Science, Certainty, and Descartes

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1999

2020

This paper presents a new approach to resolving an apparent tension in Descartes' discussion of scientific theories and explanations in the Principles of Philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes repeatedly claims that any theories presented in science must be certain and indubitable. On the other hand, Descartes himself presents an astonishing number of speculative explanations of various scientific phenomena. In response to this tension, commentators have suggested that Descartes changed his mind about scientific theories having to be certain and indubitable, that he lacked the conceptual resources to describe the appropriate epistemic attitude towards speculative theories, or that the presence of geometrical principles in these explanations guarantee their certainty. I argue that none of these responses is satisfactory and suggest a different resolution to the tension by examining Descartes' notion of explanation. On Descartes' view, providing an adequate explanation does not require being certain of the theories that constitute the explanans. Relatedly, the purpose of Cartesian explanations is not to discover the truth about the various underlying mechanisms that such explanations appeal to, but to support his general philosophical thesis that all natural phenomena can be explained by appealing to the extension of matter.

Physics and metaphysics in Descartes and in His Reception. New York and London: Routledge, 2019

This volume explores the relationship between physics and metaphysics in Descartes' philosophy. According to the standard account, Descartes modified the objects of metaphysics and physics and inverted the order in which these two disciplines were traditionally studied. This book challenges the standard account in which Descartes prioritizes metaphysics over physics. It does by taking into consideration the historical reception of Descartes and the ways in which Descartes himself reacted to these receptions in his own lifetime. The book stresses the diversity of theses receptions by taking into account not only Cartésianisme but also anti-Cartesianism and by showing how they retroactively highlighted different aspects of Descartes' works and theoretical choices. The historical aspect of the volume is unique in that it not only analyzes different constructions of Descartes that emerged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, but also reflects on how his work was first read by philosophers across Europe. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a fresh and up-to-date contribution to this important debate in early modern philosophy.

Church History and Religious Culture, 2020

This article discusses Descartes's preferred focus on morally and theologically neutral subjects and points out the impact of this focus on the scientific status of theology. It does so by linking Descartes's method to his transformation of the notion of substance. Descartes's Meditations centred around epistemological questions rather than non-human intelligences or the life of the mind beyond this world. Likewise, in his early works, Descartes consistently avoided referring to causal operators. Finally, having first redefined the notion of substance in the Principia, Descartes would completely abandon making use of this notion in his later years. Indeed, in contrast to many authors before and after him, Descartes never showed any interest in the long-established metaphysical interpretation of substances as being causal factors of natural change. With God, nature, and mind commonly serving as instances of substantial causality, Descartes's philosophy had a huge impact on the place of God in science and discreetly excluded theology as a subject to which his method might be applied.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1997

Recent work on Descartes has drastically revised the traditional conception of Descartes as a paradigmatic rationalist and foundationalist. The traditional picture, familar from histories of philosophy and introductory lectures, is of a solitary meditator dedicated to the pursuit of certainty in a unified science via a rigourous process of logical deduction from indubitable first principles. But the Descartes that has emerged from recent studies strikes a more subtle balance between metaphysics, physics, epistemology and the philosophy of science. There is much to be praised in this revaluation, but a dangerous amount of over-compensation has gone on, particularly in the reinterpretation of the role of sceptical doubt in Descartes' thought. This reinterpretion plays down the epistemological reasons for worrying about scepticism, suggesting that Cartesian physics is what ultimately drives the introduction of scepticism in the First Meditation.

Journal of Philosophy and Ethics, 2020

The task of this essay is to make a critical study of Descartes philosophy on the relationship between his epistemology and metaphysics, and how both contributed to the scientific civilization of the modern era. For the purpose of this exercise, we have divided this essay into two parts. The first part will expose the tenets of Descartes' epistemology and metaphysics, and their relationship in him, while the second part will investigate its development in modern science.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2012

