Abstract
This chapter explores the question of Leibniz’s contribution to the rise of modern “science”. To be sure, it is now generally agreed that the modern category of “science” did not exist in the early modern period. At the same time, this period witnessed a very important stage in the process from which modern science eventually emerged. I will argue that Leibniz made a distinctive contribution to the journey from natural philosophy to natural science, and to the modern distinction between science and philosophy, through the development of a conception of physics as an autonomous enterprise.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper was presented at the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science in Stanford, at a seminar in the philosophy department of King’s College London, and at the conference in Lampeter from which the present volume originates. I would like to thank participants in the Stanford workshop, the King’s seminar, and the Lampeter conference (including Richard Arthur, Martha Bolton, Bill Brewer, Vincenzo De Risi, Stefano Di Bella, Paula Findlen, Michael Friedman, Daniel Garber, Sacha Golob, Eleanor Knox, Paul Lodge, Miguel Palomo, David Papineau, Pauline Phemister, Sherrilyn Roush, Justin Smith, Lloyd Strickland, Tzuchien Tho, and Erik Vynckier) for their questions and comments. Many thanks also to Domenico Bertoloni Meli and Gaston Robert for helpful feedback, to Andrew Janiak for sharing with me a forthcoming paper on Newton’s General Scholium, and, especially, to Howard Hotson for his insightful reading of two draft versions. When not otherwise stated, translations are my own.
- 2.
Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics, esp. 1–11, notes that “at the beginning of the seventeenth century ‘physics’ signified a qualitative, bookish science of natural bodies in general. It was at once wider and narrower than the subject that now has its name: wider in its coverage which included organic and psychological as well as inorganic phenomena; and narrower in its methods, which recommended neither mathematics nor experiment” (1). Any quantified aspects fell under “mixed” or “applied” mathematics rather than physics, including fields such as hydraulics, fortification, navigation and surveying, as well as astronomy and optics.
- 3.
Galileo to Belisario Vinta, 7 May 1610, Opere, vol. 10, 353: “Finally, as regards the description and motivation of my service, I would wish Your Highness to add the title of Philosopher to the title of Mathematician, since I studied philosophy for more years than the months I studied pure mathematics.” Attention to this passage is drawn by Vanni Rovighi, Storia della Filosofia Moderna, 48, to which my discussion is indebted.
- 4.
For a different view, see Garber’s Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 383. Garber suggests that “what Leibniz is doing is a kind of enterprise that we don’t do today, either in physics or in philosophy: it is (natural) philosophy as Leibniz and his contemporaries understood the enterprise”.
- 5.
In Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography, I have tried to show that many of Leibniz’s extraordinarily rich but apparently miscellaneous endeavours were aspects of a single master project of reform and advancement of all the sciences.
- 6.
In “The Scientia Generalis and the Encyclopaedia”, Arnaud Pelletier stresses that Leibniz speaks in very different ways of the scientia generalis. Moreover, he notes that after 1688 there is only one unfinished draft explicitly focused on the scientia generalis (Aurora seu Initia Scientiae Generalis, mid-1690s, LH IV, 7a, f. 11–12; partly published in GP VII, 54–6).
- 7.
See especially Introductio ad Encyclopaediam arcanam; sive Initia et Specimina Scientiae Generalis, de instauratione et augmentis scientiarum, deque perficienda mente, et rerum inventionibus, ad publicam felicitatem, c. summer 1683–beginning of 1685 (A VI, 4, N. 126). Cf. also A VI, 4, N. 85–6, N. 110, N. 115, N. 158–9. Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna envisaged the restoration of man’s dominion over nature, lost after the original Fall, through the development of a new empirical and experimental approach to gaining knowledge of nature which could be applied to practical use. His Novum Organum, published in 1620 as the second part of this grand plan, was supposed to provide this project with a new, inductive scientific method, intended to supersede the Aristotelian Organum. In 1623, Bacon published De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, an expanded Latin version of his earlier The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), which placed this reform of natural philosophy within a comprehensive reorganization of the entire edifice of knowledge.
- 8.
Studia ad Felicitatem Dirigenda; A VI 4, 137–8.
- 9.
LGR 22.
- 10.
PW 105.
- 11.
WP 106–7.
- 12.
For a detailed discussion of this point see Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography.
- 13.
PPL 109–10.
- 14.
At the same time, I would like to stress that there is much in Garber’s monograph with which I strongly agree, notably the virtue of a developmental approach to Leibniz’s philosophical thought, showing (amongst other things) that Leibniz was deeply interested in the world of which we have experience. As Garber argues, far from being a dogmatic thinker unconcerned with the physical world, Leibniz placed the project of explaining this very world of experience at the heart of his philosophical explorations from the very beginning. It is in order to reach a satisfactory explanation of this world of experience that Leibniz thinks and re-thinks his position throughout his life.
