Accueil
[Introduction]
"Any single author who attempts to cover the entire history of philosophy is quickly made aware that in matters of detail he is at an enormous disadvantage in comparison with the scholars who have made individual philosophers their field of expertise. By compensation, a history written by a single hand may be able to emphasize features of the history of philosophy that are less obvious in the works of committees of specialists, just as an aerial photograph may bring out features of a landscape that are almost invisible to those close to the ground.
To someone approaching the early modern period of philosophy from an ancient and medieval background the most striking feature of the age is the absence of Aristotle from the philosophic scene. To be sure, in the period covered by this volume the study of Aristotle continued in the academic establishment, and at Oxford University there has never been a time since its foundation when Aristotle was not taught. But the other striking characteristic of our period, which marks it oV from both the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, is that it was a time when philosophy was most energetically pursued not within universities but outside them. Of all the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, none before WolV and Kant held professorships of philosophy." (p.XII)
"Our period is dominated by two philosophical giants, one at its beginning and one at its end, Descartes and Kant. Descartes was a standard bearer for the rebellion against Aristotle. In metaphysics he rejected the notions of potentiality and actuality, and in philosophical psychology he substituted consciousness for rationality as the mark of the mental. Hobbes and Locke founded a school of British empiricism in reaction to Cartesian rationalism, but the assumptions they shared with Descartes were more important than the issues that separated them. It took the genius of Kant to bring together, in the philosophy of human understanding, the different contributions of the senses and the intellect that had been divided and distorted by both empiricists and rationalists.
The hallmark of Cartesian dualism was the separation between mind and matter, conceived as the separation of consciousness from clockwork. This opened an abyss that hampered the metaphysical enterprise during the period of this volume. On the one hand, speculative thinkers erected systems that placed ever greater strains on the credulity of the common reader. Whatever may be the defects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, his substances—things like cats and cabbages—did at least have the advantage of undoubted existence in the everyday world, unlike unknowable substrata, monads, noumena, and the Absolute. On the other hand, thinkers of a more sceptical turn deconstructed not only Aristotelian substantial forms, but primary and secondary qualities, material substances, and eventually the human mind itself." (p.XIII)
"The division into themes in this volume diVers from that in the previous volumes in two ways. First, there is no special chapter devoted to logic and language, since philosophers in our period made no contribution in these areas at all comparable to that of the Middle Ages or that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (It is true that the period contains one logician of genius, Leibniz ; but his logical work had little impact until the nineteenth century.)" (p.XIV)
"[Chapitre 1 : Sixteenth-Century Philosophy]
Erasmus and More and their friends propounded in Northern Europe the humanist ideas that had taken root in Italy in the previous century. ‘Humanism’ at that time did not mean a desire to replace religious values with secular human ones: Erasmus was a priest who wrote best-selling works of piety, and More was later martyred for his religious beliefs. Humanists, rather, were people who believed in the educational value of the ‘humane letters’ (literae humaniores) of the Greek and Latin classics. They studied and imitated the style of classical authors, many of whose texts had been recently rediscovered and were being published thanks to the newly developed art of printing. They believed that their scholarship, applied to ancient pagan texts, would restore to Europe long-neglected arts and sciences, and, applied to the Bible and to ancient Church writers, would help Christendom to a purer and more authentic understanding of Christian truth.
Humanists valued grammar, philology, and rhetoric more highly than the technical philosophical studies that had preoccupied scholars during the Middle Ages. They despised the Latin that had been the lingua franca of medieval universities, far removed in style from the works of Cicero and Livy. Erasmus had been unhappy studying at the Sorbonne, and More mocked the logic he had been taught at Oxford. In philosophy, both of them looked back to Plato rather than to Aristotle and his many medieval admirers.
