Politics and the Origins of Empiricism
Alberto Vanzo writes…
In earlier posts, I claimed that the now-familiar notion of empiricism was first introduced by Immanuel Kant and that it was not in use in the early modern time. However, Kant contrasts “rationalists” and “empirics” in one area in which it was customary for German writers to distinguish people who relied on experience with those who relied on reason, namely, politics. Dozens of early modern German authors distinguished between empirical politicians and rational, dogmatic, or speculative politicians. Did the pre-Kantian distinction between empirical and rational politicians provide a significant source of the Kantian distinction between empiricist and rationalist philosophers? To answer this question, let us look at the contexts in which early modern German writers typically mentioned empirical politicians.
It is only in the first decades of the seventeenth century that politics appeared as an autonomous academic discipline in the German faculties of arts. Its early exponents were preoccupied with establishing its importance and autonomy against those jurists, like Jean Bodin, who regarded it as a part of jurisprudence, identified the good politician with the good legal expert, and denied that there was any need to introduce the study of politics within the arts faculty, in addition to what one could learn in the course of legal study. To this end, academic writers on politics stressed that it is more than a mere set of practical precepts. Politics is a doctrina based on general principles which one must learn to acquire the political virtue par excellence, political prudence. In this context, the phrase “empirical politician” was used to designate and criticize those politicians as pseudo-politicians who rely only on experience, without knowing the doctrine of politics.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the discipline of politics experienced a transformation that placed empirical politicians in a far better light. What used to be the theoretical and general part of politics was now dealt with within the discipline of universal public law (ius publicum universale). Politics became mostly concerned with identifying the best ways to govern and the most effective practical means to achieve aims established by universal public law. The necessity of being versed in a demonstrative philosophical doctrine for being a good politician was no longer obvious and discussions of the requirements for political prudence had largely been supplanted by discussions of the more fashionable and pragmatic topic of reason of State. It is in this context that Kant contrasts empirics and rationalists in politics, criticizing the former and stressing the importance for politics to be conducted in light of the philosophical foundations of public law.
Kant’s references to empirics and rationalists in politics show that the distinction between these two kinds of politicians and the notion of political empiricism were well known when the distinction between empiricist and rationalist philosophers was first introduced. However, there are only tenuous similarities between these distinctions.
Empiricists and rationalists take opposite stances on the origins of cognitions and foundations of knowledge, the former appealing to experience and the latter appealing to the a priori. Empirical politicians too relied on experience. However, their reliance on experience was not contrasted with the reliance on the a priori, whether in the form of a priori reasonings or of non-empirical cognitive faculties such as rational insight. It was contrasted with the «precepts of doctrine and rules derived from the learned schools» (Faber), on whose basis dogmatic or rational politicians justified their views and actions.
Dogmatic politicians would bear a significant resemblance with rationalist philosophers if the doctrines on which they rely were established a priori, independently from experience. However, the role of experience in the establishment of principles was the object of significant divergences between early modern authors, including the Aristotelians. According to some authors, principles could not be warranted independently from experience. Additionally, what role experience had in the establishment of political doctrine was never at stake in the characterizations of dogmatic politicians. Politicians qualified as dogmatic if their views, actions, and political prudence relied on a doctrine, regardless of its empirical or non-empirical origin. Empirical politicians relied on practice and experience as opposed not to a priori cognitions or faculties, but to a systematic theoretical apparatus of any sort.
I conclude that, although the early modern contrast between empirical and rational politicians bears some resemblance with the distinction between rationalists and empiricists, it cannot be a significant source of the latter distinction. Do you find this claim plausible? Let me know by posting a comment.
Ancient Philosophy and the Origins of the Rationalism-Empiricism Distinction
Alberto Vanzo writes…
An interesting aspect of Kant’s use of the rationalism/empiricism distinction (RED) is that he does not only apply it to the moderns, but also to the ancients. Kant portrays Leibniz as an adherent to Plato’s rationalism and Locke as a follower of Aristotle’s empiricism. Could Leibniz’s New Essays be a source of Kant’s distinction between empiricism and rationalism?
Here is one of Leibniz’s comments on his disagreements with Locke in the Preface of the New Essays:
- Our differences are about subjects of some importance. There is the question about whether the soul in itself is completely empty like tablets upon which nothing has been written (tabula rasa), as Aristotle and the author of the Essay [Locke] maintain, and whether everything inscribed on it comes solely from the senses and from experience, or whether the soul contains from the beginning the source of several notions and doctrines, which external objects awaken only on certain occasions, as I believe with Plato and even with the Schoolmen […]
Here, Leibniz pits Plato and himself against Aristotle and Locke with regard to the existence of innate ideas (“several notions…”) and a priori truths (“… and doctrines”). These are precisely the issues around which Kant frames his distinction between empiricists and rationalists (or, as he sometimes calls them, dogmatists and noologists). However, Kant holds that a third issue divides ancient empiricists like Aristotle from ancient rationalists like Plato. It is the existence or inexistence of objects of which we cannot have sensations. According to Kant, ancient rationalists claim that there are non-sensible objects (Platonic ideas). Ancient empiricists, like Aristotle and Epicurus, deny this. Leibniz does not focus on this issue, but Christian Garve (who would later become one of Kant’s early critics) did. Like Kant, Garve divided ancient philosophers into two camps based on whether they admitted substantive a priori truths, innate ideas, and non-sensible objects. He drew this distinction in a dissertation that he published in 1770, eleven years before Kant’s first Critique and five years after Leibniz’s New Essays. Let me summarize Garve’s statements on each of the three points.
