Stephen Gaukroger
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199296446
- eISBN:
- 9780191711985
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296446.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future have been profoundly altered since the 17th century as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped ...
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The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future have been profoundly altered since the 17th century as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. The issue is not just that science brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather that it completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This is a distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West and it marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. This book examines the first stage of this development, from the 13th-century introduction of Aristotelianism and its establishment of natural philosophy as the point of entry into systematic understanding of the world and our place in it, to the attempts to establish natural philosophy as a world-view in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. It offers a conceptual and cultural history of the emergence of a scientific culture in the West from the early-modern era to the present. Science in the modern period is treated as a particular kind of cognitive practice and as a particular kind of cultural product, with aim to show that if we explore the connections between these two, we can learn something about the concerns and values of modern thought that we could not learn from either of them taken separately.Less
The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future have been profoundly altered since the 17th century as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. The issue is not just that science brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather that it completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This is a distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West and it marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. This book examines the first stage of this development, from the 13th-century introduction of Aristotelianism and its establishment of natural philosophy as the point of entry into systematic understanding of the world and our place in it, to the attempts to establish natural philosophy as a world-view in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. It offers a conceptual and cultural history of the emergence of a scientific culture in the West from the early-modern era to the present. Science in the modern period is treated as a particular kind of cognitive practice and as a particular kind of cultural product, with aim to show that if we explore the connections between these two, we can learn something about the concerns and values of modern thought that we could not learn from either of them taken separately.
Stephen Gaukroger
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199296446
- eISBN:
- 9780191711985
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296446.003.0013
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
One of the driving ideas behind many of the various movements in 17th-century natural philosophy was that of the unity of knowledge. There were two principal ways of establishing this in its most ...
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One of the driving ideas behind many of the various movements in 17th-century natural philosophy was that of the unity of knowledge. There were two principal ways of establishing this in its most general form. The first was politico-theology: Spinoza undermined the claims of Christianity to supply satisfactory notions of wisdom and happiness, and to set out to develop a novel account of how a mechanised natural philosophy can lead to wisdom and happiness. The general unqualified rejection of the Spinozean model does not mean that in a struggle between legitimacy, which the Spinozean conception effectively abandoned, and autonomy, which it established beyond doubt, natural philosophers favoured legitimacy over autonomy. They wanted both, and the answer was deemed to lie in physico-theology: revelation and natural philosophy were treated as being mutually reinforcing, there being a process of triangulation towards the shared truth of revelation and natural philosophy.Less
One of the driving ideas behind many of the various movements in 17th-century natural philosophy was that of the unity of knowledge. There were two principal ways of establishing this in its most general form. The first was politico-theology: Spinoza undermined the claims of Christianity to supply satisfactory notions of wisdom and happiness, and to set out to develop a novel account of how a mechanised natural philosophy can lead to wisdom and happiness. The general unqualified rejection of the Spinozean model does not mean that in a struggle between legitimacy, which the Spinozean conception effectively abandoned, and autonomy, which it established beyond doubt, natural philosophers favoured legitimacy over autonomy. They wanted both, and the answer was deemed to lie in physico-theology: revelation and natural philosophy were treated as being mutually reinforcing, there being a process of triangulation towards the shared truth of revelation and natural philosophy.
Stephen Gaukroger
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199296446
- eISBN:
- 9780191711985
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296446.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
There was always a lack of fit between natural philosophy and natural history in the Aristotelian tradition, and the latter was better adapted to the Christian idea of the universe as something ...
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There was always a lack of fit between natural philosophy and natural history in the Aristotelian tradition, and the latter was better adapted to the Christian idea of the universe as something created. The natural history tradition was marginalized with the introduction of Aristotelianism in the 13th century, but it continued to play a role in conceiving of nature as a text to be read in a similar way to that in which revelation was read. Developments in biblical and legal philology in the 16th century transformed the model on which natural history was based, and as a result, it ceased to be allegorical and became literal. By the 17th century, it had begun to provide a new kind of religious reading of nature.Less
There was always a lack of fit between natural philosophy and natural history in the Aristotelian tradition, and the latter was better adapted to the Christian idea of the universe as something created. The natural history tradition was marginalized with the introduction of Aristotelianism in the 13th century, but it continued to play a role in conceiving of nature as a text to be read in a similar way to that in which revelation was read. Developments in biblical and legal philology in the 16th century transformed the model on which natural history was based, and as a result, it ceased to be allegorical and became literal. By the 17th century, it had begun to provide a new kind of religious reading of nature.
Stephen Gaukroger
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199594931
- eISBN:
- 9780191595745
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199594931.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, General
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was a concern to reconcile Christianity, the traditional humanistic disciplines, and natural philosophy. There are two principal ways in ...
