"Science and the Scientific Method"

Points out that the scientific method involves both the "empirical" and the "deductive." This will need comment -- and illustration as we work through some of the major figures discussed in this chapter. To be emphasized: the debate over the "correct" combination of the two approaches -- indeed, over the philosophical justification for any such combination -- remains a major contemporary issue in philosophy of science

--> "arch of knowledge," realism/instrumentalism discussion

Recall that it was Francis who we associate with the transformation of the attitude towards nature in Christendom -- an attitude later apparent in the figures Jones mentions, i.e., Chaucer and Petrarch (recall P's description of climbing Mont Venoux, p. 35).

As well, the role of Humanism is complex: on the one hand, it helps bring about the revival of ancient texts -- and thereby:

a) rejection of authority of Bible and Church fathers;

b) as a by-product of revival, interest in nature.

Early example of "empirical spirit" -- the medical schools of northern Italy: While initially relying on Arabian and Greek texts, "By the fifteenth century, the method and point of view of the anatomists was utterly different from the combination of rationalism and authoritarianism taught by the Scholastics."(69)

--> Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

The maxims that Jones has picked out certainly emphasize the "modern" feeling of Leonardo -- including the origin of knowledge in perceptions, emphasis on experience, repeating tests, etc.:
 

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects not caused by your experiments.

Mechanics are the Paradise of mathematical science, because here we come to the fruits of mathematics.

There is no certainty in sciences where one of the mathematical sciences cannot be applied, or which are not in relation with these mathematics.

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going. (70)

a) the "novel" character of da Vinci's insistence that the rational structure of the universe is somehow to be gotten at through mathematics is by no means so novel -- it harks back to the earliest PreSocratics, and is apparent in the work of the Franciscans: see notes on history of early modern science, especially regarding:

Roger Bacon (1214-1294);

Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464);

Alberti (1404-1472) - "the first real man of science," because of his experimental discovery in 1450 of the elementary mathematical laws of perspective.

b) we have to be careful at reading into da Vinci a modern conception of scientific method -- see comments on da Vinci in: Blake, Ralph M., Curt J. Ducasse, and Edward H. Madden. Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1960.

William Gilbert (1544-1603)

His great study, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, (1600) contains the same more or less unconscious presuppositions that underlay Leonardo's more varied activities....first, that natural knowledge is possible -- that is, that there are uniformities in nature that close observation, coupled with "experiment," will reveal. There is the assumption, second, that this natural knowledge can be put to use - specifically, that it could be used effectively in the new power systems that the conditions of life were creating in Gilbert's time. It is no accident that, in an age when colonization of the New World was just beginning, Gilbert should have emphasized the application of his new scientific knowledge of the magnet to the improvement of the compass, the determination of latitude, and other navigational aids. (71)

--> observation from Margaret Jacob regarding the strategy of "selling" the new science to newly-created classes on the basis of its utility.

This "propogandistic" dimension of the new science can be seen in the way Gilbert establishes the superiority of his own knowledge over that of the ancients:

Many have ... wasted oil and labor, because, not being practical in the research of objects in nature, being acquainted only with books, being led astray by certain erroneous physical systems, and having made no magnetical experiments, they constructed certain ratiocinations on a basis of mere opinions, and old-womanishly dreamt the things that were not....(72)

(Also notice the anti-female flavor of this!)

Good summary:

His work helped to bring the earth down to scale, to show that it is a natural object among others, and to demonstrate the pervasiveness and simplicity of natural law (that there is, for instance, a behavior pattern common to things as different in shape, size, and general appearance as the earth and a loadstone). But more important than Gilbert's conclusions was the method by which he reached them. He was scrupulous in describing everything he did in such a way that it would be possible for others to check his findings....His work was one of the first attempts to use experiment, not merely to illustrate conclusions already reached by other means, but to test hypotheses and so to extend knowledge. (73)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

...one of the earliest publicists for science. He wished to "sell" it, and his point of view was characteristically modern, pragmatic, and utilitarian. "Knowledge is power" was his recurrent theme, the knowledge in question being, of course, natural knowledge. He was poles apart from the medieval view, both in his conception of man's end and in his conception of the means to achieve it. (73)

Born "in the full tide of the English Renaissance."

