John Henry

The Fragmentation of Renaissance Occultism and the Decline of Magic

At a Christmas dinner party in 1817 an admittedly drunken Charles Lamb berated the famed Isaac Newton as “a Fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle”. He and John Keats then agreed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism. Lamb and Keats, it seemed, wished Newton in hell, as William Blake had seemed to do earlier in his long poem Jerusalem (1804), where he blamed the “cogs tyrannic” of the newly industrializing Britain on the “Water-wheels of Newton” which drove the “Loom of Locke, whose woof rages dire”. Not long after this Christmas dinner party Keats made a public statement about Newton’s “cold philosophy” in his poem, Lamia (1820):

Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of Laws of Nature

This paper draws attention to the crucial importance of a new kind of precisely defined law of nature in the Scientific Revolution. All explanations in the mechanical philosophy depend upon the interactions of moving material particles; the laws of nature stipulate precisely how these interact; therefore, such explanations rely on the laws of nature. While this is obvious, the radically innovatory nature of these laws is not fully acknowledged in the historical literature. Indeed, a number of scholars have tried to locate the origins of such laws in the medieval period. In the first part of this paper these claims are critically examined, and found at best to reveal important aspects of the background to the later idea, which could be drawn upon for legitimating purposes by the mechanical philosophers. The second part of the paper argues that the modern concept of laws of nature originates in Rene Descartess work. It is shown that Descartes took his concept of laws of nature from the mathematical tradition, but recognized that he could not export it to the domain of physico-mathematics, to play a causal role, unless he could show that these laws were underwritten by God. It is argued that this is why, at an early stage of his philosophical development, Descartes had to turn to metaphysics.

“Pray Do Not Ascribe That Notion to Me”: God and Newton’s Gravity

The precise nature of the force of gravitational attraction was always problematic for Isaac Newton. As is well known he was forced by the criticism of Leibniz to acknowledge in the General Scholium to the Principia mathematica that he did not know the cause of gravity. Making a virtue out of a necessity, he insisted that he was not interested in feigning explanatory hypotheses, being perfectly content to show “that gravity does really exist and act according to the laws which we have explained.” Elsewhere, however, as is also well known, Newton did try out various explanatory hypotheses. Essentially, Newton’s speculations derived from four earlier traditions with which he was familiar. Drawing upon the Neoplatonic tradition of light metaphysics, he suggested that light might combine with matter to give it various active powers; the alchemical tradition linked ideas of light with ideas of an active spirit, present in all things, which again might be said to give rise to various unceasing activities of matter. This active spirit, in its turn, could be linked to more recent ideas, developed in the new mechanical philosophy, in which an all pervasive aether was used as a medium of transmitting impulse from one part of the universe to another. Newton’s own aether speculations were by no means purely mechanistic, since his aether consisted of particles held apart from one another, and from particles of other matter, by repulsive forces operating between them, but they clearly owed something to the mechanical as well as the alchemical traditions. The fourth tradition was Christian theology: gravitational attraction being held to be brought about by God.1

Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum

In spite of vigorous opposition by a number of historians it has now become a commonplace that the rapid development of the ‘new philosophy’ sprang from the ideology of Puritanism. What began its career as the ‘Merton thesis’ has now been refined, developed, and so often repeated that it seems to be almost unassailable. However, the two foremost historians in the entrenchment of this new orthodoxy are willing, in principle, to concede that ‘in reality things were very mixed up’, and that non-Puritan natural philosophers at the time were operating ‘in a precisely similar manner’ to their Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, it would be impossible not to concede this in the face of the many critiques launched against the Merton thesis.

Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The Spirit of Nature and the Nature of Providence

Robert Boyle always protested his reluctance to engage in dispute about the validity of his experimental philosophy and its conclusions. Even so, of four significant attacks on his interpretation of various hydrostatical experiments he felt it necessary to respond publicly to three of them. These attacks came from the pens of Thomas Hobbes, Franciscus Linus and Henry More.1 It is fairly easy to see why Boyle should be so disturbed by the writings of both Hobbes and Linus. Hobbes had an international reputation as a philosopher and a national reputation as an atheist. On either count Boyle could not let it be seen that Hobbes’s interpretation of the physical world was more cogent than his own. Franciscus Linus, on the other hand, was a Jesuit priest and, perhaps more to the point in this context, he was a vigorous defender of scholastic Aristotelianism. Boyle and his confederates in English natural philosophy — the leading lights of the Oxford Experimental Club and later of the Royal Society — had not singled out anyone for more criticism than the contemporary Aristotelian, and it was as a representative of that breed that Linus had to be dismissed.2

