Principles in Early Modern Philosophy and Science
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Principles in Early Modern Philosophy and Science Peter R. Anstey Department of Philosophy, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Related Topics
Aristotelianism · Essence · Laws of nature · Locke · Logic · Mathematics · Moral philosophy · Natural philosophy · Newton · Political philosophy
Introduction Principles play a very important role in early modern philosophy and science. It is not too much to say that they are almost ubiquitous. If we restrict ourselves to book titles, we find the term “principle” and its cognates and non-English equivalents used by Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Robert Boyle, G. W. Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, Isaac Newton, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and many others. If we drill down to word searches, we find the term used 54 times by Boyle in Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis (1674) and 156 times in Book One of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). If we search for sustained treatments of
the concept, we find theories of principles in, inter alia, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Barrow, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Edme Mariotte, Emilie du Ch^atelet, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Thomas Reid. If we examine the disciplines and the sciences, we find principles of geometry, principles of mechanics, principles of optics, principles of hydrostatics, principles of chemistry, principles of politics, principles of law, principles of natural religion, moral principles, and so on. It is clear then that principles are important. The aim of this article is to set out what principles are and how they were used in early modern philosophy and science. This, in turn, will provide an explanation for their prevalence. The importance of principles in early modern thought derives, firstly, from their foundational role in the standard theory of how we acquire the sort of knowledge that constitutes a science. This theory derives ultimately from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, though it was amended and developed down the centuries (de Jong and Betti 2010). The neo-Aristotelian theory of knowledge acquisition that we find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be construed as having three constituents: a theory of principles, a theory of demonstration, and a theory of the sciences. According to this account of knowledge acquisition, a science or scientia is a structured set of propositions about a particular subject that is demonstrated from a finite set of foundational principles. It is not just a theory about what science is,
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_12-2
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but a theory about how scientific knowledge is acquired. This theory is predicated on the view that principles are propositions, such as “The whole is the sum of its parts” or “No proposition can be both true and false at the same time.” A helpful, if crude, analogy is the
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