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REVOLUTIONIZING THE SClENCES Related titles from Palgrave A History of Medicine The Scientific Revolutíon and the Origins of Modem Science Sixteenth-Century Europe Seventeenth-Century Europe The Enlightenment, Second Edition Jacalyn Duffin ¡ohn Herlry Richard Mackenney Thomas Munck Roy Porter REVOLUTIONIZING THE SCIENCES European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 Peter Dear * 10 Peter Dear 2001 Al! rights reselVed. No reproductlon, copy or transmlssion of this publication may be made without written permlsslon. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with wrltten permlsslon or in accordance wlth the provislons of Ihe Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1968, or under the terms of any Ikena> permitting limited copylng issued by the Copyright Llcensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to thls publication may be ¡¡able to criminal prosecutlon and civil e1aims for damages. The author has asserted his rlght to be identlfled as th. author 01 Ihl. work in accordance with the Copyright, Deslgns and Patents Act 1966. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS Companies and representatives Ihroughout the world ISBN 0-333-71573-X hardback ISBN 0-333-71574-8 paperback Thls book i. printed on paper .uitable lar recyciing and made Irom lully managed and sustained lorest sources. A catalogue record lar Ihis book i. avallable Irom the Sritlsh Library 10 9 8 7 6 4 3 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Printed and bound In Grea! Britain by Creative Print & Design (Wales). Ebbw Vale Contents Preface vii Introduction: Philosophy and Operationalism 1 "What was Worth Knowing" in 1500 10 2 Humanism and Ancient Wisdom: How to Learn Things in the Sixteenth Century 30 3 The Scholar and the Craftsman: Paracelsus, Gilbert, Bacon 49 4 Mathematics Challenges Philosophy: Galileo, Kepler, and the Surveyors 65 5 Mechanism: Descartes Builds a Universe 80 6 Extra-Curricular Activities: New Homes for Natural Knowledge 101 7 Experiment: How to Learn Things about Nature in the Seventeenth Century 131 8 Cartesians and Newtonians 149 Conc1usion: What was Worth Knowing by the Eighteenth Century? 168 Notes and References 171 Documentation and Further Reading 181 Dramatis Personae 193 Clossary of Major Terms 197 Illdl'X 201 v Preface This is a book intended for use by undergraduates in connection with college and university courses, as well as by others interested in gaining nn overview of what is usually called "the Scientific Revolution." As such, ils chief purpose is to provide a framework suitable fOf facilitating more intensive study of the multifarious issues that arise froID the narrative pro- vided here. The bibJiographical discussion at the end points the way to much important scholarly literature regarding many oi the more prominent ~uch issues. At the same time, a book of this kind cannot cover everything (or, indeed, nnything) adequately. Jt is my hope that it will, at least, suggest to readers tapies deserving of closer investigation and avenues by which to investi- gate them. Overall, the book cleaves fairly closely to a view of the period that should be broadly familiar to university teachers of relevant courses; lf it did not, it would be of Iittle use to them or their students. Thus there 18 a stronger focus on mathematical and physical sciences than on Iife Helences or medicine. The latter are, indeed, discussed throughout the book, but there i5 a 5trong case to be made (and, by others, denied) that the most significant intellectual developments of the sciences in the period reviewed occurred in areas of methodology, matter theory, and mathematical sciences; thus, for example, my discussion of natural history, while an important component of the overall argument, is limited in ils tl:!chnical content (as, to be sure, are most considerations of mathematical 8clences). Slmilarly, 1 have been obliged to deal with the relevant social history Di the period primarily when it intersects directIy with discussion of institu- tlonal and conceptual matters concerning the study of nature by the learned ~l!tl': more extensive consideration of, for example, gender issues in the for- Innlloll of modern science in this period, or with issues of class (the latter obvlollHly crucinl but, as yet, under-researched) could nol be carried out wllhln 11u- IImltH ()f "n introduction of Ihis sort, but J hflve tried to provide vil viii Preface pointers in the text to their potential significance. Once again, these are a11 issues that can be pursued further by following leads inc1uded in the bibliographical essay. 