Descartes, mechanics, and the mechanical philosophy

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 185-204

  Garber, Daniel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 48849087372     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.261061     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. When Descartes was writing, there were alchemists, Platonists, and Telesians who believed in hot and cold as basic principles, followers of Gilbert who saw magnetism as basic, and many others not so easily categorizable. For a survey of the scientific world as it was in the generation before Descartes came onto the scene, see chapter 5 of Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. My interest here is in the relation between Descartes' mechanical philosophy and the learned tradition in mechanics. One might also inquire into the connections between the mechanical philosophy and the traditions of practical mechanics. On this question, see, e.g., J. A. Bennett, "The Mechanics' Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy," History of Science 24 (1986), pp. 1-28.
3. On the importance of this text for sixteenth-century mechanics, see Paul Rose and Stillman Drake, "The Pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics in Renaissance Culture," Studies in the Renaissance, XVIII (1971), pp. 65-104;
4. and François De Gandt, "Les Mécaniques attribuées à Aristote et le renouveau de la science des machines au XVIe siècle," Les Études Philosophiques (1986), pp. 391-405.
5. See Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes with the Method of Archimedes, ed. T. L. Heath (New York: Dover, n.d.), pp. 189-220.
6. See Stillman Drake, and I. E. Drabkin, eds., Mechanics in Sixteenth- Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). This volume contains important selections from these authors in English translation, together with an introductory essay that remains an invaluable guide to the subject.
7. "Neque enim amplius mechanica, si à machinis abstrahatur, et seiungatur, mechanica potest appellari." Guidobaldo del Monte, Mechanicorum liber (Pisa, 1587), praefatio (unpagi-nated), translated in Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics, p. 245.
8. Mechanica 847a14f, translated in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. II. p. 1299.
9. The fact that machines are made for particular purposes is one of the features of machines that Dennis Des Chene emphasizes in chapter 4 of Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). Des Chene provides a very elegant discussion of the machine analogy in Descartes as it applies to humans and other living creatures. Though my own orientation in this essay is somewhat different from Des Chene's, I have learned a great deal from his work.
10. and Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605) II.8.2.
11. See also James G. Lennox, "Aristotle, Galileo, and 'Mixed Sciences' " in William A. Wallace, ed., Reinterpreting Galileo (Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), pp. 29-51;
12. and Gary I. Brown, "The Evolution of the Term 'Mixed Mathematics'," Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991), pp. 81-102.
13. For a discussion of how the art/nature distinction governed later European Aristotelian science, see Dear, Experience and Discipline (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 153-161.
14. On the relations between physics and mechanics, see, e.g., Alan Gabbey, "Between ars and philosophia naturalis: Reflections on the Historiography of Early Modern Mechanics," In Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. V. Field and F. A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 133-145;
15. and W. Roy Laird, "The Scope of Renaissance Mechanics," Osiris n.s. 2 (1986), pp. 43-68.
16. Robert Westman treats the parallel question with respect to astronomy, another middle science, in his essay, "The Astronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study," History of Science 18 (1980), pp. 105-147. Much of the evidence he cites pertains as much to mechanics (and the other mixed mathematical sciences) as it does to astronomy.
17. On Benedetti's anti-Aristotelianism, see Alexandre Koyré, "Giambattista Benedetti, Critic of Aristotle," in E. McMullin, ed., Galileo Man of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 98-117.
18. On Guidobaldo and Aristotle, see Domenico Bertoloni Meli, "Guidobaldo dal Monte and the Archimedean Revival," Nuncius 7 (1992), pp. 3-34.
19. References to Descartes' writings will be given as much as possible in the text. The standard original-language edition of Descartes' writings is René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, new edition (11 vols.) (Paris: CNRS/Vrin, 1964-74).
20. This will be abbreviated "AT," followed by volume (in Roman) and page number (in Arabic). References to Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (1644; Fr. trans. 1647) are given by "Pr," followed by the part (in Roman) and the section number (in Arabic). The best current translation is René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and (for vol. III) Anthony Kenny (3 vols.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-91). Since the passages quoted can readily be found in that edition, I will not cite the translation separately.
21. This is the conception of mechanics that is most of concern to Alan Gabbey in his essay, "Descartes's Physics and Descartes's Mechanics: Chicken and Egg?" in S. Voss, ed., Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 311-323. Gabbey does not seem to recognize that there is a second sense of the notion of mechanics in Descartes, which I will argue below.
22. This follows the Latin version. The French version makes much the same point, but using the example of a watch of unknown construction in place of the more general "machinery" Descartes alludes to in the Latin. Given the freedom allowed to seventeenth-century translators, it isn't clear whether this is Descartes' alteration or the translator's. For a discussion of some of the epistemological implications of this view, see Larry Laudan, "The Clock Metaphor and Hypotheses: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought, 1650-1670," in his Science and Hypothesis (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), pp. 27-58.
23. It should be noted in this connection that I am using the term mechanical philosophy somewhat anachronistically here. Descartes himself does not use this term. The term seems first to appear in the writings of Robert Boyle in the early 1660s, roughly ten years after Descartes' death, where it designates a conception of natural philosophy that unites a number of views considered by their originators in competition with one another, particularly those of Descartes and Gassendi. I would further claim that it was Boyle who created the idea of the mechanical philosophy, as it was used later in the century, though I will not argue that here. While recognizing the dangers, I will continue to use the term in connection with Descartes. On the history of the term mechanical philosophy, see Sophie Roux, La philosophie mécanique (1630-1690), unpublished doctoral thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1996, pp. 19-26.
24. I thank Michael Mahoney for this observation. Mahoney discusses the relations between mechanics and mathematics in the seventeenth century, including the work of Wallis, in his important essay, "The Mathematical Realm of Nature," chapter 22 of D. Garber and M. Ayers, eds., Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
25. In this respect the domain of mechanics and the machinist's workroom functioned as a kind of "trading zone" between the Aristotelian and the Cartesian mechanist, to use Peter Galison's extremely fruitful anthropological analogy. See Peter Galison, Image and Logic:A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 9.