Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:05:32.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aarsleff, Hans. 1982. “The Tradition of Condillac.” In From Locke to Saussure, edited by Aarsleff, Hans, 146–209. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1566. An Introduction for to Learne to Recken with the Pen, or with the Counters, According to the True Rule of Algorisme. London: John Awdely.Google Scholar
Ariew, Roger. 2007. “Descartes and Pascal.” Perspectives on Science 15:397–409.Google Scholar
Ashworth, William B. Jr. 1989. “Light of Reason, Light of Nature – Catholic and Protestant Metaphors of Scientific Knowledge.” Science in Context 3:89–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, Barry, and Bloor, David. 1982. “Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge.” In Rationality and Relativism, edited by Hollis, Martin and Lukes, Steven, 21–47. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Boyle, Robert. 1999–2000. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Hunter, Michael and Davis, Edward B.. London: Pickering & Chatto.Google Scholar
Chauvin, Étienne. 1713. Lexicon philosophicum [. . .]. Leeuwarden: F. Halma.Google Scholar
Collins, Harry M. 1990. Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cudworth, Ralph. 1678. A True Intellectual System of the Universe. London.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine, and Vidal, Fernando. 2004. The Moral Authority of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dear, Peter. 1988. Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dear, Peter. 1990. “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature.” Isis 81:663–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dear, Peter. 1998. “A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism.” In Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Lawrence, Christopher and Shapin, Steven, 51–82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Debus, Allen G., ed. 1970. Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: The Webster-Ward Debate. New York: Science History Publications.Google Scholar
Descartes, René. 1977. Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l'esprit en la recherche de la vérité. Translated by Marion, Jean-Luc. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Descartes, René. 1985–91. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Translated by Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert, and Murdoch, Dugald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Descartes, René. 1996. Oeuvres de Descartes. 11 vols. Edited by Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul. Paris: J. Vrin.Google Scholar
Gaukroger, Stephen. 1995. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Goclenius, Rudolph [the Elder]. [1613] 1980. Lexicon philosophicum. Frankfurt on Main: Musculus & Pistorius (reprint Hildesheim: Olms).Google Scholar
Harrison, Peter. 2002. “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63:239–59.Google Scholar
Harrison, Peter. 2008. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1996. Leviathan. Edited by Tuck, Richard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–45. The English Works. 11 vols. Edited by Molesworth, Sir William. London: J. Bohn.Google Scholar
Jolley, Nicholas. 2003. “Reason's Dim Candle: Locke's Critique of Enthusiasm.” In The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, edited by Anstey, Peter R., 179–191. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jones, Matthew L. 2001. “Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum, and the Pensées.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32:139–81.Google Scholar
Jones, Matthew L. 2006. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. 1990. Demystifying Mentalities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. 2007. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Locke, John. [1690] 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Nidditch, Peter H.. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, Michael. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodological and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Menn, Stephen. 1998. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mersenne, Marin. [1623] 2002. L'Usage de la raison. Paris: A. Taupinart (reprint Paris: Fayard).Google Scholar
Micraelius, Johannes. [1662] 1966. Lexicon philosophicum terminorum philosophis usitatorum, 2nd ed.Stettin: Jeremias Mamphras (reprint Düsseldorf: Stern-Verlag Janssen).Google Scholar
Morris, John. 1973. “Descartes’ Natural Light.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11:169–87.Google Scholar
Mulligan, Lotte. 1984. “‘Reason,’ ‘Right Reason,’ and ‘Revelation’ in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England.” In Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, edited by Vickers, Brian, 375–401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mulligan, Lotte. 1994. “Robert Boyle, Right Reason, and the Meaning of Metaphor.” Journal of the History of Ideas 55:235–57.Google Scholar
Mulligan, Lotte. 2001. “Robert Boyle, the Christian Virtuoso, and the Rhetoric of ‘Reason.” In Religion, Reason, and Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by Crocker, Robert, 97–116. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac. [1726] 1972. Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. 2 vols. Edited by Koyré, Alexandre and Cohen, I. Bernard. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. A New Translation and Guide. Translated by Cohen, I. Bernard and Whitman, Anne. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Normore, Calvin G. 1993. “The Necessity in Deduction: Cartesian Inference and Its Medieval Background.” Synthese 96:437–54.Google Scholar
Pascal, Blaise. 1963. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Lafuma, Louis. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ratcliff, Jessica R. 2007. “Samuel Morland and His Calculating Machines c.1666: The Early Career of a Courtier-Inventor in Restoration London.” British Journal for the History of Science 40:159–79.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Simon. 1985. “Occultism and Reason.” In Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, edited by Holland, Alan J., 117–143. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Schmidt, James, ed. 1996. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Skinner, Quentin. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Spurr, John. 1988. “‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England.” Journal of the History of Ideas 49:563–85.Google Scholar