{"id":3343,"date":"2013-09-30T16:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T04:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=3343"},"modified":"2013-09-24T11:11:39","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T23:11:39","slug":"cartesianism-experimentalism-and-the-experimental-speculative-distinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/cartesianism-experimentalism-and-the-experimental-speculative-distinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Cartesianism, experimentalism, and the experimental-speculative distinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

A guest post by Tammy Nyden<\/a> and Mihnea Dobre<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tammy Nyden and Mihnea Dobre write…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A while ago, we published an announcement<\/a> on this blog of our forthcoming edited volume, Cartesian Empiricisms<\/em><\/a> (Springer 2013). A claim in that post \u2013 that some Cartesians \u201cseem to escape the ESD distinction\u201d \u2013 has been questioned by Peter Anstey in another post<\/a>. We thank him for the intervention and would like to push forward our claim and discuss it in more detail as this will reveal some of our concerns with the ESD (experimental-speculative distinction).<\/p>\n

In his reply, Peter Anstey asked, \u201cDid the Cartesians practise a form of experimental philosophy analogous to that of the Fellows of the early Royal Society?\u201d We would argue that the question itself is problematic, as there are not two practices or worldviews to compare. There is variation among the Cartesians as well as among the fellows of early Royal Society. \u00a0In order to gain a nuanced understanding of these historical actors, we suggest a rather different question: \u201cWhat role did Cartesian philosophy play in the acceptance and spread of experimental practices in late seventeenth-century philosophy?\u201d When we ask this question, we recognize the experiments of Robert Desgabets on blood transfusion, Henricus Regius on liquids, Burchard de Volder\u2019s with air-pumps, etc., and consider how their work improved experimental technologies, influenced a theoretical reflection on the role of experiments and the senses in natural philosophy, and influenced institutional change that was favorable to experimental science.<\/p>\n

Because Cartesians took various aspects of Descartes\u2019 system and merged it with various aspects of experimentalism, there is not one \u2018Cartesian\u2019 use of experiment, but several. For example, both Regius and de Volder promoted experiment, but Regius rejects Descartes\u2019 theory of innate ideas while de Volder defends it. Many Cartesians came to reject hyperbolic doubt, some defended vortex theory, some did not. Cartesian Empiricisms<\/em> is not a complete inventory of such views expressed by Descartes\u2019 followers. Rather our goal was to encourage the discussion of the above-mentioned question and to reveal some aspects that have been unfortunately neglected so far by both historians of philosophy and science.<\/p>\n

Readers of this blog are familiar with the objection that traditional historiography of science was built on the Rationalist-Empiricist distinction (RED). A consequence is the exclusion of so-called \u201crationalists\u201d from the histories of science, particularly history of the use, development and acceptance of experiment. This is problematic because recent research (e.g., Ariew<\/a>, Lennon and Easton<\/a>, Easton<\/a>, Schmaltz<\/a>, Cook<\/a>, Nyden<\/a>, Dobre<\/a>, etc.) shows that many so-called rationalists were deeply involved in the practice and spread of the acceptance of experiment in natural philosophy. Cartesian Empiricisms<\/em> gives further emphasis to this issue, as it examines several philosophers who identified as committed Cartesians who were deeply involved in experiment. According to historiographies that divide the period into two mutually exclusive epistemologies or methodologies these philosophers either do not exist (i.e., they are overlooked by histories of philosophy and science) or are seen as \u201cnot really Cartesian\u201d or \u201cnot really experimentalist,\u201d as it would be needed by that particular narrative. Thus, we do share the concern of the authors of this blog, that such binaries as RED force us to fit philosophers into categories that they would not themselves recognize and causes us to misrepresent seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Moreover, we acknowledge that this blog importantly shows the anachronism of the RED, a way of viewing the period that is constructed later by what may be called Kantian propaganda. However, we would like to raise now some of our concerns with the distinction promoted by this blog, the experimental-speculative distinction (ESD) and explain why some Cartesians would escape the ESD. Our worries cover two important aspects of the ESD: the label \u201cspeculative\u201d and the actor-category problem.<\/p>\n

(1) In a very recent post<\/a>, Peter Anstey argued that eighteenth-century Newtonians<\/em> pointed out Cartesian vortex theory as a prime representative of speculative philosophy (our emphasis). We caution against letting eighteenth-century Newtonian propaganda color a historical interpretation of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Voltaire, d\u2019Alembert and others took great pains to contrast Newtonianism from Cartesianism as two mutually exclusive worldviews who battled it out, with Newton\u2019s natural philosophy as the victor. But the reality is that after Descartes\u2019 death (1650) and before the victory of Newtonianism in the middle of the eighteenth century, followers of both Descartes and Newton had more in common than we are led to believe. More importantly, both \u201ccamps\u201d had more diversity than we were ready to accept in the traditional histories. Cartesian Empiricisms<\/em> draws attention to that diversity within Cartesianism. Perhaps the one thing Cartesians discussed in the chapters of this volume do have in common is that they do both experimental and speculative philosophy, as these two categories are sometimes defined on this blog. But this last claim leads to our second concern with the ESD.<\/p>\n

(2) A reader of this blog will find<\/a> that when ESD is compared to RED, the first advantage highlighted over the latter is that \u201cthe ESD distinction provided the actual historical terms of reference that many philosophers and natural philosophers used from the 1660s until late into the 18th century.\u201d While there is no doubt that many early modern philosophers were using this language (i.e., \u201cexperimental\u201d and \u201cspeculative\u201d) in their writings, it is equally true that such language is not in use by the Cartesians. If one would be very strict with picking up \u201cthe actual historical terms of reference,\u201d one will see another pair of terms keep mentioned by various Cartesians, \u201cexperience\u201d and \u201creason.\u201d Of course, one can read this pair as another form of the ESD, but that would be an interpretation, and a problematic one at that. Both the Cartesians and the so-called \u201cexperimentalists\u201d were trying to determine the proper relationship between reason and experience and when one looks at their attempts, it becomes even more difficult to draw a clear line between speculative philosophers and experimentalist philosophers.<\/p>\n

Our concern is the possible danger of transforming ESD into a new RED. Experimental and speculative may be useful adjectives to describe aspects of a particular philosophy or particular commitments of a philosopher (especially when the two terms are clearly stated in one\u2019s writings). However, they are not useful for dividing philosophers or their natural philosophies, particularly when they are not already conceived as falling within the \u201cexperimental philosophy\u201d camp, as is the case for Cartesians at the end of the seventeenth century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A guest post by Tammy Nyden and Mihnea Dobre. Tammy Nyden and Mihnea Dobre write… A while ago, we published an announcement on this blog of our forthcoming edited volume, Cartesian Empiricisms (Springer 2013). A claim in that post \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4582,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[16407,229,16388,226,384],"class_list":["post-3343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-cartesianism","tag-empiricism","tag-esd","tag-experimental-philosophy","tag-rationalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343","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\/4582"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}