H52061/2 History of Philosophy: from Ancient and
Medieval to Modern and Contemporary
The Transition from Medieval to Modern
(a) the medieval origins of modern science
Ockham and Nominalism is not a
bad place to start our introduction to Modern Philosophy and the world view of
modern times, of which philosophy is both expression,
determinant and something which people use to try to come to terms with
it. According to the German philosopher
and historian Hans Blumenberg, the modern
self-understanding - modern science, modern philosophy, modern art,
individualism and so forth - is a particular historical and cultural response
to the all determining emphasis in theory and in practice, upon the theme of
the omnipotence of God in the nominalistic thinking
of the late Middle Ages. See Hans Blumenberg,
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(translated by R. M. Wallace) (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983), esp. Part
III, "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity".
This idea is re-enforced by
the work of other scholars. For example, Professor Richard Campbell, at A.N.U. Richard Campbell argues that the rise of
modern natural science and of modern philosophy can only be explained as a
result of the impact of the Christian doctrine of creation on Greek metaphysics
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
This led to an increasing emphasis on the radical contingency of the
created world as the Middle Ages progressed.
See Richard Campbell, "The Radical Contingency of the Created
World", in Human Beings and Nature:
Historical and Philosophical Studies, edited
Indeed,
something like this idea has become fairly commonplace in popular writing
trying to explain how come modern science originated in the Christian West
rather than in the technologically more advanced Chinese or Indian
cultures. The Christian doctrine of
Creation provides just the right world-view for stimulating empirical scientific
research. The natural world is the free
creation of a wise and intelligent and also benevolent God. In so far as the world is a creation of an
intelligent and wise God we can expect it to be intelligible, that there will
be laws to be found, it is not just chaotic; and in so far as God is benevolent
and merciful and created us in His/Her image and likeness, we can expect those
laws to be somewhat intelligible to us human being. On the other hand, in so far as the world is
the product of a free creation - God
didn't have to do it, nor do it the way S/He has done it - if we want to know
what the laws which God has chosen actually are there is no alternative but to
go out and look.
Compare also A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1953). He
finds the origins of experimental science in the West in the 13th rather than
the 17th century. It had its origins due
to the fortunate coincidence of three factors: the experimental bent of the
practical arts (e.g. what built the medieval cathedrals, and later on windmills
etc.), held in much higher regard in the Middle Ages than in ancient times when
they were the preserve mainly of the slaves and lower classes, looked down upon
by the aristocratic scientists; the
theoretical bent of the Greeks newly inherited via the Arabs; and finally, once
again, the Christian doctrine of Creation.
The Fransciscan love of nature also helped a
bit. Crombie
traces a continuity in methodological theory and
inheritance of concrete contributions in the sciences from Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253 through to Galileo, Francis Bacon,
Descartes and Isaac Newton in the 17th Century.
It was centered in
Crombie illustrates his thesis by reference to medieval
work in the science of optics, starting with Robert Grosseteste,
continued by Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and the
Silesian, Witelo (born about 1230) and culminating in
the (correct) explanation of the rainbow put forward by Theodoric
of Freiberg (died about 1311). This
medieval solution, never completely lost, was taken over and improved upon in
the 17th century, first by Descartes and then by
Other
important names in Medieval science were Nicholas of Oresme and Jean Burican.
Nicholas
of Oresme, c. 1320-1382, was a Frenchman and a Nominalist (follower of William of Ockham)
and centred in
Jean
Buridan, another Frenchman, again an Ockhamist, was born before 1300, was rector of the
Such
people as these were themselves building on the work of earlier people like
Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253, an Englishman, working
in
The great achievements in natural science of Kepler and Galileo and
(b) the revolution in thinking which cumulative advances in the
physical sciences nevertheless helped to give rise.
For
all that, when you compare the beginning the end of the story, the world of
intellectuals in the late 13th Century with that of equivalent intellectuals in
the mid 17th Century, it does become appropriate to talk of a revolution. In this sense, Modern Philosophy is the
philosophical part of a genuine, rather general revolution in human thinking,
in respect of global picture, in the
thinking of intelligent and educated people and after a time lag even of
everybody, about Nature, and about the place of human beings in regard to both
Nature and the Divine.
In
the Medieval synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy and
science, the universe of
In
the universe of 17th Century intellectuals, the world is imaginatively
large. The earth, just another planet,
goes around the sun, which is just another star. There is no longer a fundamental difference
between earthly and heavenly bodies, no privileged place to which all bodies
tend. Nature is now considered one big
mechanism, a huge clockwork, this now the root
metaphor. Colour,
sound, taste, smell are not real, they are only 'secondary qualities' (Galileo,
Descartes, Locke). The only things that
count as real are those which can be clearly and distinctly known (Descartes), that is to say the geometrical properties of bodies,
extension, figure and motion. Even the
human body is just another machine, albeit a very complicated one - thus also
Descartes. The heart = a pump - thus
(c) Further
factors in the transition from Medieval to Modern Times:
1) the breaking up of
Christendom and the rise of the Nation State
2) the Black Death
3) religious termoil, the Reformation, and Wars of Religion
4) the voyages of discovery, the opening up of the
'New World', the invention of printing, economic development, the 'mercantile
revolution' of the 15th and 16th centuries, international banking, the
invention/adaptation from the Chinese of gunpower
5) the Renascence, and
the turn back to Pythagoras (maths, worship of the
sun), to Plato and the Neo-Platonists rather than Aristotle (Plato also very
strong on maths), and the ancient Atomists Democritus
and esp. Epicurus.