1 would like to thank the anonyrnous reviewers of this book, and par- ticularly Paula Findlen, for extremely use fuI comments on fue manuscript, which have improved it significantly. Alas, 1 must take the blame for the faults that remain. The book has been written with the intentíon that it be used in concert with associated primary-source material in English translation. The edi- tions cited in the notes to individual chapters would make valuable study materials to accompany this book's overall narrative. PETER DEAR Introduction Philosophy and Operationalism 1 Knowledge and its history What is knowledge? A bird, we say, knows how to fly. But we would not like to claim that it therefore knows aeronautics: there have never been avian Wright brothers. There is much invested in the word "knowledge," and as with any word that bears many connotations, this one has a long and complex history. An understanding of the meanings that it carries for us today will therefore require a joumey into the regions of the past where those meanings were first created in a recognizably modern formo One of Ihe most important is the Europe oí the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a tinle and place that, in the history of science, is usually known as the Scientific Revolution. The global practice that we call science is still, in the twenty-first century, coordinated with primary reference to centres of training and research that look to the European tradition. This tradition was tirst adopted elsewhere on a large scale in the United States, often with the help of European train- ing and European émigrés, and only in the twentieth century did it become naturalized e1sewhere. Nobel prizes in the sciences even now go predomi- nantly to scientists in Europe and North America, including scientists from elsewhere in the world who received their training and conducted their research in those places. An historieal understanding of lhat characteristi- cally modero enterprise must thereíore look first to its development in a European setting. The idea that something particularly important to the emergence of Euro- pean science occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one that Europeans themselves first claimed in the eighteenth century. The period frem the work oí Copernicus in the early sixteenth century, which put the earth in mohon around the sun, up to the establishment oí the Newtonian world-system at the Hlnrl of the eighteenth - which included universal grnvitiltion i1S pmt of nn Inddlnltcly large universc - cilme to be regarded 2 Revolutionizing Ihe Sciences as a marvellous "revolution" in knowledge unparalleled in history.l Naturally, this perspective included an appropriate evaluation of what had gone before. The European learning of the Middle Ages, on this view, had been backward and empty. Philosophers had been slaves to the ancient writings of Aristotle; they had been more concerned with words and argu- ments than with things and applications. It is a view that stilllives on in popular myth, despite the radical historical re-evaluations of the Middle Ages, accomplished during the past century, that have given the lie to such a dismissive caricature of medieval intellectual life. Nonetheless, some aspects of the eighteenth century's celebratory account of ils recen! fore- bears deserve continued attention. For all that it was exaggerated and self- congratulatory, the idea that there was a fundamental difference between medievallearning and the new learning brought about by the recent "revo- lution" contains an important insight. Medievallearning, on this account, had stressed the ability to speak about matters of huth; whereas now, instead, there was a stress on knowledge of what was in the world and what it could do. This book will, in effect, examine how much justice that view contains. The story will be more complicated than the easy triumphalist accounts of the eighteenth century, however. We are nowadays less confident than the spokesmen of the Enlightenment that there had been an unambiguous triumph of rationality over obfuscation, or that our own modern science is a neutral and inevitable product of progress. That science is a part of the culture that nurtures it has been shown time and again by so-called "con- textualist" historical and sociological studies of specific cases; science, they have shown, is made by history. The central goal of the history of scíence is to understand why particular people in the past believed the things they did about the world and pursued inquiries in the ways they did. The historian has no stake in adjudicating the truth of past convictions. No his- torical understanding of Copernicus's belief in the motion of the earth around the sun comes from the proposítion that his belief was In/e. Coper- nieus believed what he did for varieus reasons, which it is the job of the historian to find out; huth or falsity are determined by arguments, and it is lhe argumenls that can be studied historically. In explaining historieal change, many factors may be invoked, often dif- ferent ones in