- 15.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 48.
- 16.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 48–9; the second emphasis is mine.
- 17.
Edited by Hess in Leibniz à Paris (1672–1676), 202–5 (see 203).
- 18.
Published in Fichant, G. W. Leibniz. La Réforme de la dynamique.
- 19.
A VI 4, 1989.
- 20.
This result was famously announced in the Acta Eruditorum of March 1686 with the publication of Leibniz’s Brevis demonstratio erroris memorabilis Cartesii et aliorum circa legem naturae (A VI 4, N. 369).
- 21.
See A II 1, N. 213 and A I 2, N. 187 (these are two versions of the same letter; a third brief version is published in A I 2, N. 186). English translations in PPL 259–62 and LGR 47–51.
- 22.
LGR 38.
- 23.
De vera methodo philosophiae et theologiae ac de natura corporis (LS 64). For a discussion of texts before 1679 in which Leibniz employs the notion of substantial forms, see Fichant, “Mécanisme et métaphysique”, 168, 172–8.
- 24.
PPL 308–9.
- 25.
PW 63.
- 26.
WF 11–12.
- 27.
AG 254–5.
- 28.
“When I looked for the ultimate reasons of Mechanism and of the laws of movement themselves, I was fully surprised to see that it was impossible to find them in Mathematics, and that it was necessary to return to Metaphysics. This is what took me back to Entelechies, and from the material to the formal, and made me finally understand, after many corrections and advancements of my notions, that the Monads, or simple substances, are the only true substances, and material things are nothing more than phenomena, but well founded and well connected. This is that of which Plato, and even the later Academics, and also the Sceptics, have glimpsed something, but these Gentlemen, who came after Plato, did not make use of it as well as him” (PPL 655 [translation modified]).
- 29.
See Fichant, “Mécanisme et métaphysique”, 179–80.
- 30.
See Conspectus Libelli Elementorum Physicae, c. summer 1678–winter 1678/79 (A VI 4, 1989), mentioned above. LC 235: “Force or power … must be estimated from the quantity of the effect. But the power of the effect and of the cause are equal to each other … Here it is worth showing that the same quantity of motion cannot be conserved, but that on the other hand the same quantity of power is conserved.”
- 31.
See for instance the passage from On Body and Force and the Laws of Motion, cited above.
- 32.
Leibniz to Bayle, 9 January 1687; GP III, 45–6.
- 33.
Leibniz to Bayle, 9 January 1687; GP III, 48.
- 34.
AG 254–5.
- 35.
AG 255.
- 36.
PPL 478.
- 37.
PPL 478–9 [translation modified].
- 38.
See also Monadology §79 (PW 192): “Souls act according to the laws of final causes by appetitions, ends, and means. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes by motions. And the two kingdoms, of efficient and of final causes, are in harmony with one another.”
- 39.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 235.
- 40.
LGR 220 [translation modified]: “in the natural world also the discovery of the magnetic needle is and will be a great thing, even if its workings remain forever unexplained to us”.
- 41.
On the scope of natural philosophy in the early modern period see Blair, “Natural Philosophy”.
- 42.
Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics, 7–8 identifies the second edition of Hamberger’s Elementa Physices, Methodo Mathematica … Conscripta (Jena, 1735) as the first important textbook which explicitly excluded the “whole theory of plants, animals and man” (see Preface).
- 43.
The study of early modern life sciences pioneered by Duchesneau (see Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz) has been followed by other important contributions which have explored the significance of the notion of living organism for Leibniz. See especially Nunziante, Organismo come armonia; Duchesneau, Leibniz, le vivant et l’organisme; and Smith, Divine Machines.
- 44.
“I distinguish therefore (1) the primitive Entelechy or Soul, (2) Matter, i.e. primary matter, or primitive passive power, (3) the Monad completed by these two, (4) the Mass [Massa] or secondary matter, or organic machine, for which countless subordinate Monads come together, (5) the Animal or corporeal substance, which is made One by the Monad dominating the Machine” (LDV 264; trans. Adams in Leibniz, 265).
- 45.
PW 189.
- 46.
See especially Wilson, The Invisible World and Becchi, Arlecchino e il Microscopio.
- 47.
A II 2, 713. An English translation is available at: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/foucher.htm
- 48.
NE 56.
- 49.
LDV 306–7.
- 50.
Monadology §§61–2: PW 188–9.
- 51.
Monadology §190: PW 190.
- 52.