A priori knowledge
After they learned to distinguish between appearance and reality and between the senses and the intellect, philosophers took two opposed paths:
- Some [like Heraclitus] devoted themselves to exploring the nature of the senses with great care and they subtly searched in the senses the mark and sign of truth. Others [like Parmenides], having ignored and set aside the senses, devoted themselves entirely to the faculty of intellect and to contemplating with their mind the thoughts that they had gathered in themselves.
Non-sensible beings
This epistemological divide gave rise to an ontological divide:
- [T]hose that sought the foundation of the truth to be discovered in the senses were forced to refer [only] to the things that are subjected to the senses […]; and those claiming that true cognition is distinctive of the mind, not of the senses, denied the name and almost the rank of things […] to sensible items. They ascribed it only to [merely] intelligible things […]
On the one hand, we have Protagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, the Cyrenaics and even the sceptics. On the other hand, we have Plato.
Innate ideas
Those who denied “the truth of the senses” did not only have to posit a realm of non-sensible beings. They also had to defend the existence of innate ideas. This is because, if there is no truth in the senses, we cannot derive “true notions” from the senses (where true notions appears to be, in some sense, notions that map onto reality). We must claim that they are “innate in the soul and prior to every sensation”. “And thus were born Plato’s famous ideas, on which he says various, inconsistent things”, like those who are forced to embrace a conclusion, “although they do not understand well enough what it may be or how it could be true”.
Garve does not use the terms “empiricists” and “rationalists”, which would take on their now-common meanings only with Kant. However, the way in which Garve carves the two opposed camps of ancient philosophers maps neatly onto Kant’s distinction between ancient empiricists and rationalists. Garve also suggests that Locke and Berkeley followed Aristotle, whereas Leibniz followed Plato. This is because, in the antiquity, “nearly the whole territory of all opinions which may be held on this matter had been explored; all matter for supposition and invention had been used”.
Kant too thought that modern empiricists and rationalists followed the footsteps of their ancient predecessors. This brief survey of Leibniz’s and Garve’s statements suggests that their historiography of ancient philosophy may have been a source of Kant’s influential distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
Teaching Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-century Germany: Christoph Meiners
Alberto Vanzo writes…
- Since I am convinced that experience and history are the sole authentic sources of knowledge in all sciences, apart from pure mathematics, the choice and order of the works that I recommend to the young friends of wisdom must necessarily deviate from the works that would be recommended by the men for whom pure reason or pure intellect appear to be the most reliable guides and teachers in philosophy.
These are the words with which Christoph Meiners, a German experimental philosopher, introduced his reading tips for young students in the Preface to his Foundations of Psychology, a manual that he published in 1786. In this post I will draw from Meiners’ Preface to highlight his views on the relation between natural science, philosophy, and psychology and his reading tips for young students of psychology.
Natural science, philosophy, and psychology
We have already explained in his blog how experimental philosophy saw the light as a natural-philosophical methodology and was extended to psychology by Locke and Hume and moral philosophy by Scottish thinkers. Meiners is one of the many German authors who applied the Baconian method of natural history to the field of psychology. Interestingly, in Meiners’ preface, empirical or experimental psychology expels natural history and physics [Naturkunde or Physik] from the field of philosophy. Meiners follows Hume in defining philosophy as “a science of man or a sum of cognitions that inquires into human nature not only insofar as man senses, thinks and talks, desires and hates, but also insofar as he, through his feeling and thinking, desiring and acting, becomes or makes others happier or unhappier in manifold domestic and civil contexts.” Since natural history and the experimental study of nature are not specifically about man, Meiners might have reason to deny that, as a whole, they are parts of philosophy as he understands it.
This is precisely what he does. Meiners suggest that, if one wanted to include natural history and the study of nature within philosophy, one should also include medicine and its branches within philosophy. This would have two unacceptable consequences. First, it would make the domain of philosophy so enormously large “that no human mind could encompass it”. Second, one would lose “the whole purpose for which one orders together certain sums of cognitions into sciences” distinct from one another. For Meiners, philosophy on the one hand, natural science and natural history on the other, are distinct sciences. By distinguishing the study of nature from the study of man, Meiners draws a division between natural science and philosophy that would become common only in the nineteenth century. (If you know of anyone else who explicitly denied that natural science is part of philosophy before Meiners, please get in touch.)
