Lesson 5: The New Philosophers
This chapter discusses the philosophical and scientific innovators of the early seventeenth century, including Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes.
Introduction
The seventeenth century has been called the century of genius in the history of European philosophy. Certainly in the history of science a century that starts with Galileo Galilei and ends with Isaac Newton has a strong claim to the title!
The early part of the century was particularly marked by several natural philosophers, working independently of each other, who transformed the European understanding of enquiry into the natural world. Leaders among this group included the Englishman Francis Bacon, the Italian Galileo, and the Frenchman Rene Descartes.
Vastly different though they were, they had some things in common. All were proudly anti-Aristotelian. All were conscious intellectual revolutionaries. Unlike the humanists of the sixteenth century, all saw themselves as bringing forth new knowledge rather than reviving the hidden wisdom of the ancients. All claimed to distrust things taken on authority, and emphasized the responsibility of natural philosophers to find things out for themselves. All wrote in their vernacular language as well as Latin, encouraging a broadening of the audience for natural philosophy.
Descartes, Galileo, the atomist Pierre Gassendi, and a host of lesser figures (but not Bacon) had another thing in common as well – they were "mechanical philosophers." Mechanical philosophers treated the actions of matter in terms of contact with other matter. They distrusted the Aristotelian idea that rocks fall and smoke rises because they seek their "natural place" as requiring matter to have intention.
Mechanical philosophers denied that one piece of matter could directly influence another piece with which it was not in contact. This made them very hostile to magic and magicians (astrology, for example, rests on the idea that the distant stars and planets directly influence affairs on earth), and mechanical philosophy had some popularity in religious circles for that reason. However, it could also be viewed as leaving no place for God.
Another characteristic particularly marked in Galileo and Descartes, but shared by others, was an interest in mathematizing science. Galileo insisted that the science of mechanics had to be quantitative, about things that could be precisely measured, rather than quantitative.
He asserted that nature was written in a mathematical language. The period saw a number of important innovations in pure mathematics, from the founding of modern algebra by the Frenchman Francois Viete at the end of the sixteenth century to the creation of analytic geometry by Descartes and his rival Pierre de Fermat. Perhaps as importantly, it also saw innovations that made mathematics easier to use.
The sixteenth-century German Michael Stifel popularized the use of the + and - signs, while the Dutchman Simon Stevin introduced the decimal point and the Scotsman John Napier (the first important Scottish scientist) logarithms. This continued the trend begun with the spread of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, towards making mathematical calculations far less cumbersome to make and to communicate. The greatest of the new philosophers – Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes – all established important intellectual traditions and remained as exemplars well into the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and even into our own day.