Several quotes provided in Jones (74-75) which illustrate the utilitarian conception of knowledge. And this utilitarian conception, as Jones points out, is tightly bound to "the new man" of the Renaissance, "...a man whose dominant motive was power and the good things of this life that power brings in its train. What distinguished Bacon from Caesar Borgia or Louis XI or Machiavelli was his discovery that science is a road to power." (75)

[It is to be stressed here how this view, while so familiar to us as to be "intuitively obvious," nonetheless sharply contrasts with the ancient and classical attitudes towards such knowledge as valuable in its own sake.]

THE "GREAT INSTAURATION"

-- a "total reconstruction of the sciences, arts and all human knowledge." Assumes:

virtually everything that had so far passed for knowledge was error (otherwise there would be no need for total reconstruction);

the mind is an adequate instrument for obtaining knowledge (otherwise there would be no possibility of such a reform).

Bacon must explain the apparent contradiction between the first and second claim --> the four idols.

Moreover, note the empiricist (Anglo-American) epistemology:

Originally, the mind was "like a fair sheet of paper with no writing on it," or (in another metaphor) "like a mirror with a true and even surface fit to reflect the genuine way of things." (76)

As Jones points out, there is here a clearly Christian flavor to his epistemology: the mind in its original state is perfectly adequate -- but in its present, fallen state it has become inadequate. (Comment on the difficulty of in fact starting de novo. In addition, note Jone's observation that the clear call to a return to some putatively purer and truer original state parallels the Protestant upheavals, resulting in what he calls a kind of "epistemological Protestantism" -- and, I would add, the similar "Humanist" "reformation" apparent in folk like Machiavelli, etc.)

In any case, Jones is also correct to point out that

...Bacon's account of the knowledge situation was mistaken. His metaphors about the smooth, even surface and the fair sheet of paper sound plausible, but a mind empty of all preconceptions would be as incapable of getting at the facts as a baby's, for it would be helpless to organize and interpret the experiences before it.(76)

That is, as we shall see, the modern period will also discover idealism, the recogntion of the critical role played by the mind in the construction of knowledge.

BACON'S ATTACK ON MEDIEVAL SCIENCE

Jones points out, correctly, that Bacon criticizes a Scholasticism which stresses the deductive side of the arch of knowledge -- i.e., movement from a major, general premise to a particular conclusion. And, as Bacon noted, the critical question is whether or not the major premise fits the facts in some important way.

What needs not to be lost here, however, is that this is an overly simple picture of Medieval/Aristotelian science -- a straw man, essentially (like other modern straw men created by the moderns for the sake of easy demolition of the medievals and scholastics -- e.g.,the angels on the head of a pin issue).

In this instance, it should be pointed out that Aristotle, in particular, saw himself as moving from Plato's general ideas to a form/matter metaphysics which better preserved the particular -- and, indeed, Aristotle himself stressed the importance of observation of particulars as a means of achieving general claims. In fact, Aristotle was acutely aware of the problem of the first principles, as he put it -- i.e., how to achieve certainty regarding these first principles. To omit these observations is hence to present a too one-sided picture of Aristotle.

In any case, Bacon does offer an interesting and useful analysis of the sources of error in the sciences -- the four idols of the mind.

Notice how this is modern: there is a principle interest on epistemology, on developing the correct method for achieving correct knowledge.

(A certain irony in his description of the Idols of the Cave, idols of the individual man -- including "his education and conversation with others," "the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires..." (Jones, 78) -- and yet he goes on in this paragraph to quote Heraclitus in support of his claims!)

The discussion of idols is simply negative: as a positive step in the construction of knowledge, his "inductive method," which seems to primarily involve collecting tables of particular claims, facts, e.g.:
 

Table of Essence and Presence;

Table of Deviation, or of Absence in Proximity;

Table of Degrees, or the Table of Comparison;

Process of Exclusion;

Indulgence of the Understanding, or the Commencement of Interpretation, or the First Vintage -- which Jones characterizes as "a preliminary hypothesis, or guess, as to what the causal factor in question is."

Verification (84)

Jones' comment on Bacon's method:
 

As one reads through this analysis of the nature of heat, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the whole proceeding has been "cooked up" -- that the tables were constructed to fit the hypothesis rather than that the hypothesis grew out of the tables. It is hard to believe that any reasonable hypothesis could ever emerge from thejungle of assorted cases presented in the Table of Essence and Presence, and certainly no real-life scientist has used tables like Bacon's, nor has any important scientific law been brought to light by Baconian induction.

