{"id":4157,"date":"2016-11-07T17:09:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T05:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=4157"},"modified":"2016-11-07T13:32:17","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T01:32:17","slug":"maupertuis-and-experimental-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/maupertuis-and-experimental-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Maupertuis and Experimental Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A guest post by Marco Storni<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marco Storni writes …<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Was Maupertuis an experimental philosopher? In a recent post<\/a> on this blog, Peter Anstey pointed out the many ambiguities one encounters when one raises such a question. The perplexity concerns in particular the seemingly contradictory nature of Maupertuis\u2019 contributions to the Berlin Academy: a forward-looking Newtonian in the 1730s, after he takes over the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1746, Maupertuis\u2019 writings deal with stricto sensu<\/em> scientific topics no more. Although an Experimental Philosophy and a Mathematics class existed in the Berlin Academy, \u201cMaupertuis didn\u2019t publish a single article in the Experimental Philosophy memoirs [\u2026] nor did he publish anything in the Mathematics section\u201d (Anstey, The Ambiguous Status of Maupertuis<\/em><\/a>), but only in the memoirs for Speculative Philosophy. This remark can be further generalized for, after 1746, also Maupertuis\u2019 non-academic writings also deal with non-scientific subjects, including theodicy, the origin of language, and ethics. How can we explain such a change of perspective?<\/p>\n

To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand what Maupertuis actually means by \u201cexperimental philosophy\u201d and \u201cspeculative philosophy\u201d. A key text is the academic address Des devoirs de l\u2019acad\u00e9micien<\/em> (1750), where Maupertuis discusses one by one the nature and the tasks of the Berlin Academy classes. Whereas experimental philosophy, Maupertuis says, studies natural bodies with all their sensible properties, and mathematics deals with bodies \u201cdeprived of the large majority of those properties\u201d (Les \u0153uvres de Maupertuis<\/em> (ed. 1768), 3, p. 293), speculative philosophy is rather concerned with all the objects that have no sensible properties. In this sense,<\/p>\n

The Supreme Being, the human soul, and everything relating the mind are the object of this science. The nature of bodies too, as they are represented in our perceptions, even if they are something else than these very perceptions, falls within its scope (Ibid<\/em>., p. 293-294).<\/p>\n

Speculative philosophy is thus concerned with all the areas experimental philosophy and mathematics do not cover. In fact, speculative philosophy studies the very same objects<\/em> experimental philosophy and mathematics are concerned with (e.g., natural bodies), but from a different perspective (in the case of natural bodies, from the perspective of the experience of such bodies). Therefore, in Maupertuis\u2019 view, speculative philosophy and experimental philosophy are not necessarily opposed but rather complementary. This is well displayed in his studies on the principle of least action<\/em>, first formulated as a physical principle (in the academic paper Accord de diff\u00e9rentes lois de la nature qui avaient jusqu\u2019ici paru incompatibles<\/em>, 1744), and then given a metaphysical interpretation (in the Essai de cosmologie<\/em>, 1750).<\/p>\n

Maupertuis says something more on the relationship between \u201cspeculative philosophy\u201d and \u201cexperimental philosophy\u201d in another text of the 1750s, namely the Lettre sur le progr\u00e8s des sciences<\/em> (1752). Here, Maupertuis introduces the notion of \u201cmetaphysical experience\u201d that turns out to be interesting for our present concern. If physical experiences have to do with bodies\u2014and in the first half of his career Maupertuis focused on physical experiences\u2014metaphysical experiences deal with the spiritual world. Would it not be possible, Maupertuis asks himself, to operate on the soul by means of physiological modifications on the brain? Likewise, would it not be possible to find out how languages are formed by isolating some children and seeing how they manage to communicate? However quaint all this might seem, it nonetheless indicates that speculative philosophy is for Maupertuis essentially intertwined with experimental philosophy. Ultimately, a large part of Maupertuis\u2019 activity in Berlin might be described as the attempt to construct an \u201cexperimental metaphysics\u201d.<\/p>\n

On my analysis, Maupertuis\u2019 status as an experimental philosopher turns out to be less ambiguous than it might prima facie<\/em> seem. In fact, according to Maupertuis, \u201cover so many centuries [\u2026] our metaphysical knowledge has made no progress\u201d (Les \u0153uvres de Maupertuis<\/em>, 2, p. 430) precisely because the method of speculative philosophy was too abstract and arbitrary. Grounding metaphysics on experiences, as he argues, might actually help to stimulate such progress: and this is the objective Maupertuis strives for in his works of speculative philosophy. On the whole, therefore, I incline to read Maupertuis\u2019 mature position as the attempt to reform speculative philosophy out of an experimental approach. I would nonetheless be glad to hear other thoughts on Maupertuis\u2019 experimentalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A guest post by Marco Storni. Marco Storni writes … Was Maupertuis an experimental philosopher? In a recent post on this blog, Peter Anstey pointed out the many ambiguities one encounters when one raises such a question. The perplexity concerns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29807,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[16388,226,16437],"class_list":["post-4157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-esd","tag-experimental-philosophy","tag-maupertuis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157","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\/29807"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}