Cf. NE 378: “When one considers further what belongs to the nature of these real unities, that is perception and its consequences, one is transported, so to speak, into another world, that is to say into the intelligible World of substances, whereas previously one was only among the phenomena of the senses.”
- 53.
See for instance LDV 262–3 [translation slightly modified]: “derivative forces are nothing but modifications and results [modificationes et resultationes] of primitive forces”.
- 54.
Cf. Adams, “Science, Metaphysics, and Reality”, to which I am indebted for this section of the chapter.
- 55.
I note that the relationship between physics and the “manifest” world has become more complex since the advent of subatomic physics, relativity theory and quantum theory. These physical theories no longer describe the behaviour etc. of entities roughly similar to the objects of our sense-experience the way classic Newtonian physics did.
- 56.
See the explicit reference to Plato in the letter to Rémond of January 1714 (GP III, 606) quoted above.
- 57.
See Specimen Demonstrationum Catholicarum, 1685 (A VI 4, 2326): “the laws of mechanics themselves do not flow from geometrical but from metaphysical principles, and if all things were not governed by a mind, they would be very different from what we experience”.
- 58.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, defends the view that in his middle years (roughly from the later 1670s to the mid-late 1690s) Leibniz had not yet come upon the monadological metaphysics that will characterize his later years. “Instead, what one finds there is a metaphysics grounded in corporeal substances, extended unities of matter and form.” Moreover, according to Garber, Leibniz’s last (unresolved) problem in his final years is how to put these two metaphysical models together, that is, “how to understand the relations between the bodies that we experience and the monads that are, in some sense, their metaphysical foundation” (xix, xxi).
- 59.
See Adams, “Science, Metaphysics, and Reality”.
- 60.
Descartes even complains about this, pointing at what he regards as the limitation of Galileo’s approach. See letter to Marin Mersenne, 11 October 1638, in Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes, II: 380.
- 61.
In Galileo, Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari. However, it should be noted that, in other works, Galileo seems to make ontological or metaphysical claims about the real existence or non-existence of qualities in bodies beside those which can be treated in mathematical terms, instead of simply declining to take into account in his mathematical explanation of natural phenomena certain features of bodies which are not quantifiable. Regarding the issue of Galileo’s metaphysical commitments, some commentators read him as holding a Platonic mathematical ontology (cf. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, 74–83; Koyré, Études Galiléennes) which would provide a metaphysical justification for the application of mathematics to physics. Other scholars argue for a non-metaphysical reading of Galileo, noting that his “distinctive philosophical contribution to the rise of the new science was to show how one can seek to establish the appropriateness of one type of approach to natural science over its competitors without first establishing a metaphysical framework as foundation and support” (Hatfield, “Metaphysics and the New Science”, 118). See also Vanni Rovighi, Storia della Filosofia Moderna, 31–63 and Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography.
- 62.
“General Scholium” of NewtonPhilosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, third edn. (trans. Cohen and Whitman, 943): “I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”
- 63.
Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, I: 186.
- 64.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 179 notes that in his project of grounding physics in metaphysics “Descartes is working in a broadly Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy” while the Galilean project represented a “different strand”: “Galileo’s project was within the domain of mixed mathematics, as it was called, a quantitative account of the world that favoured mathematical description over an account of the ultimate first causes.” Garber concludes with the association of Leibniz with Descartes, and of Newton with Galileo. A comparison of Newton and Descartes’ conceptions of the complex relationship between physics and metaphysics is offered by Janiak, “Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy in Descartes and Newton”. In his forthcoming “Philosophy and Metaphysics in the General Scholium”, Janiak notes that Newton developed his philosophical ideas in an ad hoc manner, without articulating any hierarchy of commitments. Perl, “Physics and Metaphysics in Newton, Leibniz and Clarke”, concludes that Leibniz and Newton “were doing different things”: for Leibniz, metaphysics “enables us to account for those features of experience which are not accessible to the restricted methods of science”; for Newton, “such a metaphysical account is superfluous” since “what is not properly accounted for in natural philosophy is readily accounted for by God” (526). For a comparison between Galileo and Descartes, stressing the non-metaphysical approach of Galileo versus Descartes’ concern with the metaphysical grounding of physics, see Dutton, “Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and Galileo”.
- 65.
Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics.
- 66.
Indeed the claim that phenomena are manifestations of substances and their principles is itself a metaphysical rather than a physical claim; it is an example of how metaphysics provides the grounding of physics but is a different enterprise.
- 67.
Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 383.
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Antognazza, M.R. (2017). Philosophy and Science in Leibniz. In: Strickland, L., Vynckier, E., Weckend, J. (eds) Tercentenary Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Leibniz. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38830-4_2
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