Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method (...) was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled. (shrink)

This paper pursues a question about the spatial relations between the three types of matter posited in Margaret Cavendish’s metaphysics. It examines the doctrine of complete blending and a distinctive argument against atomism, looking for grounds on which Cavendish can reject the existence of spatial regions composed of only one or two types of matter. It establishes, through that examination, that Cavendish operates with a causal conception of parts of nature and a dynamic notion of division. While the possibility of (...) unmixed spatial regions is found to be consistent with both the doctrine of complete blending and Cavendish’s anti-atomism by themselves, it is finally ruled out by a consideration of her theory of place. In fact, the geometrical question of the spatial relations between types of matter that drives the paper is ultimately exposed as illicitly mathematical from the perspective of Cavendish’s metaphysics. (shrink)

The organ of the memory was of crucial importance for Robert Hooke in his aim to improve natural history and the study of nature in general. As a mechanist he was careful to avoid the confident analogizing of his contemporaries, and he described his model in hypothetical form. However, he saw it as amenable to improvement—just as mechanically as the senses were augmented by the use of instruments. The close connection he made between a better memory mechanism and the task (...) of ‘perfecting’ the study of natural philosophy can be seen in a whole range of his activities. These included his discussion of the memory as an epistemological tool, his frequent use of devices such as lists and schemata for ordering aspects of nature and his personal memoranda. His diary, by acting as a stimulant to memory, should be seen as an integral part of his attempt to become a better natural philosopher. Both the act of daily inscription and the ordering of occurrences for effective later recall would improve his memory and his performance of his life's task as a philosopher of nature. (shrink)

Descartes, Boyle and Hooke shared, with many other seventeenth-century figures, the view that mechanical explanations were the only intellectually satisfactory ones. They also all accepted the view that we have incorporeal souls. This generated a problem for them when they wrote about perception. In this area, indeed, Descartes seems to be almost a reluctant Cartesian. When we read his scientific writings, the incorporeal soul is not stressed, and Descartes happily speaks of physical, or of corporeal, ideas in discussing sensation, memory (...) and imagination. (shrink)

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized him (...) as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultane published under the editorship of ously with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

According to the Monist Interpretation of Descartes, there is really only one corporeal substance—the entire extended plenum. Evidence for this interpretation seems to be provided by Descartes in the Synopsis of the Meditations, where he claims that all substances are incorruptible. Finite bodies, being corruptible, would then fail to be substances. On the other hand, ‘body, taken in the general sense,’ being incorruptible, would be a corporeal substance. In this paper, I defend a Pluralist Interpretation of Descartes, according to which (...) there are many corporeal substances. In particular, I show that none of the claims in the Synopsis about incorruptibility and substance entail either that finite bodies are not substances, or that the only corporeal substance is the entire plenum. (shrink)

The original fellow of the Royal Society best known for his concern for the Hermetic tradition is Elias Ashmole, who was associated with the society as early as 1661 and who in 1664 was appointed a member of its committee ‘for collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded’, that typically Baconian attempt to clear the decks for ‘scientific’ action. And it was Ashmole's munificence that was instrumental in establishing the first chemical laboratory at (...) any British university, namely that at Oxford set up in the original Ashmolean Building in 1683. (shrink)

In spite of vigorous opposition by a number of historians it has now become a commonplace that the rapid development of the ‘new philosophy’ sprang from the ideology of Puritanism. What began its career as the ‘Merton thesis’ has now been refined, developed, and so often repeated that it seems to be almost unassailable. However, the two foremost historians in the entrenchment of this new orthodoxy are willing, in principle, to concede that ‘in reality things were very mixed up’, and (...) that non-Puritan natural philosophers at the time were operating ‘in a precisely similar manner’ to their Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, it would be impossible not to concede this in the face of the many critiques launched against the Merton thesis. (shrink)

According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in (...) order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior. (shrink)

It has often been noted that Margaret Cavendish discusses God in her writings on natural philosophy far more than one might think she ought to given her explicit claim that a study of God belongs to theology which is to be kept strictly separate from studies in natural philosophy. In this article, I examine one way in which God enters substantially into her natural philosophy, namely the role he plays in her particular version of teleology. I conclude that, while Cavendish (...) has some resources with which to partially alleviate this tension, she is nonetheless left with a significant difficulty. (shrink)

The ArugmentThis essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work,Micrographia?Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent (...) inrepresentation– the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described inMicrographiaupon the classicalres publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships. (shrink)

This article explores the speed and form in which the mechanical philosophy was absorbed into the college curriculum in Louis XIV’s France. It argues that in general a mechanist approach to nature only began to be received sympathetically after 1690. It also emphasizes that it was the Cartesian not Gassendist form of the mechanical philosophy that professors espoused. While admitting that at present it is impossible to explain successfully the history of the reception of the mechanical philosophy in the classroom, (...) the article concludes by attempting to throw light on the French preference for Descartes. This, it is suggested, is linked to the relative familiarity of Cartesian mechanism, the way the philosophy was packaged, and the political and religious environment. (shrink)

In our recent book (Abraham and Roy 2010) we have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum as a model of consciousness. In this model, discrete space and time are derived from a discrete cellular dynamical network. As our model is essentially atomistic, we included in our book a short support chapter on atomism. In this aticle we expand on the few pages of that chapter devoted to the history of atomism, to place the current revival of atomism in (...) a larger context. (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)

La crítica que Francis Bacon dirigió a la concepción aristotélica del movimiento no tuvo como punto de partida las obras originales de Aristóteles sino la vasta literatura de texto que durante los siglos XVI y XVII ofrecía una interpretación novedosa y ecléctica del pensamiento aristotélico. En este trabajo analizo la crítica de Bacon concentrándome en los textos aristotélicos más corrientes de su medio intelectual (Magirus, Keckermann, Conimbricenses, Toledo, Zabarella). El artículo está dividido en tres secciones: la crítica epistemológica, la crítica (...) del movimiento natural y el movimiento violento y la crítica del movimiento de ascenso y de descenso. En la conclusión señalo en qué medida la teoría baconiana del movimiento rechazó los conceptos aristotélicos y, al mismo tiempo, adoptó nociones aristotélicas claves al construir su propia clasificación de los movimientos. (shrink)