Meiners distinguishes between theoretical and practical philosophy. “Theoretical [philosophy] studies man preeminently as a sensing, thinking and talking being”. And Meiners “designate[s] the theory of man […], considered as a sensing, thinking, and talking creature, with the name of doctrine of the soul or psychology”. Theoretical philosophy is empirical psychology. Predictably, practical philosophy should unfold naturalistically on the foundations of empirical psychology. To Meiners, philosophy is experimental philosophy and its core is Humean empirical psychology.
Meiners’ Reading Tips
Given Meiners’ outlook, it is unsurprising that he advises young students to read works like Bonnet’s Essay de Psychologie, Condillac’s Traité des sensations, Beattie’s Philosophical Essays and Locke’s Essay, which “must remain the principal book for students of the soul”.
Somewhat surprisingly, Meiners also recommends the largely Wolffian logic of Herman Samuel Reimarus and Leibniz’s New Essays, to be read alongside Locke’s Essay. But the main reason why his students should read the New Essays is to better know the enemy. From the New Essays,
- one will not only learn the still remarkable hypotheses of one of the greatest philosophers, but also at the same time the principles and doctrine of all those men who choose not experience and history, but so-called pure reason as their first guide in philosophy.
As the reference to pure reason suggests, Meiners recommends his young students to read Leibniz to better understand Kant. He is well aware that Kantianism represented the major threat to his Humean outlook. By grouping together Kant and Leibniz as speculative enemies of Humean experimental philosophy, Meiners was employing the experimental/speculative distinction that Kant and his followers would soon eclipse and replace with the historiographical distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
Physics: from experimental philosophy to experimental science
Alberto Vanzo writes…
I have been wondering recently when German thinkers ceased considering physics as a part of philosophy and whether this may be related to the demise of experimental philosophy in late eighteenth-century Germany. I think that this may have well been the case. My hypothesis is that experimental philosophy declined as the result of the influence of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism and that the distinction between physics and philosophy gained foot in the 1830s and the 1840s as a reaction to post-Kantian idealism. In this post, I would like to expand on this suggestion and ask you for comments and pointers for further research.
As is well-known, physics was generally regarded as a part of philosophy in the early modern age. This is true for most early modern German writers, including several German experimental philosophers who, in the 1770s and 1780s, attempted to develop their systems on the basis of experiments and observations and eschewed hypotheses and a priori speculations. They held that the whole of philosophy relied on the same method as physics.
In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies came to dominate the philosophical scene and eclipsed the German tradition of experimental philosophy. Kant vindicated a metaphysics based on a priori reasonings rather than observations and experiments. Kant held that we can discover some features of the natural world a priori. He distinguished this a priori, metaphysical study of nature from empirical, experimental physics, which he regarded as a part of philosophy too. However, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason he introduced a narrow notion of philosophy that includes only a priori disciplines and excludes empirical physics from the domain of philosophy:
- Thus the metaphysics of nature as well as morals, but above all the preparatory (propaedeutic) critique of reason that dares to fly with its own wings, alone constitute that which we can call philosophy in a genuine sense. (A850/B878)
Early-day Kantians agreed with Kant that experimental physics was part of philosophy in the broad sense, but not of philosophy in the narrow sense. However, many of their pronouncements imply that physics (tacitly identified with experimental physics) is not part of philosophy (tacitly identified with Kant’s narrow notion of philosophy). For instance, the Kantian Johann Gottlieb Buhle wrote that, when seventeenth-century writers used the expression “Cartesian philosophy”, they were often thinking “about his physics and cosmogony rather than about his philosophy in the proper sense”. With statements like this, Kant and his disciplines promoted a division of labour between the a priori inquiries of philosophers and the a posteriori research of physicists.
Did German authors start distinguishing between physics and philosophy once the Neo-Kantians started spreading Kant’s outlook in the 1860s, as Richard Rorty claimed? I believe that several German authors started distinguishing physics from philosophy much earlier, in the 1830s or 1840s. One of the most important events in the German intellectual scene between Kant’s death in 1804 and the 1840s was the rise and decline of post-Kantian idealism. Post-Kantian idealists like Schelling and Hegel pursued an approach to the study of nature that was heavily influenced by their own philosophical speculations (Schelling, for instance, founded a Journal for Speculative Physics). I believe that the tendency to distinguish physics from philosophy spread as a reaction to the attitude of post-Kantian idealists towards physics. The entry “Physik” published in the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon in 1833, two years after Hegel’s death, states:
- philosophy, at least in Germany, has again attempted to gain influence on physics. However, after all attempts to found physics from this side [i.e. on philosophy] proved unfruitful, only very few physicists, and actually not the most thorough ones, still believe that they could replace the secure footing that mathematics made possible to give [to physics] with the still very shaky concepts of philosophy. Hence, even if the so-called dynamical conception of physics that is related to this philosophical point of view still survives in some speculations, nevertheless we must admit that now only the mechanical point of view is influential and valid in real-life physics [im Leben der Physik].
Although suggestive, this single quote is hardly sufficient to prove my hypothesis that German authors started distinguishing physics from philosophy as a reaction to the post-Kantian idealistic tendencies that had in turn eclipsed experimental philosophy. Do you think that this view is persuasive? Also, when did physics stop being regarded as a part of philosophy in Great Britain and France? I would be grateful for any comments and suggestions.