difierent cases. A difficulty in historical work arises from its eomplexity and the frequent singularity oi the events or situations being addressed. lt is as íf a geologist were to be ealled upen to explain why a particular mountain happened to be exactly as high as it was, no more and no less. The elevation of such mountains might be explicable in terrns of general geological processes, but the exact details of the appearance of any particular one would be too much dependent on the unknown, accidental contingencies of its history. Historians, similarly, cannot provide deductive causal accounts of why a particular event, such as the English Civil War, took place in the way that it did. They can attempt, howcver, to makl' Introduction: Philosophy and Operalionalism 3 generalizations about what conditions rendered such an event more or lesa likely. Another way of seeing this is to move away from talking about the likelihood of outcomes, to speak instead of understanding. The historian wants to understand aspects of the past in the same sort of way as we understand what was involved in our neighbour's winning the lottery, even though we could not have predicted it. In the Scientific Revolution, similar issues were at stake for investigators of nature. Their medieval predecessors, destined to be pilloried in the eighteenth century, had aimed aboye all at understanding the natural world; the new philosophers typically aimed, by contrast, at successful prediction and control. lt was not a matter of doing the same thing better - it was a malter of doing something different. The literate culture of the fligh Middle Ages (roughly, the twelfth eentury to the fourteenth eentury) had grown up around the medieval universities, in which ít was generally known as "scholasticism." These new ínstitutions were to a greater or lesser degree associated with the ehureh and with its cultural agenda. As a result, at uni- versitíes such as those of París or Oxford theology was the first among their higher faculties (those granting the doctorate); it was routinely known as "the queen of the sciences." Scholarly prestige tended as a result to aeerue to abstraet philosophizing intended to serve the establishment of truth; this was the rational counterpart of beliei, and spoke to intellectual conviction rather than practical know-how. The central discipline concemed with knowledge oi nature was called "natural philosophy" (philosophia naturalis or, often, scientía naturalis). Other disciplines a1so dealt with nature, such as medicine (another oi the higher faculties) and the mathernatícal sciences. These latter, apart from arithmetic and geometry, eneompassed studies of those aspects oi nature which coneemed quantitative properties - areas such as astronomy, music theory, or geometrical optics. Natural phiJosophy, however, was pre-eminent among ali these because it took its central goal to be the philosophical explanation of ali aspects of the natural world. It was generally conducted using the relevant writings oi Aristotle; beca use Aristotle had used the Greek word physís to refer to the whole of the natural world, living and non-living, the medieval Latin word physica, or "physics," was routinely used as a synonym for "natural philosophy." 1I How a medieval philosopher thought about the natural world All revolutions are revolutions against something. One way of doing things is overtumed, to be replaeed by another, different one. If there realiy was n scientífic "revolution," it must by necessity have overthrown a previous orthodoxy - which is predHdy the way the story was told three centuries nRo. It is, in fact, 1I1lcll'llr lo whnt extent an old, unchall,'ngcd orthodoxy hnd nctunlly l'xistl'd, or lo whnt l')Clenl the wny~ of lhllllghl thllt rcplnced it Wt'fl' Ihl'lmll'lwN lrllly 1l0v,,1 nnd Iruly lInJ(j,·rl. Bul ('wry Inl", nt'l!dH n bl'gin- 4 Revolutionizing the Sciences ning, and the taken-for-granted beliefs of the majority of natural phi1oso- phers in the medieval universities provide us with OUIS. We must therefore examine the comrnonplaces of the scholastic-Aristotelian view of natural knowledge, so that we know a little of what everyone with a university education knew too. Aristotelian philosophy was airned at explanation. Aristotle was not interested in "facts" themselves so much as in what he caJled the "reasoned fact." That is, he wanted to know things by knowing why things were the way they were. Mere description of the obvious properties of an object or process (such as its measureable features) would not, in itseIf, serve that explanatory goal; it would merely provide something to be explained. But this does not mean that the senses, the source oí the description, were devalued. On the contrary, Aristotle had emphasized that all knowledge ultimately comes by way of the senses. Without the senses, nothing could be known, not