More paid a compliment to Plato by publishing, in 1516, a fictional blueprint for an ideal commonwealth. In More’s Utopia, as in Plato’s Republic, property is held in common and women serve alongside men in the army. More, writing in an age of exploration and discovery, pretended that his state actually existed on an island across the ocean. Like Plato, however, he was using the description of a Wctional nation as a vehicle for theoretical political philosophy and for criticism of contemporary society." (pp.1-2)
" [Luther] denounced Aristotle, and in particular his Ethics, as ‘the vilest enemy of grace’. His contempt for the powers of unaided reason was the outcome of his belief that in Adam’s Fall human nature had become totally corrupt and impotent. In one way, Luther’s scepticism about philosophical speculation was a continuation of a tendency already strong in late medieval scholasticism. Since the time of Scotus philosophers had become ever more reluctant to claim that reason alone could establish the nature of the divine attributes, the content of divine commands, or the immortality of the human soul." (p.6)
"Every Christian, Luther said, had the power of discerning and judging what was right or wrong in matters of faith. Tyndale boasted that his translation would make a boy driving the plough understand the Bible better than the most learned divine. Pessimism about the moral capacity of the trained intellect unaided by grace went hand in hand with optimism about the intellectual ability of the untrained mind illumined by faith. Squeezed between the two, philosophy found its role greatly diminished among devout Protestants." (p.8 )
"Logic was perhaps the branch of philosophy that suffered most severely. Logic did continue to be taught in the universities, but humanist scholars were impatient of it, regarding its terminology as barbarous and its complexities as pettifogging. Rabelais spoke for them when in Pantagruel (1532) he mocked logicians for inquiring whether a chimera bombinating in a vacuum could devour second intentions. Most of the advances in the subject that had been made by Stoic and medieval logicians were lost for four centuries. Instead, a bowdlerized version of Aristotle was taught at an elementary level in popular textbooks." (p.11)
"Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Rame´e, 1515–72) achieved lasting fame quite out of proportion to his actual merits as a logician. Legend has it that for his master’s degree he defended the thesis that everything Aristotle had ever taught was false. Certainly he went on to publish a short anti-Aristotelian treatise, and after his appointment as professor at the College Royale he followed this up with twenty books of Animadversions on Aristotle. His Dialectic, which was published in French in 1555, in Latin in 1556, and in English in 1574, was meant to supersede all previous logic texts. For the first time, he maintained, it set out the laws which governed people’s natural thinking.
Logic, he tells us, is the art which teaches how to dispute well. It is divided into two parts: invention and judgement, to each of which a book of his text is devoted. Treating of ‘invention’, he lists nine places or topics to which one may look to Wnd arguments to support a conclusion one wishes to defend. They are cause, eVect, subject, adjunct, opposite, comparative, name, division, and deWnition. He illustrates each of these topics with copious quotations from classical authors, which take up nearly half of his short first book. [...]
Modern historians of logic can find little merit or originality in Ramus’ work, but for long after his death debates raged between Aristotelians and Ramists, and there were even groups of semi-Ramists campaigning for compromise. Ramus became a Calvinist in 1561 and was killed in the massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. His status as a martyr gave his writings a prestige they could never have earned in their own right, and his influence lasted through the centuries. John Milton, for instance, published a volume of Ramist Logic five years after the completion of Paradise Lost. The popularity of Ramist works impoverished logic for a long period. No further progress was made in formalizing the logic of modality and counterfactuality that had fascinated medieval logicians, and much of their own work passed into oblivion." (pp.11-13)
"A French classicist teaching at Basel, named Sebastian Castellio, was shocked at the execution of Servetus and wrote a treatise Whether Heretics are to be Persecuted (Magdeburg, 1554) in which he pleaded in favour of toleration. His arguments are mainly quotations of authoritative texts or appeals to the example of Christ. ‘O Christ, when thou didst live upon earth, none was more gentle, more merciful, more patient of wrong...Art thou now so changed ?...If thou, O Christ, hast commanded these executions and tortures, what hast thou left for the devil to do ?’ But in a later work, The Art of Doubting, Castellio developed more epistemological arguments. The difficulty of interpreting Scripture, and the variety of opinions among Christian sects, should make us very cautious in laying down the law on religious matters. To be sure, there are some truths that are beyond doubt, such as the existence and goodness of God ; but on other religious topics no one can be suYciently certain so as to be justified in killing another man as a heretic. Castellio, in his time, was a lone voice ; but later supporters of toleration looked back to him as a forerunner." (p.13)
"Montaigne’s exaltation of revelation to the exclusion of reason —‘fideism’ as it came to be called—was not typical of the Counter-Reformation. In reaction against Luther’s insistence that the human intellect and will had been totally corrupted by the sin of Adam, Catholic controversialists tended to emphasize that basic religious truths were within the scope of unaided human intellect, and that faith itself needed the support and defence of reason.
In the forefront of this optimistic thrust of the Counter-Reformation were the Jesuits, the members of the new Society of Jesus." (p.16)
"Whereas medieval scholastics had based their university lectures upon canonical texts such as the works of Aristotle and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Jesuits in universities began to replace commentaries with self standing courses in philosophy and theology. By the early seventeenth century this pattern was adopted by Dominicans and Franciscans, and this led to a sharper distinction between philosophy and theology than had been commonearlier. The pioneer of this movement to reform philosophy into independent textbook form was the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, whose Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597) were the first such systematic treatment of scholastic metaphysics. [...]