6) a forerunner,
belonging to both world: Nicholas of Cusa, 1401-1464, breaking out of the Medieval mould by
way of a Neo-Platonic influenced mysticism.
He has an influence on modern philosophy mainly via Giordano Bruno, born Nola 1548, burnt at the stake in Rome in the
Campo dei Fiori in1600
A.D., a follower of Copernicus like Galileo after him and Kepler
before, but a martyr to philosophy rather than science: the problem was with
his 'magical' neo-Platonic world view, which was regarded as pantheistic.
(d)The
Three Traditions in Science 1500-1700
There
has been some quite interesting work done recently on the immediate
intellectual background to the scientific revolution or revival in the sciences
in the 16th and 17th centuries. See
especially Hugh Kearney, Science and
Change 1500-1700 (World
University Library, London, 1971).
According to
ORGANIC: going back to Aristotle, Galen in
medicine and Ptolemy in astronomy = the established position in most European
universities until about 1650, including e.g. Willaim
Harvey;
MAGICAL: Neo-Platonic, influenced by the Hermetic
Writings and the Jewish Kabbala, including
Copernicus, Bruno, William Gilbert (magnetism) 1540-1603, Paracelsus, Johannes Kepler, and even Isaac Newton at least partly. These people believed after all in action at
a distance, something which the mechanists found unintelligible. Isaac Newton spans this paradigm and the next
one, with a foot in both;
MECHANISTIC: background in Greek Atomism and
Archimedes, including Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi the Atomist, Descartes, Hobbes, and Robert Boyle.
The Mechanists eventually came out on top but never
totally, and for sociological, political and theological reasons as well as scientific.
See
also David Ray Griffin, in The Reenchantment of Science, pp. 10-13, for more
references; also the Templeton Lecture at Sydney University last year by John
B. Cobb. Feminist writers have also made
some good points about this: see Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press, New
Haven, 1985), Part One, Ch. 3, for the play of sexism in the development. Also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and The Scientific Revolution
(Harper and Row, 1980), esp.
We
start the next unit, on Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, with Descartes
precisely because the mechanistic world-view did come out on top, because like
it or not he and his colleagues determine us, and we are trying to understand
ourselves. But please note that there
was something contingent about the triumph of this world-view in its own time,
and that it does not appear to be necessary for the doing of science, not in
its early stages and almost certainly not any more, when every element within
the picture has been undermined by the development of science itself. Whatever, please note carefully that the
situation in the 17th Century was much more complicated than the impression you
are likely to get in the first part of that course.
MEDIEVAL
Developments in
Science
+
A number of other
factors
MODERN
ORIGINS
OF MODERN SCIENCE??
IN THE HIGH
MIDDLE AGES!
FACTORS
MAKING FOR THE ORIGIN OF MODERN SCIENCE?
THREE MAIN FACTORS:
GREEK WISDOM
Into
Via Arabs and Jews,
1150-1250 AD
MEDIEVAL PRACTICAL ARTS
Cathedrals, windmills, eventually mechanical clocks
City based and more highly regarded than for the Greeks
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF CREATION
The omnipotence of God and the contingency
of the created universe.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF CREATION
BOTH
INTELLIGENT
: there are laws to find
AND
FREE
:you have to go out and have a look if you want to know which ones
[and also
MERCIFUL!
:we have a fair chance of finding them if we look well enough!]
(What the 17th Century adds:
that the fundamental laws will be mathematical in character: a renewal of the
Platonic and Pythagorean tradition coming from the Renascence, God as subtle mathematician; plus
enormous improvements in both maths and scientific
instrumentation.]
MEDIEVAL SCIENCE: THE GREATS:
Robert Grosseteste
Albert the Great
Roger Bacon
Theodoric of
Nicholas of Oresme (accelerated motion, maybe a moving
earth)
Jean Buridan (impetus, plus donkeys)
RENASCENCE SCIENCE
GALILEO and
THE REVOLUTION IN THINKING 1300-1700
FROM
A closed, comfortable, finite, qualitatively differentiated
WORLD
TO
An infinite, alien, mechanistic, clockwork
UNIVERSE
OTHER FACTORS IN THE TRANSITION
1.
The fall of Christendom and the rise of the
Nation State (pope versus emperor, nation state coming up the middle)
2.
THE BLACK
DEATH from 1347 onwards
3.
Reformation
and Wars of Religion (leading
to the demise of theology as the epitome of knowledge)
4.
Voyages
of discovery, the New World, Printing, Gunpowder, Economic Developments
5: The RENASCENCE:
: a return to
PLATO (and Pythagoras)
i.e. Maths
and
EPICURUS
(Atomism) and also ARCHIMEDES
Plus
RENASCENCE HUMANISM
Esp. Thomas More and Erasmus
THREE TRADITIONS IN SCIENCE 1500-1700
ORGANIC
(Aristotelian, somewhat Ockhamized)
Inc. William
Harvey
MAGICAL or Alchemical
Inc. Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno, Gilbert, and to some extent Isaac Newton
MECHANISTIC
Inc.
Descartes, Galileo, Gassendi, Hobbes, Robert Boyle,
and to some extent also Isaac Newton.
The Mechanistic
Paradigm came out on top, for religious and socio-economic and political
reasons as much as for any scientific value.