The Reception of Aquinas in the Philosophy of Nature and Science

Notes on Contributors

The Thomist 66 (2002): 519-33 SUBSTANTIAL FORM AND THE RECOVERY OF AN ARISTOTELIAN NATURAL SCIENCE JOHN GOYETIE Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, California THE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to show the continued validity of Aristotelian natural science in light of the challenges posed by modern science. More specifically, I aim to defend the concept of nature as an intrinsic principle of motion and rest, especially the notion ofsubstantial form that Aristotle deems to be "more nature" than matter. The recovery of Aristotelian natural philosophy must begin with a defense of the notion of substantial form not only because this is the foundation of Aristotelian natural science, but also because it has been systematically rejected by modern science. Of the Aristotelian four causes, the formal cause has been the subject ofthe greatest attack. Modern science has, of course, always made use of material and efficient causality. And the notion of final causality, although criticized by the founders of modern science as well as contemporary scientists, has never been subject to the same kind of critique as the notion of substantial form. Newton, for example, endorses the modern rejection of "substantial forms and occult qualities" in the beginning of the Principia, but defends the use offinal causality in the "General Scholium" that concludes the work. For Newton the world is a machine, but it is a machine that exhibits purpose: "it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions.. . . This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an 519 520 JOHN GOYETTE intelligent and powerful Being."1 He explicitly defends the indusion of final causes and discourse on divine providence within the scope of natural philosophy.2 Substantial form is abandoned, but final causality is retained. We find something similar among contemporary design theorists such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, who argue, contrary to the neoDarwinian orthodoxy, that intelligent design is the only reasonable explanation of the origin of living organisms. The design theorists do not dispute that living things are mere machines, only that their "irreducible complexity" is a product of blind chance.3 While scientific reductionism goes unchallenged, the daim to explain the order of the world by chance has never gained universal approval among the proponents of modem science. 1 Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles ofNatural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte and Florian Cajori, vol. 2 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1962), 544. 2 "We know [God] only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes ... and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothings but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.... And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appeamnces of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy" (ibid., 546). 3 Michael Behe, who coined the phrase "irreducible complexity," refers to living things as "biochemical machines." ~All organisms are made of molecules that act as the nuts and bolts, gears and pulleys of biological systems" (Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution [New York: The Free Press, 1996], p. x). William Dembski, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, has a better sense of the position of Aristotle. In Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, HI.: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 123, he notes that modem science, which is predominantly Baconian in character, limits science to material and efficient causes, thereby exduding design, which for Aristotle is related to formal and final causality. But Dembski does not advocate a return to Aristotle's four causes: "There are problems with Aristotle's theory, and it needed to be replaced" (ibid., 124). Although he believes thatAristotle's theory has been discredited by modem science, he believes that chance and necessity are not sufficient to explain the phenomena. Thus, while he does not call into question the mechanistic approach of modem...