As a metaphysician he followed in the footsteps of Avicenna and Duns Scotus rather than those of Aquinas himself. Paradoxically, much that was to pass for Thomism during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was closer to Suarezian metaphysics than to the Summa Contra Gentiles. In political philosophy Suarez’s contribution was the De Legibus of 1621, which was the unacknowledged source of many of the ideas of better known thinkers. In his own day he was most famous for his controversy with King James I about the divine right of kings, in which he attacked the theory that temporal monarchs derived their sovereignty directly from God. King James had his book publicly burnt.
Of the philosophical issues dividing the Catholic and Protestant camps in the sixteenth century none was more thorny than human free will, which had been proclaimed at the Council of Trent in opposition to Lutheran determinism and Calvinist predestinarianism. The Jesuits made themselves champions of the libertarian account of human freedom. Suarez and his Jesuit colleague Luis de Molina oVered a deWnition of free agency in terms of the availability of alternative courses of action—‘liberty of indifference’ as it came to be known. ‘That agent is called free which in the presence of all necessary conditions for action can act and refrain from action or can do one thing while being able to do its opposite.’
Such a definition did ample justice to humans’ consciousness of their own choices and their attribution of responsibility to others. But by comparison with more restrictive accounts of freedom, it made it very difficult to account for God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, to which both Catholics and Protestants were committed. Molina, in his famous Concordia (1589), presented an elaborate solution to the problem, in terms of God’s comprehensive knowledge of the actions of every possible human being in every possible world.10 Ingenious though it was, Molina’s solution was unpopular not only among Protestants but also among his Catholic co-religionists." (pp.18-19)
"Hermetism, in Bruno’s view, was superior to Christianity and was destined to supersede it. In the system propounded in the dialogues, the phenomena we observe are the effects of a world-soul which animates nature and makes it into a single organism. The world of nature is inWnite, with no edge, surface, or limit. But the world’s inWnity is not the same as God’s inWnity because the world has parts that are not infinite, whereas God is wholly in the whole world and wholly in each of its parts. This difference perhaps suffices to distinguish Bruno’s position from pantheism, but the relation between God and the world remains obscure. It is not really clariWed by Bruno’s august formulation that God is the Nature making Nature (natura naturans) while the universe is the Nature made by Nature (natura naturata).
Two features of Bruno’s system have caught the attention of historians and scientists: his adoption of the Copernican hypothesis, and his postulation of multiple universes. Bruno accepted that it was the earth that went round the sun, and not the sun that went round the earth. He went on to develop Copernicus’ ideas in a bold and dramatic manner. The earth was not the centre of the universe: but neither was the sun. Our sun is just one star among others, and in boundless space there are many solar systems. No sun or star can be called the centre of the universe, because all positions are relative.
Our earth and our solar system enjoy no unique privilege. For all we know, there may be intelligent life at other times and places within the universe. Particular solar systems come and go, temporary phases in the life of the single infinite organism whose soul is the world-soul. Within the universe each intelligent being is a conscious, immortal atom, mirroring in itself the whole of creation. If in his interfusing of God and Nature Bruno anticipated Spinoza, in his account of rational atoms he anticipated Leibniz.
Bruno’s championship of Hermetism and his theory of multiple universes challenged the orthodox teaching that God was incarnate uniquely in Jesus and that Christianity was the deWnitive divine revelation. Nonetheless, after leaving England he was accepted for a while as a Lutheran at Wittenberg and in 1591 was lecturing in Zurich. Unwisely, he accepted an invitation from the Doge of Venice, and found himself in the prison of the local Inquisition in 1592. A year later he was passed on to the Roman Inquisition, and after a trial that dragged on for nearly seven years in 1600 he was burned as a heretic in the Campo dei Fiori, where his statue now stands.
There is no doubt that the ideas expressed in Bruno’s writings were unorthodox. The remarkable things about his trial are that he showed such constancy in defending his ideas and that it took his inquisitors so long to find him guilty of heresy. But although theories of multiple universes are once again popular with cosmologists today, it is a mistake to think of Bruno as a martyr to science. His speculations were based not on observation or experiment but on occult traditions and on a priori philosophizing. He was condemned not because he supported the Copernican system, but because he practised magic and denied the divinity of Christ." (pp.21-22)
"The most important parts of history are Natural and Civil. ‘Civil history’ is what we would nowadays call history: Bacon himself contributed to it a narrative of the reign of Henry VII. ‘Natural history’ is a discipline of broad scope with three subdivisions: the history of ‘nature in course, of nature erring or varying, and of nature altered or wrought’. It will include, then, treatises of natural science, records of extraordinary marvels, and manuals of technology. Bacon’s own contribution to natural history consisted of two compilations of research material, a History of the Winds, and a History of Life and Death. The ‘history of nature erring’, he thought, should include records of superstitious narrations of sorceries and witchcrafts, in order to as certain how far effects attributed to superstition could be attributed to natural causes. But the third subdivision, ‘history mechanical’, was the most fundamental and useful for natural philosophy, whose value, according to Bacon, was above all in its practical application and utility.
