J.P.SOMMERVILLE

 

The mechanical philosophers  
351-19(2)

 

Galileo and Descartes believed that the world was made of matter in motion. They thought that all objects were composed of particles or atoms, and that these interacted in accordance with fixed natural laws. This view of the natural world became known as "mechanical philosophy".
Mechanical philosophers modeled their view of the world on machines (not organisms, as Aristotelians had done). They wished to produce general theories that accounted in quantifiable terms for many different types of interaction.

 

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

 

Thomas Hobbes was not only a political theorist, but a philosopher and a (rather poor) mathematician.
Hobbes rejected Cartesian dualism and argued that nothing but matter exists. Even thought is simply matter in motion. He mocked the idea that human bodies were "possessed" by 'incorporeal spirits".
Hobbes' materialism led to him being accused of atheism, particularly as free will (like the soul) disappeared from  Hobbes' utterly deterministic world. Hobbes simply responded that Scripture did not require any belief in spirits and that his determinism was no different from Calvin's predestination.
 

"He that holds there is a God, and that God is really somewhat, (for body is doubtlessly a real substance), is as far from being an atheist, as it is possible to be. But he that says God is an incorporeal substance, no man can be sure whether he be an atheist or not. For no man living can tell whether there be any substance at all, that is not also corporeal. For neither the word incorporeal, nor immaterial, nor any word equivalent to it, is to be found in Scripture, or in reason".

Hobbes, Reply
 

Hobbes' protestations that he was no atheist convinced few of his contemporaries and he was denied membership in the Royal Society in part because of his materialism.
Scientists such a Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton strongly rejected such thoroughgoing materialism, and clung to a soul-body dualism (even while rejecting Descartes' theories). They tried to argue that science supported religion by showing how well-designed the universe was.
 

Baruch/ Benedict de Spinoza
(1632-77)
 

Like Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza was a materialist accused of atheism.
Born in Amsterdam of Portuguese Jews who had fled persecution, Spinoza was excommunicated from his local synagogue in 1656 for his radical views.
Spinoza earned his living by grinding lenses, and met his death by inhaling the glass dust into his lungs.
Spinoza was strongly influenced by Descartes, but disagreed with him on some important points. He accepted the Cartesian thesis that the material world was one continuous entity (i.e. with no vacuum) and whose matter was less concentrated at some points than at others.
Spinoza went much further by adding materialism and so argued that the universe is a thinking being - at once both God and Nature. His logic ran -  God is infinite; God is material; therefore there is no substance but God.
Spinoza was like Hobbes a determinist; he denied that free will was possible. Yet at the same time he wanted people to control their emotions, and especially control their fears by rejecting superstitious beliefs.
Spinoza stated unambiguously that miracles (in the sense of acts against the laws of nature) were simply impossible. Spinoza argued that the Bible must be interpreted in accordance with reason, and understood metaphorically not literally when it described impossible events.
Spinoza was widely regarded as an atheist because of his admission that the Bible contained errors, absurdities and contradictions, along with his pantheism (denying any distinction between God and the universe).
 

"They that look upon the Bible, however it be, as a letter sent from heaven by God to man, will certainly exclaim and say, I am guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost, in maintaining, that the word of God is faulty, maimed, adulterated, and contradictory to itself; that we have but fragments of it, and that the original writing of the Covenant which God made with the Jews perished… ".

Spinoza, Treatise.
 

 

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646 - 1716)

 

Leibniz was the son of a Lutheran professor. His first career was that of diplomat and he worked in the service of the Archbishop of Mainz and then of the Duke of Brunswick. In this capacity he tried to persuade Louis XIV to invade Egypt and expel the Turks rather than keep attacking Germans.
He met Spinoza in 1676 on his way back to Germany from a visit to England.
From 1676 onwards, Leibniz lived in Hannover and worked on an amazingly broad range of topics. He was an innovative mathematician, wrote on jurisprudence and political thought, developed a theory of language, and wrote many articles for the Journal Acta Eruditorum.
Leibniz was also an important philosopher; his major works being Theodicy (1710) & Monadology (1714). He argued against both Descartes and Spinoza's view that all matter was continuously extended. Instead Leibniz insisted that the most fundamental units of existence were monads.
A monad, in his theory, was a mental entity capable of perceiving and wanting. Monads had no material dimension. God sustained the harmonious interaction of monads which otherwise were completely self-sufficient.
In his Theodicy (1710), Leibniz dealt with the problem of why a good God should make a world where so many evil things happen. He argued that God chooses to bring into actuality just those individuals and events that result in the maximum good: -  "the best plan is not always that which seeks to avoid evil, since it may happen that an evil is accompanied by a greater good."
 

Alexander Pope endorsed Leibniz's optimistic philsophy poetically in his Essay on Man:

 

…All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.…

 

 

The notion that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" was satirized mercilessly by Voltaire in Candide (1759).

"There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible".

Leibniz, Monadology

 

Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz were all rationalist philosophers. Unlike Bacon and Galileo, observation and experiment were merely incidental to their attempts to construct intellectual systems. In contrast, John Locke began the trend towards empirical philosophy.

John Locke (1632-1704)
 

The son of a minor landowner, John Locke studied medicine and became the physician and client of Lord Ashley, First Earl of Shaftesbury.
John Locke was impressed by the achievements of Boyle and Newton and in 1668 joined the Royal Society. He became close friends with the distinguished physician, Thomas Sydenham. (Sydenham was one of the first to recognize the link between fleas and typhus fever, and an innovator in the use of opium and quinine in medical practice).
John Locke argued that observation was of the first importance in philosophy as well as in science. He claimed that at birth the human mind is a tabula rasa (a blank page). People have no "innate ideas" - human senses ("sensation") provide all the information with which the mind ratiocinates ("reflection").
The simple ideas produced by sensation are combined into complex ideas by reflection, and humans often make mistakes along the way - combining, for example, the true notion of a horse with the true notion of wings to form a false idea of a winged horse. Locke also complained that many people simply took their beliefs from others without carefully examining whether or not they accorded with their own experience of reality.
 

Locke set forth his theory of knowledge in An Essay concerning human understanding  (1690). It was reprinted four times before John Locke's death in 1704 and was immensely influential both in England and on the Continent.
 

Locke and later empiricist philosophers were very suspicious of metaphysics. They believed that all ideas must be derived from experience. For a scientific empiricist, knowledge is only a generalization from particular instances; it may well change with further experimentation. Truth, therefore, may be established with a high degree of probability, but not with certainty.
Scientific empiricism has been attacked by idealists, skeptics, ideologues, nihilists, Marxists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists (to name just a few). Nonetheless, Locke has had more influence than any other English-speaking philosopher.
 

The best way to come to truth being to examine things as really they are, and not to conclude they are, as we fancy of ourselves, or have been taught by others to imagine.
Locke, Human Understanding (II,XII)

 

 

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