....The first thing that was wrong was simply Bacon's assumption, already mentioned, that the mind is like a mirror, needing only to be made even and smooth to present us with a perfect reflection of external reality. With his thinking about method dominated by this analogy, it was inevitable that Bacon would oversimplify the technique of reaching hypotheses, making it appear that an hypothesis leaps to mind fully blown from a mere inspection of enough assorted facts. But this puts the cart before the horse: We cannot collect facts that will be of much use unless we have some sort of hypothesis already formed. It is clear that Bacon entirely neglected to consider the role of hypothesis in directing the search for facts and in determining what experiments are tried. (85)

In addition, Bacon fails to make a complete break with the past -- as Jones points out, he retains from Scholasticism the concept of substance -- the material version of the universal. In short, Bacon does not manage to call into question the basic goal of Scholastic (and ancient) science -- namely, to learn the unifying underlying reality that defines all particulars as members of a specific genus or class; nor does he call into question this basic metaphysics/epistemology which explains our knowledge of things qua members of a particular class in terms of real substances as corresponding to universal concepts.

IT'S HARD TO BE RADICAL, MAN!

What will gradually emerge, instead, is that "the new method" (whatever that is) is "competent to reveal about the world...something altogether different from natures. What it could discover was relations (spatial or temporal) between various occurences." (86)

What Jones seems to have in mind here is at least correlation between events -- a correlation which we will see some, at least initially, claim to indicate mechanical or efficient causality.

In other terms:
 

...Bacon proposed to use the new method to discover the natures whose reality the old metaphysics had assumed, but the new method actually implied an altogether different conception of reality -- it implied that the real constituent entities of the universe are not natures at all, but events. (87)

As he points out that one's theory of knowledge (epistemology) and theory of reality (metaphysics) are always correlative, he is able to make the point that Bacon's epistemology is modern -- but he remains trapped with a medieval/ancient metaphysics.

Jones is also good at illustrating the limitation of Bacon's excessive emphasis on particulars gained through sense perception. On Bacon's own showing, this will result in a collection of true statements, a knowledge of nature, but not in a science of nature:

Science, he held, is more than a simple collection, or assortment, of true propositions; it must be a cohesive body of knowledge. That is, there must be a rationale that connects the propositions to one another, a rationale by which one moves, at the propositional level, by logical sequences (all the while, of course, making sure by inductive means that the facts correspond to the propositions in question). But though Bacon described this ideal and vividly painted its utility, he did not fashion an instrument for attaining it. (87)

That is, I take it, Bacon fails to answer the ancient problem: how to move from particulars to the generals/universals. This will, of course, remain a central problem for the (Anglo-American) empiricists.

"The Mathematical Spirit"

Jones comments on his example of quantitative information, the middle section of a procedure exemplifying scientific method:

We are therefore dealing not with empirical things but with abstractions whose relations are certified by the "laws of combination" (addition, division, multiplication, and so forth) that hold in arithmetic....It is "pure" mathematics, and it has the certainty of any purely mathematical knowledge. Its relevance depends, of course, on the empirical phases at the beginning and the end -- the accuracy with which we have observed and measured. (90)

It is, moreover, the quantitative, middle section that is missing in Bacon's account:

...with the concentration of attention of relevance [of concepts to facts], logical cohesion suffered; in rejecting the irrelevant rationalism of medieval science [irrelevant in the sense that, on Jones' view, it emphasized logical coherency at the cost of attention to correspondance between "facts" and its general propositions], there was a tendency to throw out all rationalistic elements." (90)

Bacon himself claims to have achieved the "lawful marriage" between the empirical and the rational -- but subsequent judgment is that he failed to do so: "The rational structure of the new science was to be provided, not by a syllogistic, but by a mathematical logic." (91)

Jones sees this going on on "the Continent": Mathematics was the instrument by which the marriage of fact and deduction was at last effected....the consequences of this marriage were so fundamental that three hundred years later we are still far from understanding all its implications." (91)

COPERNICUS (1473-1543)

Quotes Pythagoreans and others in support of his view --> comment on the importance of revival of Greek texts.

-- include Jones' observation that
 

the Neoplatonic and Pythagorean revival, whether or not it actually suggested the idea to Copernicus, created a climate of opinion in which it was natural to believe that the universe runs in accordance with simple mathematical principles. The grafting of Pythagoreanism onto Christianity resulted in the concept of an omnipotent creator god who was an omniscient mathematician -- exactly the kind of view that would lead to the mathematical study of nature. It is one of the more pleasant ironies of history that the driving force behind the development of the new physics and astronomy was a semimystical religion. (93)

Again:

1) recall earlier, Roger Bacon's (Franciscan?) view, assuming the mathematical character of god's creation, and

2) --> comment on the presence of this image of God in late Jewish Scripture -- Scripture written precisely under the influence of Neoplatonism in Alexandria!

