussion of Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers has three parts. In chapter five I argue that Hobbes's views about method are in important ways similar to Zabarella's. In chapter six I look at Hobbes's rejection of the view, held by some scholastic Aristotelians, that accidents can sometimes exist without inhering in substances. Thus we see two sides of Hobbes's interaction with the Aristotelian tradition. Sometimes that interaction is just rejection, but at other times Hobbes takes over views from that tradition. Then in chapter seven I consider whether, and in what sense, Hobbes is a mechanist. I argue that the narrative of mechanism and Aristotelianism is a less powerful explanation than it has seemed to some to be, because it is hard to see what mechanists have in common. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and (...) spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Newton’s stance on explanation in physics was enabled by his overall methodology and that it neither committed him to embrace action at a distance nor to set aside philosophical and metaphysical questions. Rather his methodology allowed him to embrace a non-causal, yet non-inferior, kind of explanation. I suggest that Newton holds that the theory developed in the Principia provides a genuine explanation, namely a law-based one, but that we also lack something explanatory, namely a (...) causal account of the explanandum. Finally, I argue that examining what it takes to have law-based explanation in the face of agnosticism about the causal process makes it possible to recast the debate over action at a distance between Leibniz and Newton as empirically and methodologically motivated on both sides. (shrink)

Malebranche is both an occasionalist and an advocate of the preformationist theory of generation. One might expect this given that he is a mechanist: passive matter cannot be the source of its own motion and so requires God to move it (occasionalism); and such matter, moving according to a few simple laws of motion, could never fashion something as complex as a living being, and so organisms must be fashioned by God at Creation (preformationism). This expectation finds a challenge in (...) Kant's depiction of the relation between causation and generation. According to Kant, preformation is the generation theory one would expect the advocate of the pre-established harmony to endorse, while the occasionalist would endorse a theory whereby God directly forms the organism upon every insemination. I make sense of Malebranche's position in light of Kant's suggestion by examining the relation Malebranche sees between science and metaphysics, the roles that he believes empirical investigations and final causes have in scientific practice and explanation, and the role of the supernatural in Malebranche's philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter we will argue, firstly, that Bacon’s engages in a pecu-liar form of mathematization of nature that develops a quali-quantitative methodology of measurement. Secondly, we will show that medicine is one of the disciplines where that dual way of measurement is practiced. In the first section of the chapter, we will expose the ontology involved in the Baconian proposal of measurement of nature. The second section will address the place that mixed mathematics occupies in Bacon’s scheme of scientific (...) branches and will suggest that a proper advancement of medicine can generate a new branch of mixed mathematics. The next section will reconstruct Bacon’s approach to measurement and expose its quali-quantitative import. In the last section, we will show some examples of medicine in which this quali-quantitative measurement is applied. (shrink)

With respect to the topic of “powers and abilities,” most readers will associate David Hume with his multi-pronged critique of traditional attempts to make robust explanatory use of those notions in a philosophical or scientific context. But Hume’s own philosophy is also structured around the attribution to human beings of a variety of basic faculties or mental powers – such as the reason and the imagination, or the various powers involved in Hume’s account of im- pressions of reflection and the (...) passions. Indeed, there is a clear case to be made that, despite his deflationary account of our concept of power, Hume continues to treat certain basic powers or faculties as forming the explanatory bedrock for his new “science of man”. In this essay, I will discuss how this apparent conflict between the “critical” (if not outright skeptical) and “constructive” aspects of Hume’s discussion of powers and abilities is best resolved – with special attention to the question of how this illuminates Hume’s place in the development of early modern conceptions of the proper method for philosophy. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza las estrategias utilizadas por Descartes para «desencantar el mundo», a fin de suprimir los elementos herméticos de las explicaciones científicas cartesianas y someter todos los fenómenos naturales a nuestro control. Para ello, apelo a la distinción entre elementos causales —cualidades ocultas— y sus efectos —efectos admirables— como las dos dimensiones que deben ser incorporadas bajo las explicaciones científicas para garantizar el cálculo de los fenómenos y su dominio.

