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The Unity of Knowledge

Stephen Gaukroger

in The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685

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 ... More

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

The Construction of a New World Picture

Stephen Gaukroger

in The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760

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 ... More

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

Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Distributed Cognition: The Delicate Flux of World and Spirit

Charlotte Lee

in Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

This chapter discusses Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a prolific German poet of the eighteenth-century, as a precursor of theories of distributed cognition. It argues that developments in anti-dualist ... More

This chapter discusses Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a prolific German poet of the eighteenth-century, as a precursor of theories of distributed cognition. It argues that developments in anti-dualist and radical Protestant thought around 1700, together with Brockes’ own commitment to the ‘mixed-science’ of physico-theology, cause his poetry to resonate with modern approaches to cognition. Through close readings of individual poems from the collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, the chapter examines Brockes’ presentation of the flux between mind, body and world, and of the productive use which, through what we might call ‘epistemic engineering’, humankind can make of its environment. It also remarks on the compatibility of this religious work, geared towards the celebration of God, with modern, essentially secular understandings of our world.Less

Physico-Theology, Natural Philosophy, and Sensory Experience

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

This chapter reassesses the relationship between physico-theology—the main body of works in which philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, and John Ray advanced claims about how nature ... More

This chapter reassesses the relationship between physico-theology—the main body of works in which philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, and John Ray advanced claims about how nature should be experienced—and their empirical approach to the study of nature. For the most part, physico-theology has been interpreted as an apologetic discourse, intended to deflect accusations of religious impropriety leveled against practitioners of the new philosophy. By contrast, this chapter shows that physico-theology and natural philosophy had a lot in common. Moreover, it shows that Ray and his contemporaries saw the two practices as components of a broader project of empirical knowledge production. The chapter concludes by suggesting that it is time to take the affective and moral claims of physico-theology more seriously, considering the possibility that they were integral to the aims of the empirical natural philosophy practiced by many of the Royal Society’s leading members. In addition, it proposes that the rhetoric characteristic of much physico-theology was crucial to the representational practices of natural philosophy. The chapter suggests, in other words, that the pleasurable rhetoric of physico-theology had a far greater role in the explanatory practices of empiricism than has so far been recognized.Less

An Empiricism of Imperceptible Entities

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

Chapter 2 explores a difficulty that links the natural philosophy and physico-theology of the early Royal Society—the challenge of making imperceptible entities accessible to sensory experience. In ... More

Chapter 2 explores a difficulty that links the natural philosophy and physico-theology of the early Royal Society—the challenge of making imperceptible entities accessible to sensory experience. In natural philosophy, those entities were imperceptibly small and almost infinitely numerous atoms. In physico-theology, meanwhile, the entity in question was an immaterial God, both immaterial and infinite. The chapter explores this difficulty by turning to crucial works of neurophysiology such as Thomas Willis’s Cerebri Anatome (1664), and to texts by Robert Boyle exploring the possibility of learning about things beyond human understanding—his Discourse of Things Above Reason (1681) and Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (1675). In so doing, the chapter shows that physico-theology was by no means only an apologetic discourse. Rather, it was one part of an empirical science deeply concerned with making the activity of imperceptible spirits accessible to the bodily organs of sensation and cognition. At the same time, it shows that Boyle and others believed that the representational strategies they used to make imperceptible entities accessible to the senses should provoke pleasure. For them, the provocation of sensory and imaginative pleasure was central to the work of empiricism.Less

Studying Nature

in Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition

This chapter examines how regimen idea informs inquirers' positions relative to the study of nature, with its natural philosophical and natural theological dimensions. The focuses of the analysis is ... More

This chapter examines how regimen idea informs inquirers' positions relative to the study of nature, with its natural philosophical and natural theological dimensions. The focuses of the analysis is on the figure of the inquirer into nature rather than on natural philosophical methodology and the natural theological argument. This chapter suggests that an approach from the point of view of the inquirer can add important dimensions to methodology and argument and evaluates how this concept applies to Robert Boyle and John Locke's general concern with the rightful conduct of the understanding. It also contends that experimental methodology and physico-theology are construed as transformative exercises for the inquirer's mind.Less