--------------------------------

Alexandria is also a Jewish center. And Greek culture is having an impact on the development of Jewish thought. For example, parts of the Hebrew Scriptures are translated into Greek (the common language of the Hellenistic world) by 250 B.C.E. And Singer attributes this Greek contact with "rationalizing" the Hebrew view of nature:

Thus, while earlier biblical literature contains many references to divine intervention in the course of nature, the Wisdom Literature of Alexandrian date equate natural law with divine ordinance....[And] the new astrological science coming in from Babylon suggested the complex mathematical order of the heavenly bodies, which signalled the seasons, as controlling the seasons and through them men's lives. (69)

This influences not only the Stoics, but also appears (in negative form) in Wisdom of Solomon 13.1-2

On the same topic,

The influence of Greek science can similarly be traced into the domain of Hebrew physiological conceptions. Thus, for instance, the seat of the understanding throughout the Wisdom Literature -- which is Alexandrian -- is usually placed in the heart. This is Aristotelian and contrary to Herophilus and Erasistratus who placed the seat of intelligence in the brain. It is also opposed to the older Hebrew view (e.g., Psalm 61.7) which placed it in the liver. In several places, too, Wisdom Literature, as well as the New Testament writings (e.g. 2 Peter 3.10, Galatians 4.8-9) set forth the Greek doctrine of the four elements. And lastly from the melting-pot of pre-Christian Alexandria emerged the homunculus of European alchemy. (69)

--------------------------------------

As Jones points out, "Given this notion of a divine mathematician, criticism of the Ptolemaic scheme was inevitable. Even a fallible human mathematician would hardly stoop to designing a planetary system that involved seventy-nine epicycles and in which, even so, motion was not absolutely uniform." (93) In other terms, the Ptolemaic scheme seemed unattractive because it failed to meet the test of simplicity presented by Ockham's razor.

As Copernicus himself comments:

We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, a kind it is not possible to obtain in any other way. (Jones, 94, quoting E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science [Kegan Paul, London, 1925], p. 38; and W.C.D. and M.D. Whetham, Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Science [Cambridge University Press, 1928], p. 13)

TYCHO BRAHE (1546-1601)

Rejected the heliocentric theory, but is noted for improving astronomical instruments and developing a body of careful observations "that provided the empirical data without which further progress would have been impossible." (94)

--> Kepler (1571-1630)

While Kepler announced his adherence to the Christian (indeed, Lutheran) tradition -- he was further moved, as Jones notes, by

a Pythagorean mysticism that convinced him that God had created the universe in accordance with certain simple mathematical harmonies. This conviction gave him the fortitude to see the failure of one formula after another without giving up hope that there was a formula to be found. But it was a very great mathematical imagination that suggested the formulas to Kepler, and it was a very high order of mathematical competence that enabled him to test them. (95)

--> comment on a similar point Jones makes regarding scientific method: the necessity of having a hypothesis before collecting data. Kepler was convinced, and on religious grounds, that a simple mathematical order underlay the universe -- and hence the search for this order "made sense," even in the face of the failure of a particular attempt at articulating this order. Again, this basic assumption goes back to the very beginning of philosophy/science in the West -- indeed, to the Indo-European myth that presupposes an order which stands even above the Gods/goddesses.

Three laws of planetary motion:

1. elliptical orbits -- contra the classical/medieval assumption of circularity as the simplest and hence most perfect motion;

2. proportionality between area "swept out" by orbit and time spent traveling the arc of the orbit defining that area;

3. the proportionality between squares of periodic times/cubes of the mean distances, i.e. t² = d³

"An immense achievement," the three laws depend upon:

1) the framing of hypotheses, and

2) the mathematization of the data that confirm or disconfirm them.

As Jones points out, however, these laws stand only as independent generalizations: "They are not connected by any rationale; thus they cannot be demonstrated, that is, derived logically from the same basic principles [i.e., derived deductively from what Aristotle would call first principles]." (98)

This is what makes Galileo's work so decisive --it apparently provides "the rationale that makes it possible to organize a number of separate empirical truths into a deductive and demonstrative structure." (98) In our terms, modern science retains, despite its overt rejection of ancient and classical claims to knowledge, the basic structure of knowledge as an "arch" or circle moving ("inductively") from particular to general/first principles ("deductively") to particulars.

For that, as we shall see with Galileo, the kind of deduction from first principles is now of a different kind -- a mathematical style of deduction in contrast with the set-oriented deduction of the classical syllogism.

GALILEO (1564-1642)

Jones discusses his discovery of the satellites of Jupiter -- a discovery that tremendously excited Kepler. But Jones oversimplifies the basis of opposition to Galileo's work on the part of the Church.

1) He's probably correct to point out that opposition was based in part on the fact that Galileo's critics "lived in an intellectual world in which the primary fact about things was not simply that they are, but rather that they symbolize those sacerdotal meanings that were the fundamental realities of the religious man's experience." (101)

But it is more complicated.

2) First of all, the issue here is not a simple "Galileo the empiricist vs. the ideologically hide-bound Church." That is, it is not so much that Galileo's use of the telescope provides new empirical data; it certainly does this -- but, as Jones will later point out, much of Galileo's work depends on what the historian Alexander Koyre calls Galileo's Platonism:

As Oldroyd says: "In his empirical investigations, Galileo saw that it was necessary to abstract from the great mass of data that may be collected by the senses and focus attention on just a few factors - specifically those that could be described in mathematical terms." (51)

Remember here as well that this focus on mathematics reflects the publication (1543) of Archimedes' work [whose focus is not on real bodies, "but on geometrical bodies sailing away in Euclidean space,"] - as well as the work of the Parisian mechanist school that stretches back through Leonardo (see "Leonardo Da Vinci on the Method of Science," in Blake, Ralph M., Curt J. Ducasse, and Edward H. Madden, Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century) and to the Franciscans Ockham and Roger Bacon (see class handout, "The Origins of Modern Science: the Early Modern Period, 1150-1600.")

This also means, as Oldroyd puts it, that "...Galileo's falling bodies were, so to speak, 'mathematical' entities, moving in 'mathematical' space. All their attibutes (such as colour, smell, weight, etc) were disregarded (for the purpose of the experiment on falling bodies), and attention was focused solely on position and time. So in a sense Galileo was no longer dealing with real bodies moving in real space, but with 'mathematical fictions.' Consequently, by means of an abstract mathematical analysis of the problem he could indeed envisage the book of nature as having been writing in mathematical terms; and in this sense one can understand why Koyre described Galileo as a Platonist."(58)

This means, however, only that Galileo was indebted to Plato only for the (originally Pythagorean) assumption that the world ultimately is mathematical in character, and that this mathematical character represents an abstraction from sense qualities. And this fits with the other ancient roots (Pythagoras, Neoplatonism) we see, for example, in Copernicus and Kepler. Because Galileo, as Oldroyd points out, attempted to connect (Pythagorean-Platonic) mathematical models to the (sensory) world by way of experiment, he is not simply a "neo-neo-Platonist."

3) Finally, as I have suggested before, at least one contemporary historian argues that the primary opposition to Galileo from within the Church came from within a particular faction of the Church -- not the Church as such -- namely, the Aristotelians who saw themselves attacked both within the Church by the Christian Humanists who criticized the medieval/Aristotelian tradition, and from without the Church by secular Humanists, Reformationist, etc. who intended to dismantle the medieval/Aristotelian tradition altogether. Galileo, however unintentionally, provided powerful support for those factions -- and hence represented a critical danger.

See Redondi, Galileo: Heretic.

Hauled before the Inquisition a second time in 1632, after the publication of his Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World.

--> Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences

"The fundamental thesis was that, just as there is a simple pattern underlying the motion of the planets (as Copernicus and Kepler had found), so there is a pattern of uniformity in various phases of local motion here on the earth." (103)

In particular,

the general assumption of a rationale underlying the behavior of bodies has become a specific assumption that this rationale is geometric in character. Now, geometry is a deductive science, a system of theorems logically derivable from the axioms and definitions that are its starting point....Galileo held that, since there is a correspondence between the geometric axioms and empirically observable properties of moving bodies, the theorems deduced from these axioms apply to the empirical facts of motion. This means that physics can be an exact science: There is an explanation, geometrical in character, of the regularities observed and used by the ingenious artisans in the Venetian arsenal. (104)

In still other terms, Galileo must abstract from the particular characteristics of a particular moving body -- to create, in a sense, an idealized -- and mathematicizable -- representation of the body as such. It is at this point that he is "Platonist" in sense discussed by Koyre.

