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Overview
A fascinating analysis of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton, it not only establishes the reasons for the triumph of the modern perspective, but also accounts for certain limitations in this view that continue to characterize contemporary scientific thought. A criticism as well as a history of the change that made possible the rise of modern science, this volume is also a guide to understanding the methods and accomplishments of the great philosopher-scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486425511 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 01/27/2003 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
By E. A. Burtt
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2003 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-16522-6
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A. Historical Problem Suggested by the Nature of Modern Thought
How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about our world! And it is all so novel, too. The cosmology underlying our mental processes is but three centuries old–a mere infant in the history of thought–and yet we cling to it with the same embarrassed zeal with which a young father fondles his new-born baby. Like him, we are ignorant enough of its precise nature; like him, we nevertheless take it piously to be ours and allow it a subtly pervasive and unhindered control over our thinking.
The world-view of any age can be discovered in various ways, but one of the best is to note the recurrent problems of its philosophers. Philosophers never succeed in getting quite outside the ideas of their time so as to look at them objectively –this would, indeed, be too much to expect. Neither do maidens who bob their hair and make more obvious their nether bifurcation see themselves through the eyes of an elderly Puritan matron. But philosophers do succeed in glimpsing some of the problems involved in the metaphysical notions of their day and take harmless pleasure in speculating at them in more or less futile fashion. Let us test the modern world-view in this manner. What are the problems whose correct treatment, it has generally been taken for granted, constitute the main business of metaphysical thinkers? Well, most conspicuous of these is the so-called problem of knowledge; the main current of speculative inquiry from Descartes onward has been permeated by the conviction that investigation into the nature and possibility of knowledge forms a necessary preliminary to the successful attack upon other ultimate issues. Now, how did all this come about? What assumptions were people accepting when they plunged themselves into these profound epistemological ponderings? How did these assumptions get into men's thinking? To raise such questions at a time when everybody vigorously believes that philosophy must do this sort of thing, is, of course, inopportune and futile, but now that some contemporary philosophers have made bold to discard epistemology as the study of unreal puzzles, the occasion is ripe to suggest them. Does the problem of knowledge lead thinking into false directions, and nullify its conclusions by unsound premises? What are the premises anyway, how are they related to the other essential features of modern thought, and what was it at bottom that induced people in modern times to think in this fashion? The central place of epistemology in modern philosophy is no accident; it is a most natural corollary of something still more pervasive and significant, a conception of man himself, and especially of his relation to the world around him. Knowledge was not a problem for the ruling philosophy of the Middle Ages; that the whole world which man's mind seeks to understand is intelligible to it was explicitly taken for granted. That people subsequently came to consider knowledge a problem implies that they had been led to accept certain different beliefs about the nature of man and about the things which he tries to understand. What are those beliefs and how did they appear and develop in modern times? In just what way did they urge thinkers into the particular metaphysical attempts which fill the books of modern philosophy? Have these contemporary thinkers who decry espistemology really made this whole process thoroughly objective to themselves? Why, in a word, is the main current of modern thought what it is?
When "the main current of modern thought" is spoken of in this wholesale fashion, a brief word might be injected to show that a certain obvious danger is not blindly fallen into. It may very well be that the truly constructive ideas of modern philosophy are not cosmological ideas at all, but such ethicosocial concepts as "progress," "control," and the like. These form a fascinating key to the interpretation of modern thought and give it a quite different contour from that which it assumes when we follow up its metaphysical notions. But with that aspect of modern thinking we are not concerned in the present treatment. In the last analysis it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever. And that the modern mind clearly has such a picture, as clearly as any previous age that one might wish to select, it will not take us long to see. What are the essential elements in that picture, and how did they come there?
Doubtless it is no mystery why, amid all the genetic studies entered upon with such confidence to-day, the precise nature and assumptions of modern scientific thinking itself have not as yet been made the object of really disinterested, critical research. That this is true is not due merely to the fact, itself important enough, that all of us tend easily to be caught in the point of view of our age and to accept unquestioningly its main presuppositions: it is due also to the associations in our minds between the authoritarian principle and that dominant medieval philosophy from which modern thought broke in successful rebellion. Modern thinkers have been so unanimous and so vigorous in their condemnation of the manner in which large propositions were imposed on innocent minds by external authority that it has been rather easily taken for granted that the propositions themselves were quite untenable, and that the essential assumptions underlying the new principle of freedom, the manner in which knowledge was successfully sought with its support, and the most general implications about the world which seemed to be involved in the process, are thoroughly well grounded. But what business have we to take all this for sound doctrine? Can we justify it? Do we know clearly what it means? Surely here is need for a critical, historical study of the rise of the fundamental assumptions characteristic of modern thinking. At least it will compel us to replace this easy optimism with a more objective insight into our own intellectual postulates and methods.
Let us try to fix in preliminary fashion, although as precisely as we may, the central metaphysical contrast between medieval and modern thought, in respect to their conception of man's relation to his natural environment. For the dominant trend in medieval thought, man occupied a more significant and determinative place in the universe than the realm of physical nature, while for the main current of modern thought, nature holds a more independent, more determinative, and more permanent place than man. It will be helpful to analyse this contrast more specifically. For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him and his eternal destiny. Toward this conviction the two great movements which had become united in the medieval synthesis, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, had irresistibly led. The prevailing world-view of the period was marked by a deep and persistent assurance that man, with his hopes and ideals, was the all-important, even controlling fact in the universe.