The Logic of Nature

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

624 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:4 OCTOBER 198 9 term 'notion' " was due to the fact that most of his contemporaries "took notions to be intentional objects" (191). Flage's conclusion is "that notions are to be construed as intentional acts" (2o8). This is at best awkward. For it must be entertaining or employing a notion, rather than that notion itself, which is any sort of act, intentional or other. Flage's final chapter, as its title suggests, consists in "Conclusions and Historical Speculations." He believes, for reasons given, that Berkeley had developed his doctrine of notions by the time he first published the Principles. Flage would strengthen his case were he prepared to add what he conjectures was Berkeley's reason for not showing his hand sooner. ANTONY FLEW Reading, England Ivor Leclerc. The PhilosophyofNature. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (gen. ed., Jude P. Dougherty), Vol. 14. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 22o. $3 a.95. One is immediately sympathetic to the spirit and aims of Leclerc's contribution to this valuable series. He has provided a welcome apologia for the subject of his study, arguing the necessity of reviving the philosophicalstudy of nature, to complement and enrich the purely "scientific" investigations that these days exhaust the range of professional interests of practitioners of the physical sciences. If successful, this program would restore something that has been missing since the days of Kant, in whose unknowable and inaccessible Ding an sich Leclerc finds the watershed between an age of authentic philosophy of nature and an age in which philosophy has become "essentially a philosophy of mind or spirit." Yet, he argues, "it is precisely the physical Ding an sich which is required to be the primary object of the philosophy of nature" (12). Leclerc presents his case via a study of "the philosophy of nature" principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He gives three reasons for this approach (13). First seventeenth-century philosophers of nature elaborated their ideas against the background of Aristotelian doctrines, so "they gained from their detailed study of Aristotle a singularly good grasp of the fundamental issues involved in the philosophy of nature" (13). Second, our assessment of the state of affairs today should depend on a serious understanding of science and philosophy in the past. Third, this historical approach helps us distinguish between the philosophical and scientific issues and clarify the relations between them. No need to explain to faithful JHP readers that these last two points will have most contemporary philosophers of science scratching their heads. Accordingly, Part 2 (Historical) provides useful and skillfully managed expositions, and in some instances reinterpretations (Kant on space), of concepts of nature, doctrines of substance, matter and mind, motion and space, as found in the writings of Peripatetics , seventeenth-century atomists, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, Leibniz, Locke, Newton and Kant. Building on this historical background, in Part 3 (Issues) Lederc develops critical analyses of seven fundamentally important philosophical problem areas created BOOK REVIEWS 625 by twentieth-century science: the physical existent; the physical existent as a compound actuality; relations; physical existence, matter, and activity; compounds, body, change; motion, action, and physical being; Platonism, Aristotelianism, and modern science. In his treatment of the last of these issues, which takes up the concluding chapter, Leclerc argues that the epistemological subjectivism ("the essential Neoplatonic position ," 2o5) spawned by Kant and taken to its metaphysical culmination by Hegel and the positivists, should now be displaced by an epistemological realism in tune with the revolutionary findings of contemporary science. The philosophy of nature, he writes (2o7), "entails that nature or the physical be in itself the object of philosophical inquiry, and this it is unable to be on the Neoplatonic subjectivistic basis." To effect this philosophical transformation, we might take our cue from Whitehead, who saw "more clearly than most that this change entailed the complete rejection of the metaphysics upon which modern science had been based since the seventeenth century, that a new metaphysics is accordingly now necessary as a basis for science, and [who] has gone further than any other thinker in elaborating such a metaphysics" (2o7...

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

This book proposes that Philip Melanchthon was responsible for transforming traditional university natural philosophy into a specifically Lutheran one. Motivated by desire to check civil disobedience and promote a Lutheran orthodoxy, he created a natural philosophy based on Aristotle, Galen and Plato, incorporating contemporary findings of Copernicus and Vesalius. The fields of astrology, anatomy, botany and mathematics all constituted a natural philosophy in which Melanchthon wished to demonstrate God's Providential design in the physical world. Rather than dichotomizing or synthesizing the two distinct areas of 'science' and 'religion', Kusukawa advocates the need to look at 'Natural philosophy' as a discipline quite different from either 'modern science' or 'religion': a contextual assessment of the implication of the Lutheran Reformation on university education, particularly on natural philosophy.

This book proposes that Philip Melanchthon was responsible for transforming traditional university natural philosophy into a specifically Lutheran one. Motivated by desire to check civil disobedience and promote a Lutheran orthodoxy, he created a natural philosophy based on Aristotle, Galen and Plato, incorporating contemporary findings of Copernicus and Vesalius. The fields of astrology, anatomy, botany and mathematics all constituted a natural philosophy in which Melanchthon wished to demonstrate God's Providential design in the physical world. Rather than dichotomizing or synthesizing the two distinct areas of 'science' and 'religion', Kusukawa advocates the need to look at 'Natural philosophy' as a discipline quite different from either 'modern science' or 'religion': a contextual assessment of the implication of the Lutheran Reformation on university education, particularly on natural philosophy.

488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY this fragment, however, affirms its Hegelian authorship" (p. 61). This most recent scholarship is P6ggeler's, and it is uncertain within the context of Cook's study whether Cook agrees or disagrees with P/Sggeler. The passage, I think, needs rewriting, We know that Hegel's views and Schelling's diverge rather significantly. I do not want to end this review on a negative note, however. Taken as a whole, Cook's work offers us much in the way of help toward investigating Hegel on language. It is a definite contribution to the literature and should rekindle interest in the conceptual relevance of Hegel's thought. STEPHENA. ERICKSON Pomona College Faraday as a Natural Philosopher. By Joseph Agassi. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Pp. xiv + 359. $12.50) The history of science can be studied philosophically in at least three ways: by emphasizing the philosophical content of scientific thought as Koyr6 did in much of his work; by exploring the philosophical significance of past science, an example being Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations o[ Modern Science; or by giving a philosophical interpretation of scientific history, e.g., A. I. Sabra's Theories o[ Light from Descartes to Newton. Agassi's book is philosophical in these three ways as it studies the work of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English scientist best known for his discovery in 1831 of electro-magnetic induction, which is the phenomenon of generating an electric current in a wire by moving it relative to a magnet. As such the book deserves the attention of every historian of philosophy whose interest is not limited to his scholarly specialty but includes a willingness to explore broader conceptions of philosophy and/or history. This is not to say that one will be always satisfied with the clarity, cogency, or scholarliness of the book; but it is to say that the historian of philosophy will find the book certainly challenging, and probably inspiring, both historiographically and philosophically. The three above mentioned philosophical strands of the book are not at all easy to detect or extract; in fact it can easily give the impression of being primarily an account of Faraday's life from the point of view of the interplay between his personal, private life and his public, scientific one; this is an impression obtainable even from Agassi's explicit words (xii-xiii) to the effect that he is writing a somewhat unorthodox biography, of a type which aims to discuss many of the complexities of the life of men of science, which are usually neglected, or at least streamlined. However, I will concentrate on the philosophical-historiographical content of the book, though I do not deny that it is in part such a biography. The philosophical content of Faraday's work falls in two areas, philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. Agassi himself is not very explicit in distinguishing these two elements, but he does so implicitly; hence it is useful to make the distinction. The discussion emphasizes the philosophy of nature (chapters 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9), so much so that the one chapter on Faraday's philosophy of science may be easily lost sight of, an oversight encouraged by the book's title as well. Faraday's philosophy of nature is portrayed as being a reaction against the Newtonianism prevailing at the time, as falling in the tradition of Boscovich and Kant, and as being the field-theoretic conception of the world: that lines of force are the fundamental entities in nature, and in particular that they pervade the so-called "empty" space, which is therefore not empty; that matter is simply a concentration of lines of forces, and hence is not material in the usual sense; and that force is conserved and different forces can be converted into one another. This world view is the one that eventually triumphed in some sense, at least in the work of BOOK REVIEWS 489 Clerk-Maxwell and Einstein. Agassi explicitly refrains from arguing that because of this subsequent triumph, one can see the merit of Faraday's philosophy of nature; yet I personally cannot deny that I get the impression that Agassi...