In this book, I attempt to reconstruct key aspects of the early career of Descartes from 1618 to 1633; that is, up through the point of his composing his fi rst system of natural philosophy, Le Monde , in 1629-1633. I focus upon the overlapping and intertwined development of Descartes' projects in physico-mathematics, analytical mathematics, universal method, and, fi nally, systematic corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. 1 My concern is not simply with the conceptual and technical aspects of these projects; but, with Descartes' agendas within them, and his construction and presentation of his intellectual identity in relation to them. Hence, my subject matter is selective and ultimately limited in relation to the potential fi eld of concerns in which intellectual historians and historians of science and philosophy might place Descartes, or even the young Descartes. Nevertheless, as explained below in Sect. 1.3.3 , my focus on technical projects, agendas and identity well fi ts the scope and aim of scienti fi c or intellectual biography. On my analysis, Descartes' technical projects, agendas and senses of identity all shift over time, entangle and display great successes and deep failures. This motivates my choice of title, 'Descartes Agonistes ': In all three dimensions-projects, agendas and identity concerns-the young Descartes struggles and contends, with himself and with real or virtual peers and competitors between 1618 and 1633, as he morphs from a mathematically competent, Jesuit-trained graduate in neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism to aspiring prophet of a fi rmly systematized corpuscular-mechanism, Chapter 1 Introduction: Problems of Descartes and the Scienti fi c Revolution 1 Physico-mathematics is de fi ned in a preliminary way below, in Sect. 1.3.2 , and more fully in Sect. 2.5.3 ; Descartes' early projects within the intended scope of this discipline are explored in Chap. 3. Also see below, Sect. 1.4 'Overview of Argument', for more on the way this category will recur, be studied and explored throughout this work. 1.2 Descartes and the Historians of Science This inquiry will reveal a number of novel and surprising conclusions, concerning the content and intent of the Principia as a daring gambit in natural philosophy and in realist Copernican cosmology and cosmography. 2 These fi ndings will serve both to put into perspective our main target, Descartes' achievement and intentions in Le Monde , and to mark out a fi eld of further inquiry into what exactly the Principia was intended to accomplish within the natural philosophical contest of Descartes' generation. Overall, about three-quarters of the book are devoted to the trajectory of the young Descartes, leading up to the composition of Le Monde , whilst the fi nal quarter consists of the detailed dissection of Le Monde , and the comparison of it to the Principia , the latter treated in the rather unconventional manner just outlined. Finally, readers should rest assured that although this work declines to de fi ne the early and mature Descartes in the alternative terms mooted three paragraphs above, the Regulae as well as the Discours and Essais are treated herein, insofar as required by our focus on Descartes' natural philosophical career. As the 'Overview of Argument' in Sect. 1.4 below shows, within the perspective adopted in this book, the Regulae are examined extensively as a nodal work, especially in regard to their content and the history of their composition between 1618 and 1628. In addition, although our approach dictates that we not focus upon the Discours and Essais as a publishing event or putative statement of program per se , several aspects of Descartes' 1637 public manifestation come under examination at appropriate points in our argument-most importantly his work on the law of refraction of light and theory of lenses in the Dioptrique ; his purported method and tendentious autobiography in the Discours , and his corpuscular-mechanical explanation of color in the Météores. 1.2 Descartes and the Historians of Science As recently as a generation ago, apprentice historians of science, especially Anglophones, faced a daunting challenge, linguistic and cultural, in coming to grips with Descartes the mathematician, natural philosopher and 'scientist'. They tended to encounter a Descartes already unpalatably familiar from undergraduate excursions in philosophy or the history of ideas: an eerily contextless and anonymous author of atomic, isolated, putatively timelessly relevant texts, the Discourse on Method and the Meditations , the Father of Modern Philosophy (epistemology) with whom their philosophy instructors were, apparently, in constant, but critical discussion. With the help of equally frustrated but more experienced senior colleagues, one soon realized that the best sources for the study of Descartes' mathematics, science and their relation to his philosophical projects were old, rare and mostly in French,

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2012

As we learned in Chap. 2 , there are important traditions in the interpretation of the Scienti fi c Revolution that have been committed to narratives of the discovery, perfection and application of the scienti fi c method. Many pioneering professional historians of science of the past century were persuaded, along with the bulk of the educated reading public since the Enlightenment, that Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Huygens and Newton variously contributed to the invention of a single, transferable and ef fi cacious scienti fi c method, the advent of which was the central achievement and event in the rise of modern Western science. We also know, from Chap. 2 , that serious questions have been raised about the existence of such a unique, ef fi cacious and transferable method, and that other traditions in the fi elds of history and philosophy of science, deriving sustenance from the writings of Bachelard, Koyré and Kuhn, have cast serious doubt upon the idea that any general method commands and explains the actual practice of living fi elds of scienti fi c inquiry. Now, the entire present study has been conceived and executed under quite post-Kuhnian commitments about the sui-generis character of natural knowledge-making traditions, whether natural philosophy itself or its subordinate and cognate specialist disciplines. At no point has method, whether some general scienti fi c method, or the method of Descartes, been invoked in our reconstruction of the practices, agendas and outcomes of Descartes' pursuits in mathematics, natural philosophy, physicomathematics or mixed mathematics. We have now come to a critical turning point in our inquiry, however, because we have reconstructed how and when Descartes conceived of the core of his method, and seen the likely enthusiasm and belief it ignited in him. The issue is, how shall we deal with a the young Descartes' 'discovery' of his method? Shall we now cave in to traditional, and still popular, belief and proceed to explain his subsequent work as the product of that method? Or, shall we simply ignore Descartes' method claims, in the manner implied by the debunking historiographies of Koyré and Kuhn? Chapter 6 Method and the Problem of the Historical Descartes

Advances in Historical Studies, 2013

The paper try to provide a contribution to the scientific-historiographic debate concerning the relations between experiments, metaphysics and mathematics in Descartes' physics. The three works on which the analysis is focused are the Principia philosophiae and the two physical essays: La Dioptrique and Les Météores. The authors will highlight the profound methodological and epistemological differences characterizing, from one side, the Principia and, from the other side, the physical essays. Three significant examples will be dealt with: 1) the collision rules in the Principia philosophiae; 2) the refraction law in La Dioptrique; 3) the rainbow in Les Météores. In the final remarks these differences will be interpreted as depending upon the different role Descartes ascribed to the three books inside his whole work. The concepts of intensity and gradation of the physical quantities used by Descartes will provide an important interpretative means. In this paper, we compare the aprioristic approach to physics typical for Descartes' Principia with the experimental and mathematical one characterizing Descartes' Essays.