even the truths of mathematics; the lalter, like al! other items of knowledge, derived by abstraction from sensory awareness oí particu- lars. The apparently abstract character oí medieval Aristotelian philosophy, the feature most pilloried in the eighteenth century, justified its procedures by reference to just such a sensory basis. It was not, however, any kind of experimental ideal that would be recognizable to modern eyes. To an Aristotelian, sensory knowledge about the world served as the starting place for the creation of properly philosophical knowledge. Consider the following argurnent, a standard example in medievallogic: AlI men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal. Pieces oí sensory information resembled the final line (technically, the "conclusion" of this "syl1ogism"): "Socrates is mortal." This is a specific assertion about Socrates that can be made only on the basis of sensory experience of that particular person and his actual death. The first line, however (the "major premise"), that "all men are mortal," is a universal assertion about all men everywhere and at a11 times. It cannot itself be jus- tified as certain by reference to a delimited set oí individual sensory obser- vations. And yet certainty was one of Aristotle's requirements for proper "scientific" demonstration. During the seventeenth century, critics such as the Englishman Francis Bacon criticized Aristotelian logical procedures based on the syllogism for being circular. The universal assertion con- stituting the major premise could, Bacon said, only be justified on the basis of countless singulars, of which the conclusion in any given instance would itself be an example. So the conclusion was being demonstrated on the basis oí a philosophical, universal knowledge-claim that was itself in part justified by the conclusion.2 Bacon's criticism should alert us to something unfamiliílr in AristoteJian Introduction: Philosophy and Operationalism 5 phHosophical procedures. Bacon's point was a straightforward one well within the capacities of the enormously logically-sophisticated scholastic philosophers. And yet they did not tend to see it as a meaningful objection. The crucial issue of the move from particular experiences of the world to universally valid (and hence philosophicaD generalizations was usually seen as unproblematic. "Experience" for a scholastic Aristotelian did not mean the sensory perception of single events, as might be involved in recording an experimental outcome. Instead, according to Aristotle, "from perception there comes memory, and from memory (when it occurs often in connection with the same thing), experience; for memories that are many in number form a single experience.,,3 In effect, Bacon's difficulty is col- lapsed into a psychological habit; a ha bit, moreover, that is simply assumed to constitute a legitimate cognitive process. The usual ways in which human beings go about making their knowledge (whether explanatory or inferential) is thus not to be questioned; Aristotle provides a natural history of knowIedge rather than a critical epistemology. The Aristotelian position amounts to saying: "If that is what we do, then that is what knowledge is." Aristotelian experience, in practice, amounted to knowledge that had been gained by someone who had perceived "the same thing" countless times, so as to become thoroughly familiar with it. The rising of the sun every day (making due alIowance for cJoud-cover) would be an example of such experiential knowledge. That heavy bodies fall downwards was al80 known to everyone from daily experience, which is why Aristotle could appropriately used it in providing a philosophical explanation of the nature of heavy bodies in his Physics.4 When an Aristotelian philosopher claimed to base his knowledge on sensory experience, he meant that he was familiar with the behaviour8 and properties of the things he discussed. ldeally, his audience would be too. Therein lay the biggest difficulty. Besides its putative experiential foundations, Aristotelian natural phi- losophy also daimed to be a science (the Latin word used by the scholas- Hes for Aristotle's Greek episteme was scientia). A true science demonstrated its eoncJusions from prernises that were accepted as certain. Demonstrative eoncJu8ions would be certain as long as they were deduced correctly from starting points that were thernselves certain; mere likelihood was insuffi- dento This was a very tall order. Aristotle appears to have modelled his con- ception of an ideal science on the Greek mathematical practice of his day: the kind of geometry exemplified in Eudid's Elements (c.300 Be) uses as its starting points statements that are taken to be immediately acceptable, bclng either conventional (definitions) or supposedly seIf-evident (postu- hItes and axioms). From this foundation, Eudid attempts to derive often