What Is Life?: A Comparative Study of Ralph Cudworth and Nehemiah Grew

Raphaële Andrault

in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy

In the physico-theologies of R. Cudworth and N. Grew, “Life” and vital phenomena are used to prove the excellency of God’s creation and to refute both Cartesian mechanism and atheism. This paper ... More

In the physico-theologies of R. Cudworth and N. Grew, “Life” and vital phenomena are used to prove the excellency of God’s creation and to refute both Cartesian mechanism and atheism. This paper examines first the comparison proposed by Bayle and discussed by Leibniz between Cudworth’s plastic natures or Grew’s principles of Life, on the one hand, and scholastic “substantial forms” on the other hand. By criticizing this comparison and by distinguishing a specific notion of life (life as vegetation) and a generic one (life as incorporeity), this paper shows how the polemical framework of those texts prevents from drawing a clear-cut line between animate and inanimate bodies.Less

The Literature of Physico-Theology

Philip Connell

in Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Moving forward into the early Hanoverian era, this chapter analyses the political significance of Newtonian apologetic as it found expression in the poetry of James Thomson. The heterodox ... More

Moving forward into the early Hanoverian era, this chapter analyses the political significance of Newtonian apologetic as it found expression in the poetry of James Thomson. The heterodox inclinations of leading Newtonian divines, such as Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, and Thomas Rundle, compromised whiggish attempts to enlist the new science in the service of Hanoverian panegyric, despite Queen Caroline’s well-publicized Newtonian enthusiasms. But for those whigs—both court and opposition—who were disturbed by Robert Walpole’s alliance with the heresy-hunting bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, the ‘latitudinarian’ associations of Newtonian religion could hold a strong political appeal. This latter possibility is shown to inform the blend of Shaftesburean enthusiasm and Newtonian physico-theology in Thomson’s The Seasons (1730).Less

Evangelical Spirituality and the Natural World

D. Bruce Hindmarsh

in The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World

The evangelical attitude toward Newtonian science and devotional response to the natural world can be seen in a variety of individuals, all of whom drew upon the tradition of physico-theology but ... More

The evangelical attitude toward Newtonian science and devotional response to the natural world can be seen in a variety of individuals, all of whom drew upon the tradition of physico-theology but turned this into something more like a physico-doxology. William Romaine largely rejected Newtonian science, preferring the alternative Hutchinsonian cosmology, but Augustus Toplady celebrated science and used mechanical philosophy to support his Calvinist belief in necessity. Evangelical belletristic writing showed a keen appreciation of contemporary science and an attitude of devotional wonder, something especially evident in James Hervey, Moses Browne, Anne Steele, and Phillis Wheatley. In the last half of the century, Isaac Milner was a thoroughgoing Newtonian at Cambridge who closely united his science and his evangelical faith, and John Russell was an accomplished evangelical artist and amateur astronomer who combined art, science, and devotion in his exquisite lunar drawings.Less

Milton and the People

Joanna Picciotto

in Milton in the Long Restoration

Milton’s account of creation is examined alongside the discourse of physico-theology, which read ‘the book of nature’ as a testament to the wisdom and benevolence of its divine author. To recover the ... More

Milton’s account of creation is examined alongside the discourse of physico-theology, which read ‘the book of nature’ as a testament to the wisdom and benevolence of its divine author. To recover the physico-theological tradition is to reveal continuities between revolutionary England and post-Restoration culture that scholars have long ignored, for although the physico-theological craze is a post-Restoration phenomenon, its founding texts date from the revolutionary period. Writing in the physico-theological mode always sets itself the same (impossible) task: leveraging the new natural history to do the work of theodicy. Instead of engaging the natural world through allegorical interpretation, physico-theology attempts to analyse a system, reconstructing and imaginatively inhabiting each subject position within that system. The project of physico-theology provides a bridge between the age of Milton and the age of the novel; the habits of thought it encouraged were precisely those suited to the new prose fiction.Less