Metaphysical Issues Research Articles

Quantification and Metaphysical Discourse

AbstractIt is common in metaphysical discourse to make claims like “Everything is self‐identical” in which “everything” is intended to range over everything. This sort of “unrestricted” generality appears central to metaphysical discourse. But there is debate whether such generality, which appears to involve quantification over an all‐inclusive domain, is even meaningful. To address this concern, Shaughan Lavine and Vann McGee supply competing accounts of the generality expressed by this use of “everything.” I argue that, from the perspective of the metaphysician, neither of their proposals is entirely suitable. But their central insights, as well as their shortcomings, suggest an account which is suitable for metaphysical discourse, what I call “genuinely unrestricted quantification.” For while genuinely unrestricted quantification does not directly supply an account of the metaphysician's “everything,” it disentangles what are properly metaphysical issues from issues concerning how we ought to understand the quantifiers. It makes clear that whether the metaphysician's “everything” is meaningful cannot simply be resolved by supplying an appropriate account of our understanding of quantification. It depends on addressing certain substantive ontological questions.

Exploring the depths of play: re-calibrating metaphysical descriptions and re-conceptualizing sources of value

This paper has two main parts to it. First, it is an attempt to clarify certain metaphysical issues regarding play. Play scholars from any number of academic disciplines have created a vast body of literature on the topic that seems overwhelming. Therefore, I offer descriptions of four characteristics of play that seem most experientially prominent and most indicative of the many play descriptors that previous authors have used. Second, I make axiological claims that follow from the metaphysical descriptions. I argue against many previous authors, as I assert that play is not different in kind from our normal workaday lives but instead is only different by degree. Play is a deeper engagement with the world than that which we normally experience.

The Argument for Subject Body Dualism from Transtemporal Identity Defended

AbstractIn my argument for subject body dualism criticized by Ludwig I use the locution of a genuine and factual difference between two possibilities. Ludwig distinguishes three interpretations of this locution. According to his analysis the argument does not go through on any of these interpretations. In my response I agree that the argument is unsuccessful if ‘factual difference’ is understood in the first way. The second reading—according to a plausible understanding—cannot be used for the argument either. The discussion of this reading raises fundamental issues about different notions of propositional content. I disagree with Ludwig's diagnosis with respect to the third reading. Contrary to Ludwig's claim, there is no modal error involved if ‘factual difference’ is understood in the third way. Ludwig's objection to the argument according to its third reading can be answered by pointing out that every individual has its identity conditions necessarily. At this point fundamental and general metaphysical issues (concerning the link between identity conditions and the nature of ontological categories and between transworld and transtemporal identity) prove relevant. Finally, I make more explicit how ‘factual difference’ should be understood in the context of the argument (this is a fourth reading not considered by Ludwig) and explain how this reading strengthens the argument (compared to the third reading) by weakening its central premise. I conclude that Ludwig's attempt at undermining the argument from transtemporal identity for subject body dualism is unsuccessful.

What Shall We Do with Analytic Metaphysics? A Response to McLeod and Parsons

We defend our characterization of non-naturalistic metaphysics. Specifically we question McLeod and Parsons's interpretation of the idea of an auxiliary hypothesis. We further argue that our original article does not require that we abandon debate on important metaphysical issues. What it requires is that we reinterpret some metaphysical issues as conceptual analysis rather than ontological investigation.

New work in metaphysics of science

Metaphysics of science is currently a flourishing field of philosophical research touching issues both in metaphysics and in philosophy of science. From the perspective of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, this is a rather surprising development. For as is well known, logical empiricists tended to banish metaphysical questions. Thus, the issue of realism versus anti-realism (or idealism) was classified as a pseudo-problem by Rudolf Carnap in the late 1920s and Ernest Nagel some 30 years later called it a ‘‘conflict over preferred modes of speech.’’ A major step towards the rehabilitation of metaphysical questions within philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general was the development that led to the debate about scientific realism in the 1970s. It seemed to Putnam and others that, without taking into account that scientific terms refer to real entities, philosophy of science is unable to explain how theories can be compared trans-theoretically. At the same time, metaphysical or ontological questions became respectable again in areas such as philosophy of language, which ultimately led to what is now called analytical metaphyics (see Loux and Zimmerman 2003). During this period, philosophical problems that were formerly treated as pertaining exclusively the language of science were transformed into problems about metaphysical issues. Thus, for instance, theories of laws of nature in the 1950s aimed to define the characteristics of laws of nature entirely in terms of the syntactic structure of law statements. From the late 1970s on the question was what it is in the world that