In his classification of philosophy, Bacon first puts on one side ‘divine philosophy’ or natural theology: it suffices, he tells us, to refute atheism but not to inform religion. He then divides philosophy into natural and human. Natural philosophy may be speculative or operative: the speculative kind includes both physics and metaphysics, and the operative kind includes both mechanics and magic. Mechanics is the practical application of physics, and magic is the practical application of metaphysics.
This brisk and provocative anatomy of philosophy is not as neat as it seems, and many of the names Bacon gives to the various disciplines are employed in idiosyncratic ways. His ‘natural magic’, he tells us, must be sharply distinguished from the ‘credulous and superstitious conceits’ of alchemy and astrology. It is not at all clear what he has in mind: the one thing he seems to over as an example is the mariner’s compass. Why, we may ask, is this a matter of ‘magic’ rather than ‘mechanics’ ? An answer suggests itself when we read that physics deals with the efficient and material causes of things, while metaphysics deals with the final and formal causes. So the sail, which gives the boat its motion, operates in the realm of physics, while the compass, which guides the boat’s direction, operates in the realm of metaphysics. Bacon admits candidly that he is using ‘metaphysics’ in a novel way. What others call metaphysics he calls ‘first philosophy’ or ‘summary philosophy’: it is a receptacle, he tells us, for all the universal principles that are not exclusive to particular disciplines. (An example is ‘If equals be added to unequals the result will be unequal,’ an axiom which he believes applies in law as well as in mathematics.)
But the distinction made between physics and metaphysics on the basis of the Aristotelian four causes is itself misleading. Bacon’s scheme for natural magic leaves no real room for teleology: ‘inquiry into final causes’, he tells us, ‘is sterile, and like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’ And when he speaks of ‘forms’ he is not thinking of Aristotle’s substantial forms—such as the form of a lion, or of water—because these, he believes, are too varied and complicated to be discovered. Instead of studying these, we should look rather for the simpler forms which go into their composition, in the way that letters go to make up words. The task of metaphysics is to investigate the simpler forms which correspond to individual letters:
To enquire the forms of sense, of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and levity, of density, of tenuity, of heat and of cold, and all other natures and qualities, which like an alphabet are not many, and which the essences (upheld by matter) of all creatures do now consist. (AL, 196)
Bacon’s elementary forms are obscure characters in comparison with the mathematical shapes and symbols which Galileo declared to be the alphabet in which the book of the world is written. But most probably when he talked of forms he had in mind hidden material structures underlying the overt appearance and behaviour of things." (pp.28-29)
"Human philosophy, the other great branch of the subject, has two parts, Bacon tells us, one which considers ‘man segregate’ and another which considers ‘man congregate’. The first part corresponds to anatomy, physiology, and psychology, and the second embraces what would nowadays be called the social sciences. The detailed subdivisions Bacon enumerates appear arbitrary and haphazard. The sciences of the body include medicine, ‘cosmetic’, ‘athletic’, and the ‘Arts Voluptuary’, which include practical joking. The study of the nature of the soul is a matter for theology, but there is a human science which studies the operations of the soul. These fall into two classes, one set belonging to the understanding or reason, whose function is judgement, and the other set belonging to the will or appetite, whose function is action or execution. What of the imagination, which had a privileged place in Bacon’s initial classification of human faculties ?
The Imagination is an agent or nuncius in both provinces, both the judicial and the ministerial. For sense sendeth over to Imagination before Reason have judged: and Reason sendeth over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted ; for Imagination ever precedeth Voluntary Motion: saving that this Janus of Imagination hath differing faces; for the face towards Reason hath the print of Truth, but the face towards Action hath the print of Good. (AL, 217)
But imagination is no mere servant of the other faculties, Bacon insists: it can triumph over reason, and that is what happens in the case of religious belief.
It is clear that Bacon envisioned the mind as a kind of internal society, with the different faculties enshrined in a constitution respecting the separation of powers. When he comes to treat of the social sciences themselves he offers another threefold division, corresponding to associations for friendship, for business, and for government. Political theory is a part of civil philosophy, that branch of human philosophy that concerns the benefits that humans derive from living in society.
