The 17th century continued the trend in natural philosophy that has been set by experimental science. In this it owes a debt of gratitude to Galileo Galilei and his work on the fundamentals of motion. William Gilbert (Magnetism), Johannes Kepler (Planetary Motion) and William Harvey (Blood circulation) continued in this spirit as the older classical view of Aristotle began to crumble in the face of empiricism.
In his book the Advancement of Learning (1605) Francis Bacon emphasized the relevance of the Scientific Method, materialism as a philosophy and practical science. Experimentation and observation were key to Bacon and he stressed the notion of a solid first Hypothesis. The phrase “Knowledge is Power” is often credited to him.
Francis Bacon source: biography.com
Isaac Newton used such methodology in formulating his Three
Laws of motion, the Law of Universal Gravitation and his understanding of the
Dispersion of light. Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek continued
in this tradition.
At the same time the notion of Scientific Determinism became
more prevalent. The world appeared to be a mechanical universe driven by innate
laws and functioning as a system in motion. Thomas Hobbes saw this interlock
and extended the concept to the relationship between politics and the citizen.
Civil society necessitated order and mechanistic functioning as outlined in his
work Leviathan.
Thomas Hobbes source: linkedin.com
Rene Descartes was arguably the most important 17th century philosopher and is often viewed as the father of Modern Philosophy. In mathematics Descartes is associated with the establishment of co-ordinate geometry however his contribution to philosophy is immense. Descartes believed that True Knowledge must come from Human Reason alone. He outlined four rules that emerge from the concept of Cartesian doubt. These are:
·
Never accept anything except clear and distinct
ideas
·
Divide each problem into as many parts as are
needed to solve it (Cartesian reductionism)
·
Order your thoughts from the simple to the
complex
·
Always check thoroughly for oversights
Rene Descartes - Father of Cartestian Reductionism
Using an extreme form of skeptics he doubted all certainty
of knowledge other than the working of his own mind and then concluded that
Cogito Ergo Sum – I think, therefore I am is the First Principle of Philosophy.
From this base he constructed a framework for knowledge.
Descartes’ ideas are outlined in his two great works – Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1642). He believed that the
essence of being was thinking and argued that all knowledge of external things
is in the mind. In his worldview the
mind and body/matter were separate – a
philosophy known as Dualism. He believed that thought had its own motion and
was distinct from the ‘thing’. Like other philosophers of this era he saw the
human body as a mechanical device.
Baruch Spinoza was a leading rationalist figure of the 17th
century who worked to construct a geometry of philosophy. He saw all of the
world as interconnected and aimed to show how one could use mathematics to live
a good and moral life. However he was not dualistic and saw God and the cosmos
as one. For him mind and matter were one in the same. Although he is seen as a
leading pantheist thinker he rejected the mysticism of such belief in favour of
a unifying principle operating along scientific constraints.
Baruch Spinoza source: the culturetrip.com
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who co-founded the calculus with
Isaac Newton argued for a different model. He believed that there was not one
substance to all that there is (Spinoza’s principle) but an infinity of very
small substances called Monads. The monads he argued acted as one as a result
of a pre-established divine harmony. Leibniz was a prolific writer whose
thinking took him into symbolic language, logic, history and jurisprudence. He
advanced the “principle of the best” arguing that the world we live in is the
best possible world. Later on this idea was ridiculed by Voltaire in his work Candide.
Gottfried Leibniz source: spectrum.ieee.org
We Have already discussed John Locke with respect to his
writings on Liberal democracy however the Englishman also introduced the notion
of the Blank Slate in philosophy (Tabula Rasa). Locke argued for the centrality
of experience and was a leading thinking in the Empiricist movement. In Locke’s
view children are born with a clean slate or mind – acquire knowledge through
sensation to form simple ideas that are then built up to form more complex
ideas. He also distinguished between primary and secondary. Primary qualities
are innate to an object (eg. Texture, size). Secondary qualities produce ideas
in the mind regarding the object that extend beyond the object.
source: tes.com
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