Kant on experiments, hypotheses, and principles in natural philosophy
Alberto Vanzo writes…
As we have often noted on this blog, early modern experimental philosophers typically praised observations and experiments, while rejecting natural-philosophical hypotheses and assumptions not derived from experience. Along similar lines, Larry Laudan claimed that aversion to the method of hypothesis characterized “most scientists and epistemologists” from the 1720s to the end of the eighteenth century. Laudan mentioned Kant as one of the authors for whom “the method of hypothesis is fraught with difficulties”.
Immanuel Kant
In this post, I will sketch a different reading of Kant. I will suggest that Kant, alongisde other German thinkers like von Haller, is an exception to the anti-hypothetical trend of the eighteenth century. Kant held that natural philosophers should embrace experiments and observations, but they are also allowed to formulate hypotheses and to rely on certain non-empirical assumptions. They should develop fruitful relationships between experiments and observations on the one hand, (some) hypotheses and speculations on the other.
I will illustrate Kant’s position by commenting on a sentence from the Pragmatic Anthropology: when we perform experiments,
- we must always first presuppose something here (begin with a hypothesis) from which to begin our course of investigation, and this must come about as a result of principles. (Ak. 7:223)
1. “[W]e must always first presuppose something here (begin with a hypothesis)…”
“For to venture forth blindly, trusting good luck until one stumbles over a stone and finds a piece of ore and subsequently a lode as well, is indeed bad advice for inquiry”. Even if we tried to perform experiments in a theoretical void, our activity would still be influenced by hypotheses and expectations. “Every man who makes experiments first makes hypotheses, in that he believes that this or that experiment will have these consequences” (24:889).
Like British experimental philosophers, Kant acknowledges that hypotheses and preliminary judgements may be “mere chimeras” (24:888), “romances” (24:220), castles in the air, or “empty fictions” (24:746). Hypotheses, like castles in the air, are fictions, but not all fictions must be rejected. The power of imagination, kept “under the strict oversight of reason” (A770/B798), can give rise to useful “heuristic fictions” (24:262). What is important is to be ready to reject or modify our hypotheses in the light of experimental results, so as to get closer and closer to the truth.
2. “…and this must come about as a result of principles.”
What principles are involved in our natural-philosophical investigations? As is well known, Kant holds that nature is constrained by a set of principles that we can establish a priori, like the causal law. In what follows, I will focus on three other principles that guide our experimental activity. They are the principles of homogeneity, specification, and affinity.
- The principle of homogeneity states that “one should not multiply beginnings (principles) without necessity” (A652/B680). Kant takes it to mean that one must always search for higher genera for all the species that one knows. An example is the attempt to regard the distinction between acids and alkali “as merely a variety or varied expression of one and the same fundamental material” (A652-53/B680-81).
- The principle of specification prohibits one from assuming that there are lowest species, that is, species which cannot in turn have sub-species. This led, for instance, to the discovery “[t]hat there are absorbent earths of different species (chalky earths and muriatic earths)” (A657/B685).
- The principle of affinity derives from the combination of the principles of homogeneity and specification. It prompt us to look for intermediate specices between the species that we already know.
For Kant, the principles of homogeneity, specification, and affinity are not derived a posteriori from our experimental inquiries. They are a priori assumptions that guide them. We would not find higher genera, lower species, and intermediate species in the first place, unless we assumed that they exist and we tested that assumption with experiments and observations. For Kant, this is a non-empirical assumption that precedes and guides natural-philosophical inquiries. These do not unfold entirely a posteriori. They presuppose hypotheses and principles that are prior to experience and enable us to extend our knowledge of the world. Thus, rather than rejecting hypotheses and non-empirical assumptions as many experimental philosophers did, Kant holds that a guarded use of them is useful for our study of nature.
The Prehistory of Empiricism
Alberto Vanzo writes…
As some of you will know, I have claimed for a while that the distinction between empiricism and rationalism was first introduced by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. However, a quick search on Google Books reveals that there were many occurrences of “empiricism” and “rationalism” before Kant was even born. What is new about Kant’s use of these terms?
In this post I will survey early modern uses of “empiricism” and its cognates, “empiric” and “empirical”. I will argue that Kant’s new use of “empiricism” reflects a shift from the historical tradition of experimental philosophy to a new set of concerns.
Medical empiricism
Early modern authors often used “empiricism” and its cognates in medical contexts. Empirical physicians were said to depend “on experience without knowledge or art”. They did not have a good reputation. Shakespeare was expressing a common view when he wrote in All’s Well that Ends Well: “We must not corrupt our hope, To prostitute our past-cure malladie To empiricks”.
However, some defended empirical physicians. For instance, according to Johann Georg Zimmermann, the ancient physician Serapion of Alexandria was a good empiric. Why? Because he followed the method of experimental philosophy. He relied on experience and rejected idle hypotheses:
- Serapion and his followers rejected the inquiries of hidden causes and stuck to the visible ones […] So one can see that the founder of the sect of empirics had the noble purpose to band the love of hypotheses and useless quarrels from the medical art.