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In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was a concern to reconcile Christianity, the traditional humanistic disciplines, and natural philosophy. There are two principal ways in which the reconciliation between religion and natural philosophy was attempted: metaphysics and physico‐theology. The Leibniz/Clarke correspondence encapsulates many of the questions at issue.Less
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was a concern to reconcile Christianity, the traditional humanistic disciplines, and natural philosophy. There are two principal ways in which the reconciliation between religion and natural philosophy was attempted: metaphysics and physico‐theology. The Leibniz/Clarke correspondence encapsulates many of the questions at issue.
Raymond Flood
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199231256
- eISBN:
- 9780191710803
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231256.003.0011
- Subject:
- Mathematics, History of Mathematics
This chapter focuses on Lord Kelvin's collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait. Probably the most influential legacy of their collaboration on ‘heavy mathematical work’ was the production in 1867 of The ...
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This chapter focuses on Lord Kelvin's collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait. Probably the most influential legacy of their collaboration on ‘heavy mathematical work’ was the production in 1867 of The Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which became universally known as ‘T&T’. It was Tait's concern to have adequate textbooks for his students to support his lectures that led to the project that resulted in ‘T&T’.Less
This chapter focuses on Lord Kelvin's collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait. Probably the most influential legacy of their collaboration on ‘heavy mathematical work’ was the production in 1867 of The Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which became universally known as ‘T&T’. It was Tait's concern to have adequate textbooks for his students to support his lectures that led to the project that resulted in ‘T&T’.
Ben Brice
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199290253
- eISBN:
- 9780191710483
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290253.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
David Hume was brought up as a Calvinist, and studied Newtonian physics and methodology at Edinburgh University and beyond. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and his posthumously ...
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David Hume was brought up as a Calvinist, and studied Newtonian physics and methodology at Edinburgh University and beyond. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Hume attacked the foundations of post-Newtonian natural theology by exploiting both Newton's rules for reasoning in natural philosophy (Regulae Philosophandi) and Protestant critiques of natural reason, in order to attack the metaphysical and theological foundations of 18th-century natural religion. It is argued that while Coleridge never ceased to attack the ‘infidelity’ and corruption of the atheist Hume, he could not easily dismiss Hume's arguments against natural religion, since they were often couched in the language of ‘epistemological piety’ as practiced by Christian philosophers like Boyle, Locke, and Newton. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Coleridge's acknowledged intellectual debts to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790).Less
David Hume was brought up as a Calvinist, and studied Newtonian physics and methodology at Edinburgh University and beyond. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Hume attacked the foundations of post-Newtonian natural theology by exploiting both Newton's rules for reasoning in natural philosophy (Regulae Philosophandi) and Protestant critiques of natural reason, in order to attack the metaphysical and theological foundations of 18th-century natural religion. It is argued that while Coleridge never ceased to attack the ‘infidelity’ and corruption of the atheist Hume, he could not easily dismiss Hume's arguments against natural religion, since they were often couched in the language of ‘epistemological piety’ as practiced by Christian philosophers like Boyle, Locke, and Newton. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Coleridge's acknowledged intellectual debts to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790).
Richard Scholar
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199274406
- eISBN:
- 9780191706448
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199274406.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
It is commonly said in the early modern period that elusive qualities draw natural bodies together. This chapter offers a critical history of attempts to explain such preternatural forces in natural ...
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It is commonly said in the early modern period that elusive qualities draw natural bodies together. This chapter offers a critical history of attempts to explain such preternatural forces in natural philosophy. It argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi appears as a key term in the vernacular debate about occult qualities and other secrets of nature, and that it becomes a site of lexical conflict between traditionalists (especially Jesuit natural philosophers) and so-called ‘new’ philosophers (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton). Its appearance in this context is best understood as a symptom of the crisis that besets scholastic natural philosophy in the 17th century. The je-ne-sais-quoi offers in this way a point of entry into central debates of the period known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Not only does the word help articulate philosophical discussions about preternatural phenomena, but those discussions also offer access to the nature of the je-ne-sais-quoi itself.Less
It is commonly said in the early modern period that elusive qualities draw natural bodies together. This chapter offers a critical history of attempts to explain such preternatural forces in natural philosophy. It argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi appears as a key term in the vernacular debate about occult qualities and other secrets of nature, and that it becomes a site of lexical conflict between traditionalists (especially Jesuit natural philosophers) and so-called ‘new’ philosophers (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton). Its appearance in this context is best understood as a symptom of the crisis that besets scholastic natural philosophy in the 17th century. The je-ne-sais-quoi offers in this way a point of entry into central debates of the period known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Not only does the word help articulate philosophical discussions about preternatural phenomena, but those discussions also offer access to the nature of the je-ne-sais-quoi itself.