This paper aims to assess the epistemological value of the notion of sympathy in Galen’s thought. It first shows that Galen makes use of two different concepts of sympathy: the ambient concept, according to which the human body manifests a harmonious part-whole relationship, and the technical concept, with which one connects two pathologies on the basis of the fact that the cause of the ailment is elsewhere than where it surfaces. Neither of these sympathies constitutes in itself a causal explanation (...) of reality. The first merely acknowledges an obvious interrelationship, the second acts as an epistemic tool to shift the focus of diagnosis away from the place where the condition manifests itself. However, the two concepts are not absolutely unrelated; and they come together when the sympathetic paradigm is used to understand the unifying action of the psychic and natural faculties. Very significantly, Galen then provisionally defines the cause as a power or faculty (δύναμις) not out of theoretical necessity but for practical reasons. (shrink)

For 7 December 1683, the transactions of the Oxford Philosophical Society record the following experiment: “It was deliver’d by Mr. Harris, as found true by a late triall, that Juice of Onions did...

Thanks to how Girolamo Fracastoro defines the different types of contagion in his book De contagione, et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione, libri tres (1546), and his defense of the “seeds of contagion” (seedbed) as the cause of contagious diseases, he is considered today one parent of the modern epidemiology and microbiology. One of the crucial problems in this book is to explain the remote transmission of the contagious diseases refuting the etiologic use of the occult qualities. The aim of (...) this study is to investigate the philosophical background of the problem and draw the conclusions that his solution had for medicine and for science in general. (shrink)

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal of (...) a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century? (shrink)

Although the theological elements of Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny, his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked. This article takes a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. Rather than argue that Boyle – like John Locke or David Hume – was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature, the article treats him as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and (...) economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command. More specifically, it uses one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage – in order to explore how economic exchange began to acquire a patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17th-century imagination. (shrink)

Relying on the results of the fist paper of this pair (Vermeir, 2004), which argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination, I unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the imagination often stayed implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians as (...) well as moralists struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being (...) informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. (shrink)

Recent ‘revisionist’ studies of the Scientific Revolution have utilized Robert Hooke as an example of a mechanical philosopher who incorporated active principles in his world system. This paper carefully examines Hooke's natural philosophy in order to determine the extent to which he employed active agents in his work. Thorough investigation reveals that although Hooke sometimes refrained from offering causal explanations of the phenomena he studied, there is no solid evidence that he believed active principles were at work in nature. Rather, (...) his major tool for interpreting nature—his theory of congruity—follows wholly mechanical principles, as do his explanations of the essences of the fundamental constituents of the universe. Hooke emerges from this analysis as a purely mechanical philosopher. (shrink)

Since its birth in 1600 opera has been interpreted as an attempt to revive Greek tragedies in its marvelous music. Its provocative presentation of action and narration entirely in music has been seen as a manifestation of the enchanted universe of sixteenth-century hermeticism. Viewed as a final homage to the magical incantations of the premodern era, late Renaissance operas have been interpreted as the culmination rather than the dissolution of Renaissance culture. This paper proposes that the relationship between the natural (...) and the supernatural in early opera represents a rational mediation between the real and the unreal rather than an enchanted bond between these realms. The paper situates the birth of opera in the context of the epistemological shift of the new science and suggests that opera played a key role in the transition from the old to the modern notions of meaning and truth. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) was the first professor to introduce the demonstration of experiment into a university physics course and built the Leiden Physics Theatre to accommodate this new pedagogy. When he requested the funds from the university to build the facility, he claimed that the performance of experiments would demonstrate the “truth and certainty” of the postulates of theoretical physics. Such a claim is interesting given de Volder’s lifelong commitment to Cartesian scientia. This chapter will examine de (...) Volder’s views on experiment and show that they are not Newtonian or inductivist, as is sometimes claimed. While de Volder thinks we need deductive reasoning from first principles to provide evidence of the certainty of the content of our physical theories, he also contends that we need experiment to provide evidence of the certainty of the existence of the particular bodies those theories discuss. This approach to experiment is based on a distinction between rational certainty and the certainty of material bodies in the actual world. While this account is deeply influenced by Descartes, it is importantly different than Descartes’ distinction between absolute and moral certainty. De Volder’s “Cartesian Empiricism” is best understood as a continuation and further development of a long tradition of teaching through observation at Leiden. (shrink)

