SPRING QUARTER, 2006
Department of History
University of California, Irvine
Instructor: Dr. Barbara J. Becker
Lecture 10. New Method
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When |
Who |
Where |
How |
Why |
| 400 BCE-500 CE | • philosophers | • academies • museums • libraries |
• critique and expand on work of predecessors | • intellectual gratification |
| 500-1450 | • learned professionals | • monasteries • universities |
• master work of predecessors | • explicate and glorify God's creation |
| 1450-1600 | • wealthy • powerful • virtuosi |
• private studies • patron's home |
• observe Nature directly | • personal and national benefit |
| 1600-1730 | • merchants • literati |
• scientific circles • learned societies |
• interrogate Nature | • acquire and disseminate useful knowledge |
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A New Philosophy By the turn of the seventeenth century, an ever-widening group of people could and did read. Ready access to the world of ideas engendered a sense of intellectual restlessness and growing dissatisfaction with others' ideas about the world. Those with sufficient resources and leisure time, or who could locate a wealthy patron to support them, pursued philosophical ventures on their own and sought new ways of arriving at certain knowledge about the structure and working of the world. There were common threads running through these early efforts:
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In the New Method, Bacon described the study of nature as a new kind of puzzle:
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Bacon's New Method |
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Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former, like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.... The true labor of philosophy resembles [that of the bee], for it neither relies entirely nor principally on the powers of the mind, or yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the understanding....
[T]he reverence for antiquity, and the authority of men who have been esteemed great in philosophy ... have retarded men from advancing in science....
[B]y far the greatest obstacle to the advancement of the sciences ... is to be found in men's despair and the idea of impossibility....
[T]he secrets of nature betray thmselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course....
[M]en will ... only begin to know their own power, when each person performs a separate part, instead of undertaking in crowds the same work. |
Those who heeded Bacon's warning to question the deadening authority of books and the brain stifling university system that was built upon it, sought fresh sources from which they could learn and new venues for exchanging ideas and discoveries with like-minded individuals. Around 1623, the Minim monk, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), superior of the Place Royale monastery in Paris, initiated interaction among a network of savants throughout Europe for which he served as the hub, or "intelligentser." He arranged meetings when they were in Paris and exchanged correspondence when they were away. Called the Académie Parisiensis, or Académie Mersenne, this thriving circle of mathematicians and natural philosophers included:
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Events in the Life of René Descartes |
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1596 |
born near Tours, France |
1604 |
sent to study at Jesuit school at La Flêche |
1612 |
went to Paris |
1615 |
studied mathematics |
1617 |
joined the army |
1618 |
met Dutch scientist, Isaac Beeckman, and becomes his pupil |
1619 |
series of vivid dreams provoked an interest in philosophy and raised fundamental questions in his mind concerning the limits and extent of human knowledge |
1626 |
after years of travel and study, settled in Paris, became active in Mersenne's circle, and began his philosophic writing |
1628 |
completed the first twelve of what he hoped would be thirty-six Rules for the Direction of the Mind, a comprehensive guide to developing clear and distinct ideas about the natural world, a work that remained unfinished at his death... |
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by René Descartes (1596-1650) Written in Latin around 1628. Dutch translation appeared in Holland in 1684. First Latin edition published in Amsterdam in 1701. |
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| 1. The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true & sound judgments about whatever comes before it. | |
2. We should attend only to those objects
of which our minds seem capable of having certain & indubitable cognition.
[If two individuals disagree -- one is wrong; the philosopher's attention should be limited to Arithmetic or Geometry -- all else is opinion.] |
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3. Concerning objects
proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently
intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other people have thought
or what we ourselves conjecture. For knowledge can be attained in
no other way.
[If the question is difficult, it is more likely that few, rather than many will have been able to discover the truth about it. There are only two ways to come to knowledge: intuition and deduction solely from reason.] |
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| 4. We need a method if we are to investigate the truth of things. | |
| 5. The whole method consists entirely in the ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our mind's eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method exactly if we first reduce complicated & obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, & then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try to ascend through the same steps to a knowledge of all the rest. | |
| 6. In order to distinguish the simplest things from those that are complicated & to set them out in orderly manner, we should attend to what is most simple in each series of things in which we have directly dedicated some truths from others, & should observe how all the rest are more, or less, or equally removed from the simplest. | |
| 7. In order to make our knowledge complete, every single thing relating to our undertaking must be surveyed in a continuous & wholly uninterrupted sweep of thought, & be included in a sufficient & well-ordered enumeration. | |
8. If in the series of
things to be examined we come across something which our intellect is unable
to intuit sufficiently well, we must stop at that point & refrain from
the superfluous task of examining the remaining items.
[The instruments of knowledge are intellect, imagination, and sense-perception. The intellect alone is capable of attaining knowledge. Intellect is aided by other mental tools like imagination, the senses, and memory.] |
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| 9. We must concentrate our mind's eye totally upon the most insignificant and easiest of matters, and dwell on them long enough to acquire the habit of intuiting the truth distinctly & clearly. | |
| 10. In order to acquire discernment we should exercise our intelligence by investigating what others have already discovered, and methodically survey even the most insignificant products of human skill, especially those which display or presuppose order. | |
| 11. If after intuiting a number of simple propositions we deduce something else from them, it is useful to run through them in a continuous & completely uninterrupted train of thought, to reflect on their relations to one another & to form a distinct & as far as possible simultaneous conception of several of them. For in this way our knowledge becomes much more certain & our mental capacity is enormously increased. | |
12. Finally, we must
make use of all the aids which intellect, imagination , sense-perception,
& memory afford in order, firstly, to intuit simple propositions distinctly;
secondly to combine correctly the matters under investigation with what
we already know, so that they too may be known; & thirdly, to find
out what things should be compared with each other so that we make the
most thorough use of all our human powers.
[Human senses are like impressions in wax.] |
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1628 |
Descartes relocated to Holland and began work on The World, or Treatise on Light (physics and cosmology) and Treatise on Man (the structure and function of the human body and soul); both were to be major works based on new, non-Aristotelian principles |
| 1633 | stopped plans to publish these treatises after Galileo's arrest in 1632 [though he continued to revise these works for several years, he never published them; a French version of each treatise was eventually published in 1664, after his death] |
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excerpt from Descartes' Treatise on Man (c. 1632-1640) |
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| ...I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us. Thus He not only gives its exterior the colours and shapes of all the parts of our body, but also places inside it all the parts needed to make it walk, eat, breathe, and imitate all those functions we have which can be imagined to proceed from matter and to depend solely on the disposition of our organs.... | |
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