Sport and Art: an Essay in The Hermeneutics of Sport

In this essay I explore the relationship of sport to art. I do not intend to argue that sport is one of the arts. I will rather argue that sport and art have a commonality, in that both are alienated philosophy. This is to propose – in an argument that has its roots in Hegel's aesthetics – that sport and art may both be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, albeit in media that are alien to philosophy's conceptual language. The medium of art is the manipulation of sensuous materials, such as stone, paint, or sound. The medium of sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge, at which the athlete may fail. I will develop this argument by borrowing from the philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto. In particular, I will suggest that a parallel to his concept of ‘artworld’ can be seen in a ‘sportworld’. As the artworld is an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as art, so a sportworld is the atmosphere of theory through which an event is constituted as sport. I will argue that much of the existing discussion of the relationship between sport and art is grounded in an ill-conceived aesthetics. In order to be appreciated and appropriately interpreted, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics and hermeneutics. As such, the core issue of an aesthetics of sport is not that of beauty, but rather of the meaning of the sport, and what I shall call the capacity of sport to ‘speak as a world’ – to bring to consciousness through play the taken-for-granted cultural conditions through which our social lives are constituted, and within which metaphysical and normative problems are articulated. I will propose that the hermeneutics of music provides a useful model for the interpretation of sport.

The Ontological Significance of Constitution

There much to admire in Lynne Baker's (2007) The Metaphysics of Everyday Life, and much that I agree with: particularly the need to defend the existence of ordinary objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones against various forms of eliminativism and reductionism. Given this common orientation, we also fight of the same battles - e.g., against arguments for denying the existence of ordinary objects on grounds of their alleged causal redundancy or violation of constraints of parsimony. Finally, we both agree that the distinction between those objects that and not 'mind-dependent' is, as Baker would put it, not 'ontologically significant': that mind-dependence no grounds for denying the existence of entities like drivers' licenses, works of art, or college degrees, so that in the ontology need not be wholly independent of us (2007, 20). In fact, on most of the major first-order issues in metaphysics, Baker and I in broad agreement.There is, however, a significant area in which we at least seem to disagree: in our metametaphysics, or perhaps more simply put, in how we each see what we doing in making our first-order metaphysical claims. Throughout her new book, Baker often turns to defend what she calls a 'robust' approach to metaphysics, and rejects 'conceptual' or 'linguistic' approaches to metaphysical problems. Accordingly, she has expressed reservations about what she sees as my 'linguistic' approach, writing, e.g. (in her comments on Ordinary Objects): Whereas Thomasson takes metaphysical problems to be dissolved by conceptual analysis and empirical discovery, I'll suggest that we still need good old-fashioned metaphysics. And, linguistic considerations, she writes, are not enough to vindicate our commonsense worldview of ordinary objects. We need a more robust metaphysics.1It true that our approaches differ, at least on the surface: I tend to defuse the arguments against ordinary objects by showing how some of the key arguments against them rely on misuses of words, or on treating certain metaphysical principles as perfectly general which don't apply when the claims involved analytically interrelated. And I argue that the questions of metaphysics answerable straightforwardly by a combination of conceptual and empirical enquiry: questions of what exists answerable by determining what the application conditions for our terms (conceptual analysis) and seeing whether they fulfilled (the empirical part).2 True claims of metaphysical necessity, I have argued (Thomasson 2007b), object-language reflections of rules of use for our terms (or their consequences).Baker, by contrast, appeals to the metaphysical relation of constitution both to explain what ordinary objects and how they related to underlying physical objects, and to explain away various puzzles associated with ordinary objects. Constitution, she writes is a single comprehensive metaphysical relation that unites items at different levels of reality into the objects that we experience in everyday life (Baker 2007, 32); it is the metaphysical glue, so to speak, of the material world (Baker 2007, 177-78). Properly understood, she argues, constitution can provide a theoretical explanation (Baker 2007, 239) of certain facts about entities. It accounts for the unity of a object (Baker 2007, 165) and explains, e.g., why many properties shared by both constituter and constituted (Baker 2007, 39).What I will suggest here that Baker's way of presenting her constitution view as a robust metaphysical discovery of a relation that plays a theoretical-explanatory role opens her up to a line of awkward questions and objections about whether it really does explanatory work or just gives a name to the various problems. These, in fact, some of the objections that have been most repeatedly raised against her account.My project here to examine what happens if we pair Baker's firstorder metaphysical story of constitution with a more deflationary metametaphysical picture. …