During the seventeenth century there were different ways of opposing the new mechanical philosophy and the old Aristotelian philosophy. Remarkably enough, one of this way succeeded in becoming stable beyond the moment of its formulation, one according to which Descartes would be the benchmark by which the works of other natural philosophers of the seventeenth century fall either on the side of the old or the new. I consequently examine the French debate where this representation emerges, a debate that took (...) place along with the development of a Cartesian propaganda in the 1660s and the ensuing official condemnations of the philosophy of Descartes, which was said to constitute a danger for the mystery of Eucharist. But these condemnations pronounced in the name of theology, as numerous and radical as they were, were not considered to be sufficient. They were assisted by numerous polemical works, the audience of which were learned companies of courteous honnêtes gens, and the object of which was to defend a certain way of proceeding in natural philosophy. I consequently concentrate on two correlated questions, the question of what kind of ontological entities are necessary for the establishment of a good physics, and the correlated question of what norms should be adopted in natural philosophy. I show quite systematically that the criticisms of Cartesian philosophers by the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste de La Grange, the bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, and various Jesuits, Ignace Pardies, Antoine Rochon, Louis Le Valois, Gabriel Daniel, René Rapin, and Honoré Fabri respond to the mockeries of Gérauld de Cordemoy, Jacques Rohault, Louis de La Forge, Bernard Lamy, Nicolas Malebranche or Antoine Arnauld concerning the scholastic entities. Not only do I contrast their philosophical arguments concerning ontological entities and the norms to be respected in physics, but also their ways of defining the philosophical enterprise and its public. (shrink)

I argue that the imagination was a crucial concept for the understanding of marvellous phenomena, divination and magic in general. Exploring a debate on prophecy at the turn of the seventeenth century, I show that four explanatory categories were consistently evoked and I elucidate the role of the imagination in each of them. I introduce the term ‘floating concept’ to conceptualise the different ways in which the imagination and the related ‘animal spirits’ were understood in diverse discourses. My argument is (...) underpinned with a general discussion of the imagination, after which I focus on a unorthodox tradition which attributed special powers to this internal faculty. Many physicians had explained psychosomatic phenomena by referring to the influence of the imagination on the human body; but some philosophers held that the imagination could also exert power over external objects. During the renaissance these theories acquired negative associations and became linked with illicit magic. Furthermore, I show that the relation between both animal spirits and imagination, and the power of the latter over external bodies, points to the importance of a ‘history of vapours’; and this suggests an adjustment to Keith Hutchison’s argument on occult qualities in mechanical philosophy. The accompanying paper gives more evidence of these claims and elaborates on the relation between the natural and the moral. (shrink)

In the first paper of this pair, I argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination [Vermeir, K. . The ‘physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: A case-study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination . Studies in History and Philosophy of Science C, 35, 561–591]. In the present article, I will rely on these results in order to unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the imagination (...) were often implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians and moralists all struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)

In his accounts of plant and animal generation Pierre Gassendi offers a mechanist story of how organisms create offspring to whom they pass on their traits. Development of the new organism is directed by a material “soul” or animula bearing ontogenetic information. Where reproduction is sexual, two sets of material semina and corresponding animulae meet and jointly determine the division, differentiation, and development of matter in the new organism. The determination of inherited traits requires a means of combining or choosing (...) among each parent's contributions, and towards this end, Gassendi outlines the nature of competition and dominance among animulae. Unlike his fellow mechanists, Gassendi can extend his mechanism to his heredity account, because his proposed vehicle for ontogenetic transmission is material. That proposal in turn relies on his atomist hypothesis. The relative uniformity of atoms allows animulae to operate equivalently across different modes of generation, spontaneous or otherwise. Further, his molecular model of atomic structures allows a material means of storing ontogenetic information received from the souls of parent organisms. These accounts—flawed and sketchy—unsurprisingly fail to specify how hereditary information might be borne physically, and in any case do not meet Gassendi's own empiricist standards. Yet this generation theory with pretensions to a materialist mechanism establishes Gassendi's firm commitment to a unity of the sciences through an atomist ontology that underlies all physical phenomena, including the organic. (shrink)