This view underlay medieval physics. The entire world of nature was held not only to exist for man's sake, but to be likewise immediately present and fully intelligible to his mind. Hence the categories in terms of which it was interpreted were not those of time, space, mass, energy, and the like; but substance, essence, matter, form, quality, quantity–categories developed in the attempt to throw into scientific form the facts and relations observed in man's unaided sense-experience of the world and the main uses which he made it serve. Man was believed to be active in his acquisition of knowledge–nature passive. When he observed a distant object, something proceeded from his eye to that object rather than from the object to his eye. And, of course, that which was real about objects was that which could be immediately perceived about them by human senses. Things that appeared different were different substances, such as ice, water, and steam. The famous puzzle of the water hot to one hand and cold to the other was a genuine difficulty to medieval physics, because for it heat and cold were distinct substances. How then could the same water possess both heat and cold? Light and heavy, being distinguished by the senses, were held to be distinct qualities, each as real as the other. Similarly on the teleological side: an explanation in terms of the relation of things to human purpose was accounted just as real as and often more important than an explanation in terms of efficient causality, which expressed their relations to each other. Rain fell because it nourished man's crops as truly as because it was expelled from the clouds. Analogies drawn from purposive activity were freely used. Light bodies, such as fire, tended upward to their proper place; heavy bodies, such as water or earth, tended downward to theirs. Quantitative differences were derived from these teleological distinctions. Inasmuch as a heavier body tends downward more strongly than a lighter, it will reach the earth more quickly when allowed to fall freely. Water in water was believed to have no weight, inasmuch as it was already in its proper place. But we need not multiply instances; these will sufficiently illustrate the many respects in which medieval science testified to its presupposition that man, with his means of knowledge and his needs, was the determinative fact in the world.
Furthermore, it was taken for granted that this terrestrial habitat of man was in the centre of the astronomical realm. With the exception of a few hardy but scattered thinkers, the legitimacy of selecting some other point of reference in astronomy than the earth had never suggested itself to any one. The earth appeared a thing vast, solid, and quiet; the starry heavens seemed like a light, airy, and not too distant sphere moving easily about it; even the keenest scientific investigators of ancient times dared not suggest that the sun was a twentieth of its actual distance from the earth. What more natural than to hold that these regular, shining lights were made to circle round man's dwelling-place, existed in short for his enjoyment, instruction, and use? The whole universe was a small, finite place, and it was man's place. He occupied the centre; his good was the controlling end of the natural creation.
Finally, the visible universe itself was infinitely smaller than the realm of man. The medieval thinker never forgot that his philosophy was a religious philosophy, with a firm persuasion of man's immortal destiny. The Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and the personal Father of the Christian had become one. There was an eternal Reason and Love, at once Creator and End of the whole cosmic scheme, with whom man as a reasoning and loving being was essentially akin. In the religious experience was that kinship revealed, and the religious experience to the medieval philosopher was the crowning scientific fact. Reason had become married to mystic inwardness and entrancement; the crowning moment of the one, that transitory but inexpressibly ravishing vision of God, was likewise the moment in which the whole realm of man's knowledge gained final significance. The world of nature existed that it might be known and enjoyed by man. Man in turn existed that he might "know God and enjoy him forever." In this graciously vouchsafed kinship of man with an eternal Reason and Love, lay, for medieval philosophy, a guarantee that the whole natural world in its present form was but a moment in a great divine drama which reached over countless sons past and present and in which man's place was quite indestructible.
Let us make all this vivid to ourselves by the aid of a few verses from that marvellous poetic product of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, the Divine Comedy of Dante. It but puts in sublime form the prevailing conviction of the essentially human character of the universe.
The All-Mover's glory penetrates through the universe, and regloweth in one region more, and less in another.
In that heaven which most receiveth of his light, have I been; and have seen things which whoso descendeth from up there hath nor knowledge nor power to retell;
Because, as it draweth nigh to its desire, our intellect sinketh so deep, that memory cannot go back upon the track.
Nathless, whatever of the holy realm I had the power to treasure in my memory, shall now be matter of my song ...
Much is granted there which is not granted here to our powers, in virtue of the place made as proper to the human race....
All things whatsoever observe a mutual order; and this the form that maketh the universe like unto God.
Herein the exalted creatures trace the impress of the Eternal Worth, which is the goal whereto was made the norm now spoken of.
In the order of which I speak all things incline, by diverse lots, more near and less unto their principle;
Wherefore they move to diverse ports o'er the great sea of being, and each one with instinct given it to bear it on.
This beareth the fire toward the moon; this is the mover in the hearts of things that die; this doth draw the earth together and unite it.
Nor only the creatures that lack intelligence doth this bow shoot, but those that have both intellect and love ...
Gazing upon his son with the love which the one and the other eternally breathes forth, the primal and ineffable Worth,
Made whatsoever circleth through mind or space with so great order that whoso looketh on it may not be without some taste of him.