Edward Al-Kharrat, a Pioneer of Innovative Narrative Prose Writing: Beginnings

This study deals with the short stories of Edward al-Kharrat (b. 1926) during the early stages of his writing career, which officially began at the end of the 1950s. The article will deal with the atmosphere, the contents and the novel aspects of his writing as reflected in his first three story collections, Hitan aliya (High Walls, 1959), Saat al-kibriyaa (Hours of Pride, 1972) and Mahattat al-sikka al-hadeed (The Train Station, 1955–84), against the background of the changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time, as well as changes that occurred in the concepts and functions of literature and in the strategies of narration. In his move away from traditional narratives that were represented at that time by the novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), al-Kharrat's stories tended more and more to delve into the depths of the soul and to focus on existentialist and metaphysical issues, and, as a result, he was forced into changing his storytelling strategies and reducing external narratives in favor of introspection, dreams and imagination, as well as using language that relied on metaphor and attained a nearly poetic character. All these elements together contributed to convulsing “reality,” which in al-Kharrat's writings became different, discontinuous and unclear.

A Brief Philosophical Encounter with Science and Medicine

We show a lot of respect for science today. To back up our claims, we tend to appeal to scientific methods. It seems that we all agree that these methods are effective for gaining the truth. We can ask why science has its special status as a supplier of knowledge about our external world and our bodies. Of course, one should not always trust what scientists say. Nonetheless, epistemological justification of scientific claims is really a big project for philosophers of science. Philosophers of science are interested in knowing how science proves what it does claim and why it gives us good reasons to take these claims seriously. These questions are epistemological questions. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy which deals with knowledge claims and justification. Besides epistemological questions, metaphysical and ethical issues in science are worthy of philosophical scrutiny. This paper gives a short survey of these intellectually demanding issues.

Misfired Slingshots: A Case Study on the Confusion of Metaphysical and Semantic Considerations

Most philosophers today will acknowledge the pitfalls of confusing metaphysical and semantic issues. Many are also familiar with the classic semi-formal argument that has come to be known as ‘the Slingshot’ and the various philosophical ends to which this argument has been deployed. The combination of the argument’s relatively simple theoretical machinery and its wide range of applications make it ripe for abuse. The slingshot was originally conceived as a semantic argument about designation; what it suggests, but does not prove, is that the closest analogue to singular term reference for any expression is that expression’s semantic extension. In order to derive more metaphysically robust conclusions, however, many classical deployments of the argument make use of several methodologically suspicious tactics. By cataloguing the more frequent abuses of the argument, we may remind ourselves of a valuable philosophical lesson.

Fumbling at Your Soul

Fumbling at Your Soul

Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Spinoza studies revolved almost exclusively around metaphysical issues for centuries. In these last few decades, this situation changed – mainly prompted by French neo-Marxist studies in the 60’s – since there has been recognition of an original political philosophy deeply rooted in Spinoza’s ontology. The TheologicalPolitical Treatise and the later Political Treatise finally began getting the attention they deserved, three hundred years after their original publication. A scholar committed to studying Spinoza’s political philosophy fifty years ago could hardly find supporting literature beyond the usual discussions of the Ethics’ Parts One and Two, whereas today there is a vast available literature, and still growing. In more recent years, however, there seems to have appeared a new literature that neither engages exclusively in metaphysical discussions of the Ethics nor proposes simply to analyse Spinoza’s political tracts. Instead, this growing literature seems mostly concerned with contemporary problems related to radically democratic political theory, but approaches them from the viewpoint of Spinoza’s conceptual groundwork. This can be witnessed in recent work by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Warren Montag, or Moira Gatens. Hasana Sharp’s latest book can be considered a new contribution to this novel trend. Sharp intends to make Spinoza’s naturalism meet its full consequences with regard to human nature, thus opening up a path toward a sort of political ontology of human relations that might be relevant to contemporary feminist theory, antiracist struggles, ecology, and animal studies. She is especially concerned with reconciling two distinct aspects of Spinoza’s naturalism: his rejection of human exceptionalism in nature, which implies that human agency is entirely natural and subject to the exact same natural laws governing all other parts of nature; and his rejection of primitivism, which means that being natural for humans equals what she calls ‘philanthropy’. Her overall argument is expressed in three different points. The first

The early Kant’s (anti-) Newtonianism

It is well known that during his pre-Critical period, Kant was a major proponent of Newtonian physics, for the project of the Universal Natural History explicitly uses “Newtonian principles” to explain the formation of the various bodies that constitute our solar system as well as those that lie beyond. What has not been widely noted, however, is that the early Kant also developed a major criticism of Newton, one that is based on subtle metaphysical issues pertaining to God, which are most at home in philosophical theology. Interestingly, this criticism is neither an inchoate precursor of his later criticisms of Newton’s account of absolute space, nor isolated to the abstract realm of metaphysics, but has a wide range of implications for the way in which a scientific account of the formation and constitution of the heavenly bodies ought to be developed, that is, for the kind of argument Newton offered in the Principia. That Kant remained interested in this set of issues later in his Critical period suggests that, alongside the revolutionary changes that comprise transcendental idealism, there are deep continuities not only in his Newtonian commitments, but in his anti-Newtonian tendencies as well.

How to Lewis a Kripke–Hintikka

It has been argued that a combination of game-theoretic semantics and independence-friendly (IF) languages can provide a novel approach to the conceptual foundations of mathematics and the sciences. I introduce and motivate an IF first-order modal language endowed with a game-theoretic semantics of perfect information. The resulting interpretive independence-friendly logic (IIF) allows to formulate some basic model-theoretic notions that are inexpressible in the ordinary quantified modal logic. Moreover, I argue that some key concepts of Kripke’s new theory of reference are adequately modeled within IIF. Finally, I compare the logic IIF to David Lewis counterpart theory, drawing some morals concerning the interrelation between metaphysical and semantic issues in possible-world semantics.

A Study of Fortinbras as a Metaphysical Tragicomedy with Three Dramatic Devices of Hamlet Appropriated

This paper aims at proving that Lee Blessing’s Fortinbras can be viewed as a metaphysical tragicomedy with three dramatic devices of Hamlet appropriated. The play deals with metaphysical issues such as death, the hereafter, and the moral choices of this life. It also converts a series of tragic events regarding Fortinbras, Osric, and Horatio to a happy ending that their ghosts accept their role or fate and disappear with no vengeance against one another. Furthermore, Blessing combines comicality and seriousness by appropriating three dramatic devices such as a ghost, anachronism, and stage properties from Hamlet. First, nine ghosts in the play contribute to the blending of serious and light moods and reveal philosophical speculations on metaphysical issues. Second, some examples of anachronism of using a television set in which Hamlet’s ghost is confined, a television remote control used by Ophelia’s ghost, and a telescope used by Fortinbras and his ghost are of service to the comicality and seriousness of the play. Third, the stage properties?tapestry(Polonius), chalice(Gertrude), dried flower bouquet(Ophelia), prayer bench(Claudius), and foils(Hamlet and Laertes)?which are appropriated as decor of Fortinbras’s chamber but, in the end, discarded into the moat give the play comicality and seriousness. Therefore, Fortinbras is a noteworthy metaphysical tragicomedy in which three dramatic devices of Hamlet are appropriated brilliantly and humorously.

The Work of the Best and Greatest Artist: A Forgotten Story of Religion, Science, and Stars in the Copernican Revolution

IN 1576 THE ENGLISH ASTRONOMER Thomas Digges (1546-95) published his English translation of Nicholaus Copernicus's (1473-1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium together with a sketch of the Copernican universe under the heading A Perfit description of the Coelestial Orbes (fig. 1). Because Digges's sketch shows the planets circling the Sun, surrounded by an infinite expanse of stars, it is often hailed as a forerunner of the modern, scientific understanding of an infinite universe in which the Earth is but a speck. (1) However, Digges was illustrating not the insignificance of Earth but the greatness of a universe of stars that testified to the omnipotence and magnificence of God. Ideas such as Digges's played a prominent role in Copernican thought, so much so that Copernicans cited Divine Omnipotence to answer one of the most powerful scientific objections to the heliocentric theory. This Copernican use of religion to answer a scientific objection to heliocentrism greatly troubled one of the most prominent defenders of geocentrism, the Italian Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671). The story of Digges, Riccioli, and the stars challenges the modern portrayal of the Copernican Revolution as being a contest of religion versus science: geocentricism versus heliocentrism. It also raises questions about how historians and scientists, and in particular Catholic historians and scientists, could forget such a dynamic part of the history of ideas. Writers today commonly portray a Copernican infinite universe, such as Digges envisioned, as rendering irrelevant human beings or the Earth or even God--usually with reference to Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) being burned at the stake, supposedly for advocating such a universe. Consider, as a very recent example, some quotes from David Wootton's newly published biography of Galileo, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. Galileo was prepared to say that there is no way of telling whether the Universe is finite or infinite. This was dangerous territory. Bruno had argued that the universe was infinite, and that not only were the stars suns, but they were circled by innumerable inhabited planets (a view which would imply innumerable Christs, for each world would need its own saviour). Moreover, it was difficult to see how an infinite universe could be the work of a creator: an infinite universe must surely have existed (as Aristotle claimed) throughout eternity. (2) And later: Indeed [heliocentrism] offered a view of the cosmos in which humankind, and the things that matter to humankind--love and hatred, virtue and vice, mortality and immortality, salvation and damnation--were irrelevant. Far from embodying a scheme of values, far from embodying a telos or purpose, Galileo's universe appeared to be indifferent to moral and metaphysical issues, and even indifferent to our own existence. ... Galileo's greatest and at the same time most disturbing achievement was to recognize that the universe was not made for the sake of human beings, and that it teaches us nothing about right or wrong, and offers us neither salvation nor damnation. (3) The largest illustration in Watcher, aside from the frontispiece portrait of Galileo himself, is Digges's sketch of the infinite Copernican universe. (4) The notion that the vastness of the Copernican cosmos indicates purposelessness and insignificance is so common today as to be cliche. Yet Copernicans apparently were of the mind that the vastness of the universe testified to human beings about the power and magnificence of God. Copernicus himself first connects the vastness of the universe to God. In the Copernican theory, the Earth changes position with respect to the stars as it circles the Sun. That motion should reveal itself in the stars, an effect known to astronomers as annual parallax. Yet no such parallax appears to the naked eye. To Copernicus, this indicates that Earth's motion around the Sun is negligible compared to the distances to the stars, and in those vast distances is seen God's handiwork. …

Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination

Thomas Hobbes's philosophical system rests on the priority and centrality of the body. Not only is this centrality apparent in his texts devoted to physical and metaphysical issues, but also in those parts of his books dedicated to legal and political matters. My contention in this article is that Hobbes's entire writings are haunted by a de facto argument which, short of “demonstrating”, sought at least to “monstrate” a scene of destitution where bodies are produced. His compulsive resort to this argument was not fuelled only by his scientific and metaphysical interests in the collisional tendency of the human body; it was also an inducement of his largely overlooked literary education. In my view, Hobbes political imagination was not only informed by strictly philosophical argument, but also shaped by readings of Greek authors like Thucydides and Homer, and by the Renaissance spectacle of resilient, soulless and agonistic corporality furnished by Kyd, Nashe, Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights.

Breaking the <em>Pax Magisteriorum</em>

Breaking the Pax Magisteriorum:The New War of Science and Religion Horace L. Fairlamb (bio) Western philosophy and religion have co-existed more or less uneasily for over two thousand years, sometimes inspiring each other, sometimes engaging in what some have called warfare. In the modern period, science became faith's most visible rival, occasionally prompting public confrontations such as after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and at the Scopes Trial (1925). In the late 1980s and early 90s, the faith-based attack on Darwin resurfaced with a movement to teach "Intelligent Design" in science classes, sparking a new struggle between the authority of science and religion with fundamentalists on the offensive. With the rise of religious violence culminating in 9/11, however, faith found itself playing defense in the latest round of religion/science polemics. Ironically, the post-9/11 hostilities followed on the heels of Stephen J. Gould's attempt at a rapprochement, his Rocks of Ages (1999), which argued that science and religion ought to be considered "non-overlapping magisteria," i.e., each authoritative in its domain: science concerned with facts and religion concerned with values.1 If Gould had been right, there would have been no common territory between religion and science worth fighting over. But even if 9/11 had not raised the temperature of the science/religion debate, Gould's proposed pax magisteriorum was not to be. As many critics noted, science and religion both assert facts, science is not indifferent to values, and religion is not consistently authoritative on morality. In the face of Gould's irenic proposal, four members of the Reason Project—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett (the neo-rationalists)—entered the fray of public debate on the side of secular reason against the privileges enjoyed by theistic faith. In their wake appeared a burgeoning literature on the public role of religion in a [End Page 251] modern democracy. Not surprisingly, much of the literature has consisted of apologetics by the faithful and skeptics' alarms about fanatical faith. The neo-rationalists cloak themselves in the mantles of reason, argument, and evidence against the irrational excesses of the faithful. Apologists for faith, predictably, tout the virtues of religion and the rationality of believing at least some things without all the evidence in. On closer inspection, however, the intense partisanship seems less like a debate than a duel of dogmatisms, whose conclusions are predetermined either de jure by the current orthodoxies of faith or de facto by the materialist metaphysics that dominates academic philosophy and much secular culture.2 Still, notwithstanding the predictable biases, there is still considerable interest in the muck that is raked along the way. Indeed, because the faithful and their scientistic opponents seem dedicated to overlooking the limits of their own perspectives, a kind of rough adversarial justice is achieved by examining the situation from both sides. The atheists not only highlight religion's dangers but also suggest some of the social and psychological causes of fanatical excess. Conversely, because the skeptics are tone deaf to metaphysical thinking, one learns less from their dismissals of theological argument than from those who consider them in historical and philosophical depth. In the end, as one would expect, real progress lies with approaches that are not predetermined one way or the other. Significantly, where polemicists are typically preoccupied with justifying or condemning supernaturalism, the more promising reconstructions of the science/religion issue focus on 1) the personal-transformational and social significance of religion (while acknowledging the pathologies) and 2) the metaphysical issues that are raised by the science of evolution. In what follows, I will discuss some of the more high profile members of the contemporary conversation on faith and reason, not to summarize the many views, but to point out certain salient features of the debate itself and on the possibilities of further clarification of the science/religion relationship. I will first focus on the two sides of the debate and their polemical effects, and then consider several non-partisan voices in order to bring some wider considerations into view. [End Page 252] War's Collateral Benefits Polemics serve to focus...