De Koninck on the Philosophy of Nature J. M. Hubbard (bio) Charles De Koninck was born in Belgium in 1906. In 1934 he obtained a PhD from Louvain University with a dissertation on Sir Arthur Eddington. That same year he was hired by Laval University, Quebec, Canada, where he was dean of the faculty of philosophy from 1939–1956 and 1964–1965 and spent the rest of his life. In 1954 he obtained a doctorate in sacred theology from Laval with a dissertation on Mary’s Assumption, La Piété du Fils. He also taught at Notre Dame University in the fall semesters of 1957–1963. He died in Rome on February 13, 1965, while acting as conciliar theologian for Cardinal Roy of Quebec.1 De Koninck wrote on many topics: the common good, natural philosophy, the philosophy of science, Marxism, and Mariology. A [End Page 140] complete list of his 163 published works can be found in Melanges a la Memoire de Charles De Koninck.2 The bibliography also contains a list of the forty-seven dissertations he directed, most of which were excerpted in Laval Théologique et Philosophique. A. Gagne, the archivist who compiled the bibliography, notes that the unpublished work of De Koninck exceeds the published.3 The two articles by De Koninck presented here deal with topics in the philosophy of nature. It has become commonplace to consider the philosophy of nature as having been replaced by experimental science.4 After all, what is there to say about nature that science has not already said?5 Some have tried to save the philosophy of nature by reducing it to metaphysics; others have reduced it to the philosophy of science in its critical role of judging the results of science.6 Of those who attempted to find an autonomous role for the philosophy of nature, the preeminent was Jacques Maritain.7 He held that since the subject of the study of nature is ens mobile seu sensibile (changing or sensed things), there could be two more or less autonomous sciences of nature. One, the philosophy of nature, studied changing things precisely as things (res); the other, which he called empiriological science, studied changing things precisely as changing (mobile). In his first writing on the philosophy of nature, “Le Cosmos” (1936), De Koninck indicated agreement with Maritain.8 Five years later, however, in “Les sciences expérimentales sont-elles distinctes de la philosophie de la nature?” he presented a different view, one he was to refine the rest of his life.9 “The Unity and Diversity of Natural Science,” published in 1961 and here reprinted, is his last expression of this view. In this article, De Koninck argues, following Aristotle, that the philosophy of nature and experimental science are parts of one science of nature. There is but one science of nature, but there is diversity in the methods by means of which the human mind achieves knowledge of natural things and their behaviors.10 The unity arises from the consideration of natural science as the study of material things. [End Page 141] To understand this we must see that, following Aristotle, one must say that science studies general, universal things, not singulars (roses, not this rose bush; dogs, not Fido). It follows then, that sciences can be distinguished according to the ways they abstract from (leave aside) matter, which is, philosophically speaking, the source of individuality.11 There are thus three possibilities: a science that leaves aside individuating matter but not all sense matter, that is, natural science; one that leaves aside all sense matter but not all matter, that is, mathematics; and a science that studies things completely separated from matter, that is, metaphysics. From this point of view there can be but one science that studies natural things precisely with reference to their sensible matter: natural science. Philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences are fundamentally united in their study of material things. Of course, each may be further divided by the kinds of material things studied, but here we see the fundamental point of unity. So if there is one science of nature, how is one to understand the diversity...

Philosophy, Science, and History is an anthology, consisting mostly of excerpts from important texts in philosophy of science. Some of these texts were written in the tradition of philosophy of science as a discipline. However, most of them come from older times when there was not much of a separation between science and philosophy and reflecting about science was a way of doing science—the tradition known as natural philosophy. The book contains a total of 29 chapters, the first of which is a general introduction, and the remaining 28 are grouped in two parts, each with a brief summary presenting the themes discussed. The first part, ‘‘Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science’’, aims at presenting classical twentieth-century approaches to philosophy of science. It contains an introduction by the editor and texts by George Santayana, Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Martin Rudwick, and Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. It focuses on philosophical reflections about science in the debate between the logical and methodological, and the historical and sociological approaches. The second part draws attention to earlier periods of philosophy and history of science; it is divided into three sections (A, B, and C), each devoted to a different debate, and each containing an introduction by the editor. Section A is entitled ‘‘Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery’’, bringing texts by John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Norwood Russell Hanson; its theme is the relation between scientific hypotheses and inductive reasoning, in such a way that Hanson’s text appears as the peak of the tradition of investigation on the processes that lead to the formulation of scientific theories. Section B discusses ‘‘Force in Natural Philosophy’’, presenting texts by Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Emilie du Châtelet, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Those texts raise numerous discussions, but the Editor’s Introduction to this section directs the reader through the matters of force and causality in classical physics. And in section C one finds some important features of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism in geology and its

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Philosophy of science developed in the nineteenth century from continuations of and reactions to Kant's critical philosophy. The project arose from modern science's challenge to the cognitive authority of traditional philosophy. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton no doubt thought of themselves as philosophers, answering fundamental questions about the nature of planetary and terrestrial motions that had been central for 'natural philosophy'. It gradually became apparent, however, that the empirical methods of the new natural philosophy were quite different from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy; and the question gradually arose of what, if anything, there remained for philosophy in the traditional sense to do. Kant placed this question at the center of philosophical thinking, where it has remained ever since. Philosophical discussions of science have, after Kant, displayed various fundamental attitudes toward scientific knowledge. These attitudes define the main directions in French philosophy of science during the twentieth century.