Stephen Gaukroger

The hydrostatic paradox and the origins of cartesian dynamics

Abstract In the early decades of the seventeenth century, various attempts were made to develop a dynamical vocabulary on the basis of work in the practical mathematical disciplines, particularly statics and hydrostatics. The paper contrasts the Mechanica and Archimedean approaches, and within the latter compares conceptions of statics and hydrostatics and their possible extensions in the work of Stevin, Beeckman and Descartes. Descartes’ approach to hydrostatics, a discussion of which forms the core of the paper, is shown to be quite different from that of his contemporaries, above all in its attempt to provide a natural-philosophical grounding for hydrostatics while at the same time using it to develop a range of concepts, approaches and ways of thinking through problems that would shape Descartes’ mature work in optics and cosmology.

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity

This collection of essays provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher.

The soft underbelly of reason : the passions in the seventeenth century

Each of the essays in this collection, written by the most respected academics in their fields, provides both an insightful and valuable understanding on the different views of the passions in the Seventeenth Century.

Pliny's Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History

Aude Doody, Plinys Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), viii + 194pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-521-49103-7 The Historia Naturalis of Pl...

The Metaphysics of Impenetrability: Euler's Conception of force

In this paper I want to examine in some detail one eighteenth-century attempt to restructure the foundations of mechanics, that of Leonhard Euler. It is now generally recognized that the idea, due to Mach, that all that happened in the eighteenth century was the elaboration of a deductive and mathematical mechanics on the basis of Newtons Laws is misleading at best. Newtons Principia needed much more than a reformulation in analytic terms if it was to provide the basis for the comprehensive mechanics that was developed in the eighteenth century. Book II of the Principia , in particular, where the problem of the resistance offered to the motion of a finite body by a fluid medium was raised, was generally (and rightly) thought to be in large part mistaken and confused. There were also a number of areas crucial to the unification of mechanics which Newton did not deal with at all in the Principia: particularly the dynamics of rigid, flexible and elastic bodies, and the dynamics of several bodies with mutual interactions. Although a start had been made on some of these topics in the seventeenth century (notably by Galileo, Beeckman, Mersenne, Huygens, Pardies, Hooke, and Leibniz), it was only in the eighteenth century that they were subjected to detailed examination, and Eulers contribution to the development of these topics, and hence to the unification of mechanics, was immense.

THE ROLE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOCKE'S EMPIRICISM

In the 1660s, with the controversy over Boyle’s pneumatics and the controversy over Newton’s establishment of the heterogeneity of white light, the question of the standing of phenomenal explanation was raised in a pressing way. Briefly, Boyle and Newton discovered that in order to account for certain phenomena in a satisfactory way they had to suspend their commitment to corpuscularianism. Because corpuscularianism had acted not merely as a form of explanation, but also as a way of organizing the explanandum into phenomena that needed explaining and those that did not, and distinguishing real and apparent properties, this meant that they needed some alternative way of organizing the phenomena under investigation other than in terms of underlying micro-corpuscularian structure, and this organization was effectively provided by the experimental apparatus itself. The apparatus produced a certain range of phenomena which defied explanation in fundamental terms, and indeed from a foundationalist mechanist perspective the results produced were anomalous. The way in which they were generated was therefore crucial, not just because this is what legitimated them but also because, if they were to have any coherence at all, it had something to do with the way in which they were generated, for it was this that held them together as connected phenomena, and excluded what might, on mechanist grounds, mistakenly or at least unhelpfully appear to be related phenomena. The way in which the results were generated was a function of the experimental apparatus, the way in which this apparatus was manipulated, and what one was able to do with it. Here a domain of investigation is brought into focus not through the constraints imposed by a postulated underlying structure, but by means of the experiment or instruments. For the advocate of a systematic mechanism, the ultimate explanations took the form of accounts in terms of underlying microscopic states, so that causation, and with it explanation, were always construed as vertical, as it were: causes and effects were not on the same level, because causes are always more fundamental. By contrast, Boyle and Newton postulated

The Role of Matter Theory in Baconian and Cartesian Cosmologies

Within twenty years of one another, Bacon and Descartes proposed cosmologies which relied heavily on matter theory. In both, the distribution of matter in the cosmos determined what centers of rotation there were, and rotating bodies were carried around by the motion of an all-encompassing celestial fluid in which they were embedded. But the role of matter theory in the two accounts is very different, both in motivation and in the level at which it is active in guiding physical theory. Matter theory in Baconian cosmology stands as a foundational discipline, being virtually constitutive of physical theory, as it had been for natural philosophers from Thales onwards, whereas in Descartes it is subservient to the needs of his optics and his mechanics. Comparison of the two cases shows how the role of matter theory came to be radically modified in seventeenth-century cosmology.

Romanticism and decommodification: Marx's conception of socialism

This paper examines the question of how socialism has been conceived in Marxist terms. The problem is stated, and possible solutions explored, in the first section. In the second and third sections, which make up the main body of the paper, Marxs anthropologically inspired conception of socialism, both in its 1844 and later versions, is examined and found wanting. In the course of the discussion, it is argued that decommodification per se cannot be a socialist objective, and that there is no general conception of socialism, at least of the kind traditionally sought, by which socialists can be guided.

The One and The Many: Aristotle on The Individuation of Numbers

In Book K of the Metaphysics Aristotle raises a problem about a very persistent concern of Greek philosophy, that of the relation between the one (τ⋯ ἓν) and the many (τ⋯ πλ***θ***), but in a rather peculiar context. He asks: ‘What on earth is it in virtue of which mathematical magnitudes are one? It is reasonable that things around us [i.e. sensible things] be one in virtue of [their] ψνχ⋯ or part of their ψνχ⋯, or something else; otherwise there is not one but many, the thing is divided up. But [mathematical] objects are divisible and quantitative. What is it that makes them one and holds them together?’ (1077 a 20–4).

The Unity of Natural Philosophy and the End of Scientia

The dominant model of the unity of natural philosophy in the Middle Ages, namely scientia, collapsed in the early modern era, and the unity of natural philosophy was rethought in the seventeenth century in terms of a reductionist and foundationalist notion of common causation. I want to argue that, if we can identify the reasons for the collapse of the notion of scientia, then we can get a better sense of what was demanded of its successors, and that this will help us in understanding the subordination of all cognitive values to scientific ones so distinctive of the modern era.