Having finished his classification, Bacon can boast ‘I have made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world’ (AL, 299). The various sciences which appear in his voluminous catalogue are not all at similar stages of development. Some, he thinks, have achieved a degree of perfection, but others are deficient, and some are almost non-existent. One of the most deficient is logic, and the defects of logic weaken other sciences also. The problem is that logic lacks a theory of scientific discovery:
Like as the West-Indies had never been discovered if the use of the mariner’s needle had not been first discovered, though the one be vast regions and the other a small motion; so it cannot be found strange if sciences be no further discovered if the art itself of invention and discovery hath been passed over. (AL, 219).
Bacon set out to remedy this lack and to provide a compass to guide scientific researchers. This was the task of his Novum Organum." (pp.29-30)
"Bacon’s project of introducing discipline into research had a negative and a positive component. The researcher’s first, negative, task is to be on his guard against the factors that can introduce bias into his observations. Bacon lists four of these, and calls them ‘idols’ because they are fetishes which can divert us from the pursuit of truth: there are the idols of the tribe, the idols of the den, the idols of the marketplace, and the idols of the theatre. The idols of the tribe are temptations endemic in the whole human race, such as the tendency to judge things by superficial appearances, the tendency to go along with popular belief, and the tendency to interpret nature anthropomorphically. The idols of the den, or cave, are features of individual temperaments which hamper objectivity: some people, for instance, are too conservative, others too ready to seize on novelties. Each person has ‘a certain individual cavern of his own, which breaks and distorts the light of nature’. The idols of the marketplace (or perhaps ‘idols of the courts’ idola fori) are snares lurking in the language we use, which contains meaningless, ambiguous, and ill-defined words. Finally the idols of the theatre are false systems of philosophy which are no more than stage plays, whether ‘sophistical’, like Aristotle’s, or ‘empirical’, like contemporary alchemists, or ‘superstitious’ like the Neoplatonists who confuse philosophy with theology.
The positive task of the researcher is induction, the discovery of scientific laws by the systematic examination of particular cases. If this is not to be rash generalization from inadequate sampling of nature, we need a carefully schematized procedure, showing us how to mount gradually from particular instances to axioms of gradually increasing generality. Bacon offers a series of detailed rules to guide this process:
Suppose that we have some phenomenon X and we wish to discover its true form or explanation. We must first make a table of presences—that is to say, we list the items A, B, C, D...which are present when X is present. Then we make a table of absences, listing items E, F, G, H...which are present when X is absent. Thirdly, we make a table of degrees, recording that J, K, L, M...are present to a greater degree when X is present to a greater degree, and present to a lesser degree when X is present to a lesser degree.
This is only the preparatory step in the method. The real work of induction comes when we start the process of eliminating candidates for being the form of X. To be successful a candidate must be present in every case occurring in the table of presences, and absent in every case occurring in the table of absences. Bacon illustrates his method with the example of heat. We list cases when heat is present (e.g. the rays of the sun and the sparks of a Xint) and cases in which it is absent (e.g. in the rays of the moon and the stars). Since light is present in cases listed in the table of absence, we can eliminate light as being the form of heat. After some further eliminative moves, and making use also of the table of degrees (e.g. that the more exercise animals take the hotter they get), Bacon concludes that heat is a special kind of motion (‘an expansive motion held in check and pushing its way through tiny particles’).
Bacon never completed the series of guidelines that he set out to present in the Novum Organum, and it cannot be said that his system adds up to a ‘logic of induction’. However, he did establish the important point that negative instances are more signifcant, in the process of establishing laws, than positive ones. Twentieth-century philosophers have been willing to give him credit for being the first person to point out that laws of nature cannot be conclusively verified, but can be conclusively falsified.
Bacon’s insistence on the importance of precise and repeated observations went hand in hand with an appreciation that natural science could make progress only by a massive cooperative endeavour. In the New Atlantis, an unfinished fragment published posthumously, a ship’s crew in the South Seas land on an island containing a remarkable institution known as Salomon’s House. This turns out to be a research establishment, where scientists work together to embody Bacon’s utilitarian ideal of science as the extension of men’s power over nature for the betterment of the human race. Their projects include plans for telephones, submarines, and aeroplanes. The president of the institute described its purpose thus:
The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bound of Human Empire, to the eVecting of all things possible. (B, 480)
Salomon’s House was a Utopian fantasy; but it was given a counterpart in the real world when, thirty-five years after the New Atlantis, Bacon’s compatriots of the next generation founded the Royal Society of London." (pp.30-32)
-Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, tome 3 The rise of modern philosophy, Oxford / New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, 356 pages.
