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34 - Science, Philosophy, and the Mind

from Part V - Ramifications and Impacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Paul Wood
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

During the eighteenth century, men and women of letters throughout the Atlantic world repeatedly celebrated the revolution they had witnessed in all the many branches of philosophy. Drawing on the rhetoric and historical vision of those who had championed the achievements of the “new science” of the seventeenth century, apologists for the Enlightenment claimed that humankind had finally been able to progress far beyond the narrow intellectual horizons of antiquity and the “dark ages” thanks to the new methods of inquiry forged by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this heroic reading of the genesis of modernity, Bacon was cast as the father of the experimental method, and Descartes played the tragic role of the flawed genius who used reason to liberate humankind from the shackles of scholasticism only to foist yet another false system of philosophy on the learned world. Locke was assigned the part of the humble reformer of metaphysics, who replaced meaningless verbal disputes with the patient empirical investigation of the mechanisms of mind and language and who carefully mapped the limits of human knowledge. But to the siècle des lumières it was Newton – apostrophized in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) couplet, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night./GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” – who towered above the other founders of the Enlightenment. Not only had Newton divined the secrets of Nature by demonstrating that his theory of universal gravitation explained the motions of both celestial and terrestrial bodies, but he had also taught the salutary lesson that philosophers could discover the truth only by eschewing arbitrary hypotheses in order to focus their attention on what could be proved using the combined tools of geometry and experiment.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 800 - 824
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Science, Philosophy, and the Mind
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.035
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  • Science, Philosophy, and the Mind
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.035
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  • Science, Philosophy, and the Mind
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.035
Available formats
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