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Divine Illumination, Mechanical Calculators, and the Roots of Modern Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2010

Peter Dear
Peter Dear*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Argument

Talk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 351 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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