{"id":1118,"date":"2011-05-09T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T21:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=1118"},"modified":"2012-09-25T02:05:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T14:05:00","slug":"gideon-manning-on-the-origins-of-the-experimentalspeculative-distinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/gideon-manning-on-the-origins-of-the-experimentalspeculative-distinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Gideon Manning on the Origins of the Experimental\/Speculative Distinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gideon Manning writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Having commented on Peter Anstey\u2019s \u201cThe Origins of the Experimental-Speculative Distinction\u201d<\/em> at the recent symposium<\/a> in Otago, I am pleased to share a much abbreviated and slightly revised version of my comments.\u00a0 I limit myself here to making two points.\u00a0 First, there is reason to believe the Experimental-Speculative Distinction<\/a> (ESD) is not all it is cracked up to be.\u00a0 Second, the best place to look for what Peter has called the \u201cpre-history\u201d of ESD<\/a> might be in the Scholastic distinction and distinct practice of general as opposed to particular physics.<\/p>\n

1. Part of what motivates Peter\u2019s interest in the Experimental-Speculative Distinction (ESD) is his belief that in just about every way it is superior to the post-Kantian Rationalism-Empiricism Distinction (RED).\u00a0 I agree that RED is no good \u2013 it\u2019s an idealization and it\u2019s imposed after the fact to tell a self-affirming story about how philosophy was waiting for Kant to come along. \u00a0In addition, RED ignores all sorts of interesting characters in early modern philosophy (like Boyle) and further it ignores the shared doctrines between members of the supposedly opposed camps.\u00a0 Without wanting to defend RED, however, I do want to raise a red flag about ESD\u2019s advantages.\u00a0 With the sole exception that the terms employed in ESD were used by many of the actors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, I see the same worries Peter identifies with RED coming up for ESD.\u00a0 Specifically, where RED over emphasizes epistemology ESD over emphasizes methodology; where RED admits to too many significations of \u201cempiricism\u201d and \u201crationalism\u201d ESD admits to too many significations of \u201cexperiment\u201d and \u201cexperimental\u201d; where RED leaves a demarcation problem with figures like Boyle \u2013 and I would add Hobbes and Berkeley \u2013 ESD leaves a demarcation problem with figures like Huygens and Descartes.\u00a0 Put succinctly, the fact that ESD is an actor\u2019s distinction does not mean it is not an idealization imposed to tell a self-affirming story.<\/p>\n

2. In passing, Peter notes<\/a> that Niccol\u00f2 Cabeo<\/a>\u2019s commentary on Aristotle\u2019s Meteorology<\/em> (1646) uses the phrase \u201cexperimental philosophy \/ experimentalis philosophia<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 I urge him to pursue this lead further.\u00a0 For, there was a Scholastic distinction between two approaches to natural philosophy found in Aristotle\u2019s corpus: physica generalis <\/em>and physica particularis<\/em>.\u00a0 Physica generalis<\/em> is exemplified by Aristotle\u2019s Physics, <\/em>where he defines the object of natural philosophy, <\/em>notes the conditions for the possibility of any kind of motion or change, and identifies matter, form, privation and the four causes as the principles of nature. Physica particularis<\/em> is exemplified by On Generation and Corruption <\/em>and the fourth book of the Meteorology, <\/em>where Aristotle defines the object of natural philosophy as corpus potentia<\/em> sensibile<\/em>, <\/em>considers what the object of sense-perception is, and concludes that touch is the most fundamental of all the senses. \u00a0Physica generalis<\/em> is a metaphysical<\/em> and theoretical or speculative <\/em>approach to the study of nature since it is based on the conceptual analysis of the concept of a natural body.\u00a0 P<\/em>hysica particularis<\/em> is an experimental approach to nature since it is based on an empirical analysis of what is or seems to be given in sense-perception, as Cabeo observed.\u00a0 Put succinctly, physica particularis<\/em> was unquestionably experimental with its own experimental philosophy, so if the story of the \u201cnew science\u201d and ESD represent a move away from the general to the particular and toward experimentation, we must look closely at physica particularis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The case of Daniel Sennert further supports this suggestion.\u00a0 Sennert was aware of the two approaches to natural philosophy in Aristotle\u2019s corpus and as he matured he grew, in Bill Newman\u2019s words, \u201cincreasingly impatient with the traditional scholastic focus on the more theoretical side of Aristotle’s thought\u201d.\u00a0 In fact, in Sennert\u2019s late Hypomnemata physica <\/em>(1636) he complains about traditional scholastic practice:<\/p>\n

    I consider the chief cause of the imperfection of physics to be the fact that in previous centuries those who considered themselves particularly subtle consumed the greatest part of their life in those very general questions about the prime matter, form, privation, motion, and the like, and wore out their time in those disputations repeated so many times ad nauseam. <\/em>Indeed they never considered the specifics from whose observation their principles should have been derived, or those specifics which should have provided the foundations of medicine and other disciplines\u2026. And this to such a degree that so many wagon-fulls, practically, of commentaries on Aristotle’s books of general physics have been born, stuffed for the greatest part with questions that are not physical, but rather metaphysical, and often empty speculations. But very few are found who would read or comment on Aristotle’s Meteorology, Historia animalium, De partibus animalium, De generatione animalium, <\/em>and De plantis<\/em>. (Newman\u2019s translation)<\/ol>\n

    Sennert\u2019s impatience with contemporary Aristotelians (and even his own earlier Aristotelianism) was tied to their preference for the general over the particular. \u00a0In focusing on ESD and its history, I think Peter and his group are reminding us what Sennert and his followers knew; that physica particularis <\/em>was where the action was in the early modern period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Gideon Manning writes… Having commented on Peter Anstey\u2019s \u201cThe Origins of the Experimental-Speculative Distinction\u201d at the recent symposium in Otago, I am pleased to share a much abbreviated and slightly revised version of my comments.\u00a0 I limit myself here to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[454,396,229,386],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-aristotelianism","tag-cabeo","tag-empiricism","tag-historiography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}