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