Naturalizing Intentionality between Philosophy and Brain Science. A Survey of Methodological and Metaphysical Issues (1969-2011)

To give an account of intentionality in terms of the concepts and methods of natural science has been considered as a crucial step towards a naturalization of mental phenomena in general, and as such it has been pursued by a large number of naturalist philosophers and cognitive scientists. Starting from the late 1960s the problem has been addressed in very different, reductionist (Dennett, Millikan: § 2) and antireductionist ways (e.g. Searle, Chalmers, Putnam: § 3). The development of these philosophical programs has benefited from the contemporary technical and theoretical progresses of neuroscience, and leading scientists such as Changeux, Edelman and Damasio have presented articulated proposals of naturalization of intentionality (§ 4). A common element of philosophical investigations turns out to be the reference to a still undeveloped neuroscientific theory. This reference belongs to the legacy of early XXth century anti-metaphysical “scientific philosophy”. In spite of this dominant philosophical a...

The Work of the Best and Greatest Artist: A Forgotten Story of Religion, Science, and Stars in the Copernican Revolution

The Work of the Best and Greatest ArtistA Forgotten Story of Religion, Science, and Stars in the Copernican Revolution Christopher M. Graney (bio) In 1576 the English astronomer Thomas Digges (1546–95) published his English translation of Nicholaus Copernicus’s (1473– 1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium together with a sketch of the Copernican universe under the heading “A Perfit description of the Cœlestial Orbes” (fig. 1). Because Digges’s sketch shows the planets circling the Sun, surrounded by an infinite expanse of stars, it is often hailed as a forerunner of the modern, scientific understanding of an infinite universe in which the Earth is but a speck.1 However, Digges was illustrating not the insignificance of Earth but the greatness of a universe of stars that testified to the omnipotence and magnificence of God. Ideas such as Digges’s played a prominent role in Copernican thought, so much so that Copernicans cited Divine Omnipotence to answer one of the most powerful scientific objections to the heliocentric theory. This Copernican use of religion to answer a scientific objection to heliocentrism greatly troubled one of the most prominent defenders of geocentrism, the Italian Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671). The story of Digges, Riccioli, and the stars challenges the modern portrayal of the Copernican Revolution as being a contest of religion [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Thomas Digges’s representation of an infinite Copernican universe. [End Page 98] versus science: geocentricism versus heliocentrism. It also raises questions about how historians and scientists, and in particular Catholic historians and scientists, could forget such a dynamic part of the history of ideas. Writers today commonly portray a Copernican infinite universe, such as Digges envisioned, as rendering irrelevant human beings or the Earth or even God—usually with reference to Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) being burned at the stake, supposedly for advocating such a universe. Consider, as a very recent example, some quotes from David Wootton’s newly published biography of Galileo, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. Galileo was prepared to say that there is no way of telling whether the Universe is finite or infinite. This was dangerous territory. Bruno had argued that the universe was infinite, and that not only were the stars suns, but they were circled by innumerable inhabited planets (a view which would imply innumerable Christs, for each world would need its own saviour). Moreover, it was difficult to see how an infinite universe could be the work of a creator: an infinite universe must surely have existed (as Aristotle claimed) throughout eternity.2 And later: Indeed [heliocentrism] offered a view of the cosmos in which humankind, and the things that matter to humankind—love and hatred, virtue and vice, mortality and immortality, salvation and damnation—were irrelevant. Far from embodying a scheme of values, far from embodying a telos or purpose, Galileo’s universe appeared to be indifferent to moral and metaphysical issues, and even indifferent to our own existence. . . . Galileo’s greatest and at the same time most disturbing achievement was to recognize that the universe was not made for the sake of human beings, and that it teaches us nothing about right or wrong, and offers us neither salvation nor damnation.3 [End Page 99] The largest illustration in Watcher, aside from the frontispiece portrait of Galileo himself, is Digges’s sketch of the infinite Copernican universe.4 The notion that the vastness of the Copernican cosmos indicates purposelessness and insignificance is so common today as to be cliché. Yet Copernicans apparently were of the mind that the vastness of the universe testified to human beings about the power and magnificence of God. Copernicus himself first connects the vastness of the universe to God. In the Copernican theory, the Earth changes position with respect to the stars as it circles the Sun. That motion should reveal itself in the stars, an effect known to astronomers as “annual parallax.” Yet no such parallax appears to the naked eye. To Copernicus, this indicates that Earth’s motion around the Sun is negligible compared to the distances to the stars, and in those vast distances is seen God...