Then, reader, raise with me thy sight to the exalted wheels, directed to that part where the one movement smiteth on the other;
And amorously there begin to gaze upon that Master's art, who within himself so loveth it, that never doth he part his eye from it.
See how thence off brancheth the oblique circle that beareth the planets, to satisfy the world that calleth on them;
And were their pathway not inclined, much virtue in the heaven were in vain, and dead were almost every potency on earth;
And if, from the straight course, or more or less remote were the departure, much were lacking to the cosmic order below and eke above.
From the description of Dante's final mystic union with God:
O light supreme, who so far dost uplift thee o'er mortal thought, re-lend unto my mind a little of what thou then didst seem,
And give my tongue such power that it may leave only a single spark of thy glory unto the folk to come;
I hold that by the keenness of the living ray which I endured I had been lost, had mine eyes turned aside from it.
And so I was the bolder, as I mind me, so long to sustain it as to unite my glance with the Worth infinite.
O grace abounding, wherein I presumed to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I consumed my sight thereon!
Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe;
Substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame....
Thus all suspended did my mind gaze fixed, immoveable, intent, ever enkindled by its gazing.
Such at that light doth man become that to turn thence to any other sight could not by possibility be ever yielded.
For the good, which is the object of the will, is therein wholly gathered, and outside it that same thing is defective which therein is perfect....
O Light eternal, who only in thyself abidest, only thyself dost understand, and to thyself, self-understood, self-understanding, turnest love and smiling:
That circling which appeared in thee to be conceived as a reflected light, by mine eyes scanned some little,
In itself, of its own color, seemed to be painted with our effigy and thereat my sight was all committed to it,
As the geometer who all sets himself to measure the circle and who findeth not, think as he may, the principle he lacketh;
Such was I at this new seen spectacle; I would perceive how the image consorteth with the circle, and how it settleth there;
But not for this were my proper wings, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its will came to it.
To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled–even as a wheel that moveth equally–
By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Compare with this an excerpt from a representative contemporary philosopher of influence, which embodies a rather extreme statement of the doctrine of man widely current in modern times. After quoting the Mephistophelian account of creation as the performance of a quite heartless and capricious being, he proceeds:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E. A. Burtt. Copyright © 2003 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION(A) The Historical Problem Suggested by the Nature of Modern Thought
(B) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science the Key to This Problem
CHAPTER II: COPERNICUS AND KEPLER
(A) The Problem of the New Astronomy
(B) Metaphysical Bearings of the Pre-Copernican Progress in Mathematics
(C) Ultimate Implications of Copernicus' Step-Revival of Pythagoreanism
(D) Kepler's Early Acceptance of the New World-Scheme
"(E) First Formulation of the New Metaphysics-Causality, Quantity, Primary and Secondary Qualities"
CHAPTER III: GALILEO
"(A) The Science of "Local Motion"
(B) Nature as Mathematical Order-Galileo's Method
(C) The Subjectivity of Secondary Qualities
"(D) Motion, Space, and Time"
(E) The Nature of Causality-God and the Physical World-Positivism
CHAPTER IV: DESCARTES
(A) Mathematics as the Key to Knowledge
(B) Geometrical Conception of the Physical Universe
"(C) "Res extensa" and "Res cogitans"
(D) The Problem of Mind and Body
CHAPTER V: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY
(A) Hobbes' Attack on the Cartesian Dualism
(B) Treatment of Secondary Qualities and Causality
(C) More's Notion of Extension as a Category of Spirit
"(D) The "Spirit of Nature" "
(E) Space as the Divine Presence
"(F) Barrow's Philosophy of Method, Space, and Time"
CHAPTER VI: GILBERT AND BOYLE
(A) The Non-Mathematical Scientific Current
(B) Boyle's Importance as Scientist and Philosopher
(C) Acceptance and Defence of the Mechanical World-View
(D) Value of Qualitative and Teleological Explanations
(E) Insistence on Reality of Secondary Qualities-Conception of Man
(F) Pessimistic View of Human Knowledge-Positivism
(G) Boyle's Philosophy of the Ether
(H) God's Relation to the Mechanical World
(I) Summary of the Pre-Newtonian Development
CHAPTER VII: THE METAPHYSICS OF NEWTON
Section 1: Newton's Method
(A) The Mathematical Aspect
(B) The Empirical Aspect
"(C) Attack on "Hypotheses"
(D) Newton's Union of Mathematics and Experiment
Section 2: The Doctrine of Positivism
"Section 3: Newton's General Conception of the World, and of Man's Relation to It"
"Section 4: Space, Time, and Mass"
(A) Mass
(B) Space and Time
(C) Criticism of Newton's Philosophy of Space and Time
Section 5: Newton's Conception of the Ether
(A) The Function of the Ether
(B) Newton's Early Speculations
(C) Development of a More Settled Theory
Section 6: God-Creator and Preserver of the Order of the World
(A) Newton as Theologian
(B) God's Present Duties in the Cosmic Economy
(C) The Historical Relations of Newton's Theism
CHAPTER VIII: CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX