New Philosophy — Method & Research & Public Interest

1. Biomedical study and the human body

   • critiques of current practice and lost knowledge (Preface to Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica [1543])

   • reformed anatomy of the Padua school of Vesalius and followers

   • new interest in explanations of physiological action

   • experimentation with bodily systems:

     • Harvey’s De motu cordis [Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings]  (1628)

     • mechanical models within Aristotelian theory: components and linkage

     • debate over the causes of living things

2. Francis Bacon’s 'New Philosophy' and the utopian vision of progress [early 1600s]

   • critique and proposal for a new method ( A New Organon [1620])

   • new, empirical basis to knowledge

   • promotion of empiricism and induction

   • “experiment” as key to new encyclopedic knowledge

   • technological promise and hopes for worldly society

3. Galilean mechanical philosophers and Mersenne’s circle (1630s-40s)

   • methodology of reductionism

   • mechanistic imagery and causes

   • goal of a new physics of particles and mechanical properties (Descartes’s The World [written 1633, published 1664]):

     • quantitatively measure phenomena

     • express the relationships of parts with mathematics

     • derive relationships from axioms

   • critical anti-Scholastic campaign:

     • attacks on Aristotelian university scholars (Descartes, Hobbes)

     • public demonstrations: air pressure and vacuum experiments of Torricelli, Pascal, Boyle, Guericke

   • cultural support in the arts, commerce, consumerism, politics

4. Machines, consumers, and the “clockwork” analogy

   • the popular appeal of new technology: machines, clocks, miniaturization, automata

   • regularity, permanence, predictability

   • reductionism to component systems

   • mechanical imagery for causes

   • parts in linkage

   • designed order, universal law

   • broad religious implications

5. Philosophical search for new methods and Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637)

   • method as a foundation for certain knowledge:

     • 1st:  critical doubt and examination

     • 2nd:  reductionism and empiricism of investigation

     • 3rd:  deductive building of explanation

     • 4th:  certainty through complete enumeration (and hypothesis comparison and exclusion-testing)

   • Cartesian mind-body dualism:

     • separating spirit and matter

     • the “two spheres” of religion and science

   • new methodological rigor but overeager (naive) mechanistic goal

6. Cartesian physics of “matter in motion” (1640s-50s)

   • the particulate universe

   • “plenitude” and denying the vacuum

   • first cause: designed universe and matter put into motion

   • causes (action) without “forces”:

     • conservation of “the quantity of motion”

     • “force of a moving body” and impact: size x speed

   • a physics for the new astronomy:

     • acceptance of Kepler’s laws

     • the vortex, mechanical model of the plenum

7. Elaborations of experimental technique

   • Boyle’s program of corpuscular philosophy (1650s-60s)

     • empiricism and cautious phenomenalism

     • natural theology as inspiration for practice of science

     • gentlemen’s involvement in science patronage and practice

   • Redi’s investigations and experimental design

     • attacks on Scholastic knowledge and use of Scriptures

     • innovations of manipulation, comparison, and controls

   • Shared “research program” on motion

     • Widespread mathematical and experiment studies: Huygens, Hooke, Wallis, Wren, Newton, Leibniz, Halley (1650s-80s)

     • mathematical description of mechanics

     • Huygens’s analysis of the pendulum (1656), patent on a pendulum clock (1656), centrifugal force (1659), and centrifugal motion (1673)

     • impacts and forces (1668: law of sums of momentum in collisions by Huygens, Wallis, Wren)

     • attempts to derive Kepler’s Law:

       • the question of inertia — circular? rectilinear? tangential?

       • centrifugal acceleration (Huygens in 1673)

       • inverse square relationships (Hooke, Wren, Halley in 1680s)

8. The Royal Society of London (1662)

   • patronage and promotion of science and technology

   • scientific practice and shared problems

   • communication and Philosophical Transactions (1665)

   • gentlemanly values: the practice and status of science

© 2018 Dr. William Kimler