Political empiricism
Tetens wrote in 1777: “It has been asked in politics whether [politicians] should derive their maxims from the way the world goes, or whether they should derive them from rational insight.” Those who chose the first alternative were empirical politicians. Like empirical physicians, they were usually the target of criticism. Several writers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century agreed that true politicians could not be “blind empirics”.
Who opposed empirical politicians? It was the dogmatic or — as a review from 1797 called them, speculative politicians. Speculative politicians relied on “philosophical hypotheses and unilateral [i.e., insufficient] observations”, from which they rashly derived general conclusions. Once again, empirical politicians and their adversaries are implicitly identified with experimental and speculative philosophers.
Empirical people
The term “empiric” was also used in a general sense to refer to people who “owe their cognition to the senses” and “steer their actions on the basis of experience“. Leibniz famously said that we are empirics in three quarters of our actions. Bacon called empirics those who perform experiment after experiment without ever reflecting on the causes and principles that govern what they experience.
At least two of Kant’s German predecessors, Baumgarten and Mayer, coined disciplines called “empiric” that deal with the origin of our cognitions from experience or introspection. Additionally, two German historians identified an “empirical philosophy” that they contrasted with “scientific philosophy”.
Kant: what’s new in his usage?
Kant built on these linguistic uses when he introduced a new notion of empiricism:
- Like the authors referred to by some historians, Kant’s empiricists are philosophers.
- Like empirical physicians, empirical politicians, and empirical people, Kant’s empiricists rely entirely on experience.
However, Kant’s empiricism is not a generic reliance on experience, nor is it primarily related to the rejection of hypotheses and speculative reasonings. Kant’s empiricists advocate specific epistemological views (taking “epistemology” in a broad sense), that is, views on the origins and foundations of our knowledge. They deny that we can have any substantive a priori knowledge and they claim that all of our concepts derive from experience.
What is new in Kant’s notion of empiricism is the shift from a generic reference to experience and to the methodological issues that were distinctive of early modern x-phi, to broadly epistemological issues. To be sure, Kant was not concerned with epistemology for its own sake. He aimed to answer ontological and moral questions. Nevertheless, the epistemological issues that Kant’s new notion of empiricism focuses on are the issues that post-Kantian histories of philosophy, based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism, would place at the centre of their narratives.
Do you think this is persuasive? I am collecting early modern uses of “empiricism” and “rationalism”, so if you know some interesting occurrence, please let me know. Also, if you are familiar with methods for performing quantitative analyses of early modern corpora, could you get in touch? I would appreciate your advice.
Leibniz: An Experimental Philosopher?
Alberto Vanzo writes…
In an essay that he published anonymously, Newton used the distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy to attack Leibniz. Newton wrote: “The Philosophy which Mr. Newton in his Principles and Optiques has pursued is Experimental.” Newton went on claiming that Leibniz, instead, “is taken up with Hypotheses, and propounds them, not to be examined by experiments, but to be believed without Examination.”
Leibniz did not accept being classed as a speculative armchair philosopher. He retorted: “I am strongly in favour of the experimental philosophy, but M. Newton is departing very far from it”.
In this post, I will discuss what Leibniz’s professed sympathy for experimental philosophy amounts to. Was Newton right in depicting him as a foe of experimental philosophy?
To answer this question, let us consider four typical features of early modern experimental philosophers:
- self-descriptions: experimental philosophers typically called themselves such. At the very least, they professed their sympathy towards experimental philosophy.
- friends and foes: experimental philosophers saw themselves as part of a tradition whose “patriarch” was Bacon and whose sworn enemy was Cartesian natural philosophy.
- method:experimental philosophers put forward a two-stage model of natural philosophical inquiry: first, collect data by means of experiments and observations; second, build theories on the basis of them. In general, experimental philosophers emphasized the a posteriori origins of our knowledge of nature and they were wary of a priori reasonings.
- rhetoric: in the jargon of experimental philosophers, the terms “experiments” and “observations” are good, “hypotheses” and “speculations” are bad. They were often described as fictions, romances, or castles in the air.
Did Leibniz have the four typical features of experimental philosophers?
First, he declared his sympathy for experimental philosophy in passage quoted at the beginning of this post.
Second, Leibniz had the same friends and foes of experimental philosophers. He praised Bacon for ably introducing “the art of experimenting”. Speaking of Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments, he called him “the highest of men”. He also criticized Descartes in the same terms as British philosophers:
- if Descartes had relied less on his imaginary hypotheses and had been more attached to experience, I believe that his physics would have been worth following […] (Letter to C. Philipp, 1679)
Third, the natural-philosophical method of the mature Leibniz displays many affinities with the method of experimental philosophers. To know nature, a “catalogue of experiments is to be compiled” [source]. We must write Baconian natural histories. Then we should “infer a maximum from experience before giving ourselves a freer way to hypotheses” (letter to P.A. Michelotti, 1715). This sounds like the two-stage method that experimental philosophers advocated: first, collect data; second, theorize on the basis of the data.