As Jones puts it:

As long as one merely observes moving bodies (no matter how carefully), one will never see any correspondence between moving bodies and those relations with which geometry is concerned. But if one is prepared to ignore the material the moving objects are made of; if one is prepared to ignore whether they are handsome or ugly,shining or dull; if, in short, one is prepared to ignore everything about the empirically observed motion except its velocity, one can arrive at properties that lend themselves to geometrical representation. And because such properties are capable of geometrical representation, the application of geometrical theorems to the behavior of physical things becomes possible. (105; cf. the comment above re. Archimedes, p. , etc.)

Note further that Galileo's "geometric reasoning" is different in kind from syllogistic reasoning, which rests on relationships between classes and subclasses:

Hence it can be said that, while the empirical spirit was reforming the notion of relevance, the mathematical spirit was expanding the notion of validity. The result was a new method capable, or so it seemed to its first users, of disclosing all the secrets of nature. (107)

It is also the case, however, that this new method at best allows for a description of behavior -- not of discerning possible causes (whether final or efficient) of behavior (Jones, 108)

THE PROBLEM OF EMPIRICAL VERIFICATION

Verification (not, as in Popper's 20th ct. approach, falsification) is a problem: it requires constructing "a situation in which it is possible to observe whatever it is that one needs to observe in order to verify (or disverify) the hypothesis," -- i.e., a controlled experiment. But further notice, as Jones rightly emphasizes, that this experimental stage would be impossible "without a guiding hypothesis furnished by logical analysis" available ahead of the stage of collecting experimental data:

If Galileo had not already had an hypothesis that he wanted to check, it would never have occurred to him to set up his inclined plane and roll balls down it....Before the movement of the ball down the inclined plane could be significant, Galileo had to know what he was looking for. This suggests that one of the differences between mere observation and experiment is that in the latter we observe only after we have constructed a situation with a particular hypothesis in mind. (111)

THE NEW SCIENCE AND THE NEW PHILOSOPHY

Jones sees that "as soon as the new scientific method was formulated, metaphysical speculation began again on a grand scale. The new science acted as a stimulus to philosophy because the new ideal of knowledge entailed a new conception of reality, a new metaphysics; and this novel conception of the nature of things was at once seen to be the pivot around which a new synthesis would emerge." (114f.)

Scientific Concept of Reality -- extended matter, whose quantitative characteristics (dimension, weight, motion) were measured in physics, such that

the results of these measurements showed that its behavior conformed to simple mathematical "laws." For the qualitative and teleological conception of nature with which men of the Middle Ages had operated, there was thus substituted a quantitative and mechanical one. (115)

--> two problems:
 

1) what happens to God, freedom, immortal soul -- in a mechanistic, material, determined universe?

--> initial dualisms (Descartes --> Spinoza) attempting to hold together both modern ontology and ancient/medieval ethics.

2) similar problem: the ontological status and relationship between "the sensuous world of colors, smells, tastes, and sounds" to the primary (if not exclusive) ontological reality of matter in motion?

--> sharp distinction between "objective" physical properties and "subjective" appearances -- a distinction clearly parallel to earlier Thomistic and Platonic ontologies. But this leads to the same denigration of the sense world that is often objected to by moderns in some strands of Christianity and Neoplatonism (not Plato, thank you very much!)

Selected Bibliography

Blake, Ralph M., Curt J. Ducasse, and Edward H. Madden. Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1960.

Bronowski, J. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973.

Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. [?]

Cohen, I. Bernard. Album of Science: From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450-1800. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980.

Crombie, A.C. Augustine to Galileo, Vols I and II. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1959.

Crombie, A.C. Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Daumas, Maurice. B. T. Batsford, trans. Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Praeger, 1972.

Gillispie, C.C., ed. Concise Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York, 1981

Kockelmans, Joseph J. Philosophy of Science: The Historical Background. New York: Free Press, 1968.

Lindberg, David C. and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Lloyd, G.E.R. Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. Chatto & Windus, 1970.

Morrison, Philip and Phylis. The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know. New York: Random House, 1987.

Neugebauer, O. The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Oldroyd, David. The Arch of Knowledge: An Introductory Study of the History of the Philosophy and Methodology of Science. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Redondi, Pietro. Galileo: Heretic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Singer, Charles, E. J. Holmyard, and A.R. Hall. A History of Technology. Oxford, 1954.

Singer, Peter. A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

Smith, Cyril Stanley. A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History. MIT Press, 1981.