Stephen Gaukroger
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199594931
- eISBN:
- 9780191595745
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199594931.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, General
The chapter explores the development of the thought of John Locke. It begins with his early medical concerns, showing how these became connected with the issue of the standing of ‘experimental ...
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The chapter explores the development of the thought of John Locke. It begins with his early medical concerns, showing how these became connected with the issue of the standing of ‘experimental natural philosophy’. The most comprehensive statement of the philosophy to which Locke was opposed was that of Nicolas Malebranche, and Locke's mature views can be seen as a response to Malebranche. The reading offered brings to light an understanding of empiricism as a successor to, and philosophical refinement of, seventeenth‐century ‘experimental’ natural philosophy, something which is intimately tied up with natural‐philosophical practice, and is quite distinct from the speculative epistemology to which it is reduced in the ‘rationalism/empiricism’ debates.Less
The chapter explores the development of the thought of John Locke. It begins with his early medical concerns, showing how these became connected with the issue of the standing of ‘experimental natural philosophy’. The most comprehensive statement of the philosophy to which Locke was opposed was that of Nicolas Malebranche, and Locke's mature views can be seen as a response to Malebranche. The reading offered brings to light an understanding of empiricism as a successor to, and philosophical refinement of, seventeenth‐century ‘experimental’ natural philosophy, something which is intimately tied up with natural‐philosophical practice, and is quite distinct from the speculative epistemology to which it is reduced in the ‘rationalism/empiricism’ debates.
Ted McCormick
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199547890
- eISBN:
- 9780191720529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547890.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Economic History
The conclusion draws together several of the main themes of the book, arguing that political arithmetic can only be understood properly from the manuscripts he circulated in his lifetime, and in the ...
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The conclusion draws together several of the main themes of the book, arguing that political arithmetic can only be understood properly from the manuscripts he circulated in his lifetime, and in the context of his lifelong engagement with natural philosophy and his Baconian interpretation of the methods and purposes of science. Petty's project to transform government through the systematic manipulation of populations in the interests of the state undermines any retrospective distinction between his contribution to social science and his interest in social engineering; the concept of ‘biopolitics', though equally anachronistic, is more appropriate. By the same token, however, the massive expansion (in real terms) of demographic manipulation after Petty's death suggests that political arithmetic's ambitions were not abandoned but merely concealed.Less
The conclusion draws together several of the main themes of the book, arguing that political arithmetic can only be understood properly from the manuscripts he circulated in his lifetime, and in the context of his lifelong engagement with natural philosophy and his Baconian interpretation of the methods and purposes of science. Petty's project to transform government through the systematic manipulation of populations in the interests of the state undermines any retrospective distinction between his contribution to social science and his interest in social engineering; the concept of ‘biopolitics', though equally anachronistic, is more appropriate. By the same token, however, the massive expansion (in real terms) of demographic manipulation after Petty's death suggests that political arithmetic's ambitions were not abandoned but merely concealed.
Edward Grant
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- July 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195172256
- eISBN:
- 9780199835546
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195172256.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Scientific values embodied in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the civic virtues embedded in his practical sciences (ethics and politics), were used to improve the quality of government in the 14th ...
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Scientific values embodied in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the civic virtues embedded in his practical sciences (ethics and politics), were used to improve the quality of government in the 14th century by King Charles V of France. This was readily feasible because of the separation of church and state, the favorable attitude toward natural philosophy by medieval theologians, and the institutionalization of the study of Aristotle’s theoretical and practical sciences in the medieval universities, which relied heavily on reasoned argumentation and a rejection of arguments from authority, as exemplified by Nicole Oresme. The intellectual habits developed in this process shaped a “scientific temperament” that ushered in early modern science. In stark contrast, Islam was a theocracy with no separation of church and state. Natural philosophy was viewed as a potential threat to religious faith and was marginalized, leading eventually to a gradual deterioration in the study of the exact sciences, which had previously attained the highest level in the civilized world.Less
Scientific values embodied in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the civic virtues embedded in his practical sciences (ethics and politics), were used to improve the quality of government in the 14th century by King Charles V of France. This was readily feasible because of the separation of church and state, the favorable attitude toward natural philosophy by medieval theologians, and the institutionalization of the study of Aristotle’s theoretical and practical sciences in the medieval universities, which relied heavily on reasoned argumentation and a rejection of arguments from authority, as exemplified by Nicole Oresme. The intellectual habits developed in this process shaped a “scientific temperament” that ushered in early modern science. In stark contrast, Islam was a theocracy with no separation of church and state. Natural philosophy was viewed as a potential threat to religious faith and was marginalized, leading eventually to a gradual deterioration in the study of the exact sciences, which had previously attained the highest level in the civilized world.