Fourth, Leibniz embraces the rhetoric of experimental philosophers, but only in part. He places great importance on experiments and observations. However, he does not criticize hypotheses, speculations, or demonstrative reasonings from first principles as such. This is because demonstrative, a priori reasonings play an important role in Leibniz’s natural philosophy.
Leibniz thinks that we can prove some general truths about the natural world a priori: for instance, the non-existence of atoms and the law of equality of cause and effect. More importantly, a priori reasonings are necessary to justify our inductive practices.
When experimental natural philosophers make inductions, they presuppose the truth of certain principles, like the principle of the uniformity of nature: “if the cause is the same or similar in all cases, the effect will be the same or similar in all”. Why should we take this and similar principles to be true? Leibniz notes:
- [I]f these helping propositions, too, were derived from induction, they would need new helping propositions, and so on to infinity, and moral certainty would never be attained. [source]
There is the danger of an infinite regress. Leibniz avoided it by claiming that the assumption of the uniformity of nature is warranted by a priori arguments. These prove that the world God created obeys to simple and uniform natural laws.
In conclusion, Leibniz really was, as he wrote, “strongly in favour of the experimental philosophy”. However, he aimed to combine it with a set of a priori, speculative reasonings. These enable us to prove some truths on the constitution of the natural world and justify our inductive practices. Leibniz’s reflections are best seen not as examples of experimental or speculative natural philosophy, but as eclectic attempts to combine the best features of both approaches. In his own words, Leibniz intended “to unite in a happy wedding theoreticians and observers so as to improve on incomplete and particular elements of knowledge” (Grundriss eines Bedenckens […], 1669-1670).
Eric Watkins on Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Eric Watkins writes…
Having commented on two of Alberto Vanzo’s papers at the symposium recently held in Otago, I am happy to post an abbreviated version of my comments. The basic topic of Alberto’s papers is the extent to which one can see evidence of the experimental – speculative philosophy distinction (ESD) in two different periods in Germany, one from the 1720s through the 1740s, when Wolff was a dominant figure, and then another from the mid 1770s through the 1790s, when Tetens, Lossius, Feder, Kant, and Reinhold were all active. Alberto argues that though Wolff was aware of the works of many of the proponents of experimental philosophy and emphasized the importance of basing at least some principles on experience and experiments, he is not a pure advocate of either experimental or speculative philosophy. He then argues that some of the later figures, specifically Tetens, Lossius, Feder and various popular philosophers, undertook projects that could potentially be aligned with ESD, while others, such as Reinhold and later German Idealists, consciously rejected it, opting for the rationalism-empiricism distinction (RED) instead, which was better suited to their own agenda as well as to that of their German Idealist successors. As a result, Alberto concludes that ESD was an option available to many German thinkers, but that experimental philosophy was not a dominant intellectual movement, as it was in England and elsewhere.
I am in basic agreement with Alberto’s main claims, but I’d like to supplement the account he offers just a bit with a broader historical perspective. Two points about Wolff. First, when Wolff tries to address how the historical knowledge relates to the philosophical knowledge, which can be fully a priori, it is unclear how his account is supposed to go. As Alberto points out, Wolff thinks that data collection and theory building are interdependent, but he also thinks that we can have a priori knowledge. It’s simply not clear how these two positions are really consistent and Wolff does not, to my mind, ever address the issue clearly enough. So I am inclined to think that Wolff is actually ambiguous on a point that lies at the very heart of ESD.
Second, though Wolff was certainly a dominant figure in Germany, he is of course also not the only person of note. For one, throughout the course of the 18th century, experimental disciplines became much more widespread in Germany. So, in charting the shape and scope of ESD at the time, it would be useful to see what conceptions of knowledge and scientific methodology university professors in physics, physiology, botany, and chemistry had, if any. For another, after the resurrection of the Prussian Academy of Sciences by Frederick the Great in 1740, a number of very accomplished figures with reputations of European-wide stature, such as Leonhard Euler, Maupertuis, and Voltaire, came to ply their trade in Berlin. Virtually all of them were quite interested in experimental disciplines and several were extremely hostile towards Wolff. It would therefore be worth considering the full range of their activities to get a sense of their views on ESD.
Let me now turn to the later time period. As Alberto argued, Kant isn’t exactly the right figure to look to for the origin of the RED. Kant does not typically contrast empiricism with rationalism. Instead, when it comes to question of method and the proper use of reason, Kant’s clearest statements in the Doctrine of Method are that the fundamental views are that of dogmatism (Leibniz), skepticism (Hume), indifferentism (popular philosophers), and finally the critique of pure reason, positions that do not line up neatly with either RED or ESD.