Ideology, Inevitability, and the Scientific Revolution

Looking in particular at the Scientific Revolution, this essay argues that, for all their differences, positivist commentators on science and contextualist historians of science ought to be committed to the view that counterfactual changes in the history of science would have made no significant difference to its historical development. Assumptions about the history of science as an inexorable march toward the truth commit the positivist to the view that, even if things had been different, scientific knowledge would still have ended up where it is. Perhaps surprisingly, the move away from “great man” history and the increasing emphasis among contextualist historians on the broad cultural influences on scientific thought and practice also imply that changes of a restricted or specific nature ought to have no significant effect on general outcomes. Unlike the positivist, however, the contextualist is willing to concede that things might have been different if the entire cultural background had been different. But in such cases the effect of such sweeping changes would be impossible to conceive and so deprive counterfactual history of any useful insights it might be supposed to offer.

“Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison”

There is a historiographical tradition which links two different theological approaches to God’s creation of the world (and his subsequent relationship to it) with correspondingly opposed attitudes to the most reliable scientific epistemology. These two approaches are usually referred to as voluntarist and intellectualist theology. The beginnings of this historiographical tradition can be traced back to the 1930s with the appearance of a series of three papers by the philosopher and theologian Michael Beresford Foster (1903–59), published in the philosophical journal, Mind, and the appearance in 1936 of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “Study of the History of an Idea”, The Great Chain of Being. Foster drew attention to the role of what he called “voluntarist theology” in the rise of science in the early modern period, and attributed this to the encouragement voluntarism provided for empiricist approaches to an understanding of the natural world. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, by contrast, focused on the theological approach to which Foster’s voluntarism was opposed, and which is usually called “intellectualist”. Although failing to reach the heights, in terms of influence, that Robert K. Merton’s Science, technology and society in seventeenth-century England of 1938 went on to enjoy, among those interested in the relations between science and religion the voluntarism and science thesis has proved as enduring as the Puritanism and science thesis. But it has been under a notice to quit from Peter Harrison since the appearance of his “Voluntarism and early modern science”, in 2002. What I want to do in this paper, therefore, is to attempt to re-affirm, contrary to Harrison’s claims, that voluntarist theology was an important component, or at least concomitant, of the natural philosophy of some of the leading thinkers of the early modern period. But the first thing to do is to say a few words about what is meant by intellectualist and voluntarist theologies.

Francesco Patrizi da Cherso's concept of space and its later influence

Summary This study considers the contribution of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597) to the development of the concepts of void space and an infinite universe. Patrizi plays a greater role in the development of these concepts than any other single figure in the sixteenth century, and yet his work has been almost totally overlooked. I have outlined his views on space in terms of two major aspects of his philosophical attitude: on the one hand, he was a devoted Platonist and sought always to establish Platonism, albeit his own version of it, as the only currect philosophy; and on the other hand, he was more determinedly anti-Aristotelian than any other philosopher at that time. Patrizis concept of space has its beginnings in Platonic notions, but is extended and refined in the light of a vigorous critique of Aristotles position. Finally, I consider the influence of Patrizis ideas in the seventeenth century, when various thinkers are seeking to overthrow the Aristotelian concept of place and the equiv...

Magic and the origins of modern science

Further important sources of the empiricism of the Scientific Revolution were to be found in the magical tradition, and these influences can be seen at work in a number of areas. They deserve separate consideration here, however, because they have generated considerable historiographical debate [222; 39]. A number of historians of science have refused to accept that something which they see as so irrational could have had any impact whatsoever upon the supremely rational pursuit of science. Their arguments seem to be based on mere prejudice, or on a failure to understand the richness and complexity of the magical tradition.

Historical and other studies of science, technology and medicine in the University of Edinburgh

Considering Edinburghs prominence in the historical development of the sciences, it might be expected that the formal study of the history of science would appear as a significant feature in its university. Alas, this is not so, although there are signs that things are beginning to improve. If there is a deficit in historical studies of science, however, it is surely outweighed by Edinburghs remarkable contribution to the sociological study of science and technology, which has even given rise to the designation ‘Edinburgh School’ to refer to a characteristic approach to the study of science that was developed in Edinburgh University. In this report I briefly consider the history of these and other aspects of the study of science, technology and medicine in Edinburgh as well as presenting an outline of the current picture.