However, it would be hasty to infer that there is no significant element of ESD in Kant. Kant dedicates the Critique of Pure Reason to Bacon, an inspiration to many of the British experimentalists. More importantly, one should keep in mind whom Kant is attacking in the first Critique, namely proponents of pure reason who use reason independently of the deliverances of the senses in their speculative endeavors. In many of these instances, the term “speculative” is synonymous with “theoretical” and is contrasted with “practical”. However, in many others Kant is indicating a use of reason that is independent of what is given through our senses, and on that issue, it is a major thrust of Kant’s entire Critical project to show that the purely speculative use of reason (pure reason) cannot deliver knowledge. In this sense, his basic project reveals fundamental similarities with experimental philosophers.
Now the British experimental philosophers would presumably object to synthetic a priori knowledge on the grounds that this is precisely the kind of philosophical speculation that one ought to avoid. But Kant would respond that he is attempting to show that experiments in particular, and experience in general, have substantive rational presuppositions, a possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand, given its intimate connection to what the experimental philosophers hold dear. This is one of the novel and unexpected twists that make Kant’s position so interesting. So one could incorporate Kant into the ESD narrative by arguing that he is trying to save the spirit of the experimentalists against those who are overly enamored with speculation while still allowing for rational elements. On this account, then, Kant would be responding directly to the ESD, namely by trying to save it, albeit in an extremely abstract and fundamental way that original proponents of the view could never have anticipated.
Tim Mehigan on ‘Empiricism vs Rationalism: Kant, Reinhold, and Tennemann’
Tim Mehigan writes…
Alberto Vanzo presented two papers for discussion at the recent Otago symposium on early modern experimental philosophy. There are two conclusions in the first paper (“Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth Century Germany” [on which we’ll publish Eric Watkins’ comments next Monday]) that are important for the second paper: one, that experimental philosophy, as “observational philosophy”, was replaced in German historiography by the term “empiricism” (this occurred sometime before 1796 as a passage from an essay by Christian Garve indicates); two, as experimental/observational philosophy waned, so the historiographical distinction between rationalism and empiricism (RED) waxed. While the reasons for the waxing are not completely clear, there appear to be two ways of imagining how it occurred. The first view holds that Kant himself was responsible for legislating the RED into existence. The second argues that the distinction was not authorized by Kant but arose as a result of the way his philosophy was interpreted and explained by later Kantians such as Reinhold and Tennemann. Both explanations are considered and evaluated in Vanzo’s second paper “Empiricism vs. Rationalism.”
So this is what’s at stake: Vanzo needs to show how the RED can be read into Kant’s first Critique, even if it is not expressly established as a formal distinction on which other parts of the CPR depend. Given the strategy alluded to above – that Kant introduces a distinction under the guise of different terminology – Vanzo is obliged to consider whether we encounter a “mapping” problem when Kant’s contrasts are seen in the context of the RED. He immediately concedes that there is indeed such a mapping problem (as Gary Banham had noted here). The RED is introduced in two places in the CPR – the Antinomies of Pure Reason and the History of Pure Reason. In the first case, Kant contrasts empiricism with dogmatism (not rationalism), and in the second case, Kant contrasts empiricism with “noologism” (not rationalism). The question is: whether RED can “map onto” either or both of these contrasts and thus indicate compellingly that Kant operated with the RED in mind?
As it turns out, the occurrence of the RED in the History of Pure Reason is more readily answered than in the Antinomies. Vanzo establishes both that the contrast of “empiricism” and “noologism” in the History of Pure Reason can be regarded as a version of the RED and that the contrast established here was to become a standard part of the histories of early modern philosophy. The argument in the Antinomies follows a more circuitous route. Vanzo cannot directly show that “dogmatism” and “rationalism” are interchangeable terms, all the more so since Kant’s purpose in the Antinomies is to show that neither dogmatism nor empiricism on its own is able to offer satisfactory proofs of key statements about the world. So both dogmatism and empiricism come up short, and Kant, as a later self-identifying rationalist, is clearly not about to subscribe to the dogmatic variant of metaphysical rationalism. So a problem of mapping does appear here, and it is the more serious one for the RED distinction.
Was the RED introduced by Kant? Vanzo’s final answer is, “not really”. Kant does not have the “epistemological bias” in regard to the RED, i.e. he does not overestimate the importance of the RED on epistemological grounds. Neither does Kant have the “Kantian bias”, according to which the RED is important for his project in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, finally, does not have the “classificatory bias” which classifies all philosophers prior to Kant into either empiricist or rationalist camps. When we consider the later Kantians, the picture is quite different. Both Reinhold and Tennemann are said to have the epistemological, the Kantian and the classificatory biases. Reinhold, I believe, did not initially have the classificatory bias, as it is not clearly in evidence in his first major work, the Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation (1789). By the early 1790s, however, as Vanzo shows, Reinhold appears to have derived a historiographical framework based on the RED. Reinhold’s framework appears to have been important for philosophers such as Tennemann, who by the late 1790s had begun to craft a “methodologically sophisticated history of early modern philosophy” in which the RED is amply applied to individual philosophers and where Kant takes his place as the author who successfully overcame the limits of these two schools.
In sum, Vanzo’s case for the establishment of the RED in Germany appears to ascribe great importance to the manner in which Kantian philosophy was received from the mid 1780s until the mid 1790s and how it was laid out against a background of historiographical assumptions. As happens so often, the background was to become foreground for a few brief years, and when it did so under Reinhold’s pen – this is the likely conclusion – the historiography became more important than the philosophy. Fortunately this situation has reversed itself and Kant’s philosophy has become a far more open proposition than it was taken to be in those years. This openness, in turn, makes room for different conceptualizations of the early modern period.
From Experimental Philosophy to Empiricism: 20 Theses for Discussion
Before our recent symposium, we decided to imitate our early modern heroes by preparing a set of queries or articles of inquiry. They are a list of 20 claims that we are sharing with you below. They summarize what we take to be our main claims and findings so far in our study of early modern experimental philosophy and the genesis of empiricism.
After many posts on rather specific points, hopefully our 20 theses will give you an idea of the big picture within which all the topics we blog about fit together, from Baconian natural histories and optical experiments to moral inquiries or long-forgotten historians of philosophy.
Most importantly, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Do you find any of our claims unconvincing, inaccurate, or plainly wrong? Do let us know in the comments!
Is there some important piece of evidence that you’d like to point our attention to? Please get in touch!
Are you working on any of these areas and you’d like to share your thoughts? We’d like to hear from you (our contacts are listed here).
Would you like to know more on some of our 20 claims? Please tell us, we might write a post on that (or see if there’s anything hidden in the archives that may satisfy your curiosity).
Here are our articles, divided into six handy categories:
General
1. The distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy (ESD) provided the most widespread terms of reference for philosophy from the 1660s until Kant.
2. The ESD emerged in England in the late 1650s, and while a practical/speculative distinction in philosophy can be traced back to Aristotle, the ESD cannot be found in the late Renaissance or the early seventeenth century.
3. The main way in which the experimental philosophy was practised from the 1660s until the 1690s was according to the Baconian method of natural history.
4. The Baconian method of natural history fell into serious decline in the 1690s and is all but absent in the eighteenth century. The Baconian method of natural history was superseded by an approach to natural philosophy that emulated Newton’s mathematical experimental philosophy.
Newton
5. The ESD is operative in Newton’s early optical papers.
6. In his early optical papers, Newton’s use of queries represents both a Baconian influence and (conversely) a break with Baconian experimental philosophy.
7. While Newton’s anti-hypothetical stance was typical of Fellows of the early Royal Society and consistent with their methodology, his mathematisation of optics and claims to absolute certainty were not.
8. The development of Newton’s method from 1672 to 1687 appears to display a shift in emphasis from experiment to mathematics.
Scotland
9. Unlike natural philosophy, where a Baconian methodology was supplanted by a Newtonian one, moral philosophers borrowed their methods from both traditions. This is revealed in the range of different approaches to moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment, approaches that were all unified under the banner of experimental philosophy.
10. Two distinctive features of the texts on moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment are: first, the appeal to the experimental method; and second, the explicit rejection of conjectures and unfounded hypotheses.
11. Experimental philosophy provided learned societies (like the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh) with an approach to knowledge that placed an emphasis on the practical outcomes of science.
France
12. The ESD is prominent in the methodological writings of the French philosophes associated with Diderot’s Encyclopédie project, including the writings of Condillac, d’Alembert, Helvétius and Diderot himself.
Germany
13. German philosophers in the first decades of the eighteenth century knew the main works of British experimental philosophers, including Boyle, Hooke, other members of the Royal Society, Locke, Newton, and the Newtonians.
14. Christian Wolff emphasized the importance of experiments and placed limitations on the use of hypotheses. Yet unlike British experimental philosophers, Wolff held that data collection and theory building are simultaneous and interdependent and he stressed the importance of a priori principles for natural philosophy.
15. Most German philosophers between 1770 and 1790 regarded themselves as experimental philosophers (in their terms, “observational philosophers”). They regarded experimental philosophy as a tradition initiated by Bacon, extended to the study of the mind by Locke, and developed by Hume and Reid.
16. Friends and foes of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies in the 1780s and 1790s saw them as examples of speculative philosophy, in competition with the experimental tradition.
From Experimental Philosophy to Empiricism
17. Kant coined the now-standard epistemological definitions of empiricism and rationalism, but he did not regard them as purely epistemological positions. He saw them as comprehensive philosophical options, with a core rooted in epistemology and philosophy of mind and consequences for natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics.
18. Karl Leonhard Reinhold was the first philosopher to outline a schema for the interpretation of early modern philosophy based (a) on the opposition between Lockean empiricism (leading to Humean scepticism) and Leibnizian rationalism, and (b) Kant’s Critical synthesis of empiricism and rationalism.
19. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann was the first historian to craft a detailed, historically accurate, and methodologically sophisticated history of early modern philosophy based on Reinhold’s schema. [Possibly with the exception of Johann Gottlieb Buhle.]
20. Tennemann’s direct and indirect influence is partially responsible for the popularity of the standard narratives of early modern philosophy based on the conflict between empiricism and rationalism.
That’s it for now. Come back next Monday for Gideon Manning‘s comments on the origins of the experimental-speculative distinction.
