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Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332 Pietro Daniel Omodeo Rodolfo Garau Editors Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Volume 332 Editors Alisa Bokulich, Boston University Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Michela Massimi, University of Edinburgh Managing Editor Lindy Divarci, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Editorial Board Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens Heather E. Douglas, University of Waterloo Jean Gayon, Université Paris 1 Thomas F. Glick, Boston University Hubert Goenner, University of Goettingen John Heilbron, University of California, Berkeley Diana Kormos-Buchwald, California Institute of Technology Christoph Lehner, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Peter McLaughlin, Universität Heidelberg Agustı Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Nuccio Ordine, Universitá della Calabria Sylvan S. Schweber, Harvard University Ana Simões, Universidade de Lisboa John J. Stachel, Boston University Baichun Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science The series Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science was conceived in the broadest framework of interdisciplinary and international concerns. Natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists and philosophers have contributed to the series, as have historians and sociologists of science, linguists, psychologists, physicians, and literary critics. The series has been able to include works by authors from many other countries around the world. The editors believe that the history and philosophy of science should itself be scientific, self-consciously critical, humane as well as rational, sceptical and undogmatic while also receptive to discussion of first principles. One of the aims of Boston Studies, therefore, is to develop collaboration among scientists, historians and philosophers. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science looks into and reflects on interactions between epistemological and historical dimensions in an effort to understand the scientific enterprise from every viewpoint. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5710 Pietro Daniel Omodeo • Rodolfo Garau Editors Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science Editors Pietro Daniel Omodeo Rodolfo Garau ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA n. 725883) (GA n. 725883) Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venezia, Italy Venezia, Italy This volume is an outcome of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 725883 Early Modern Cosmology) ISSN 0068-0346 ISSN 2214-7942 (electronic) Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ISBN 978-3-319-67376-9 ISBN 978-3-319-67378-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the institutions that supported our research and made this collective volume possible: the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG), Department I; the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Episteme in Motion’ (at the Freie Universität of Berlin), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); the University of Turin (Italy); the Israel Science Foundation (grant 469/13 based at Bar-Ilan University, and in particular professor Ohad Nachtomy); the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières; Bard College Berlin; the interdisciplinary laboratory Bild Wissen Gestaltung at the Humboldt University of Berlin (and in particular professor Christian Kassung and doctor Stefan Zieme); and the consolidator project Early Modern Cosmology funded by the European Research Council and based at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. We would also like to thank all the participants of the MPIWG Workshop The Idea of Contingency in Natural Philosophy and Science (which ran from January 2015 to December 2015), of the panel Contingency in the Early Modern Science and Natural Philosophy (History of Science Society, Chicago, November 6, 2014), and of the panel Matter of Contingency in the Early Modern Science of Nature (international conference Understanding Matter, Palermo, April 10–13, 2014) for their useful and constructive comments. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who provided very useful comments, and Ian Lawson and Lindsay Parkhowell for the English revision of the papers. v Contents 1 Overview: Contingency in Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Stephen Gaukroger 2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Rodolfo Garau and Pietro Daniel Omodeo 3 Contingency and Causal Determinism from Scotus to Buridan. . . . . 27 Magali Roques 4 Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Silvia Manzo 5 Practices and Theories of Contingency in Renaissance Approaches to Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Pietro Daniel Omodeo 6 “Qualis alio modo reperiri non potest.” A Few Words on Copernican Necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Jonathan N. Regier 7 Astrological Contingency: Between Ontology and Epistemology (1300–1600) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Steven Vanden Broecke 8 Secundum Quid and Contingentia: Scholastic Reminiscences in Early Modern Mechanics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Pietro Daniel Omodeo 9 Manipulating Matter and Its Appetites: Francis Bacon on Causation and the Creation of Preternaturals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Doina-Cristina Rusu vii viii Contents 10 Descartes’ Physics in Le Monde and the Late-Scholastic Idea of Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Rodolfo Garau 11 Bacon and the Virtuosi: Experimental Contingency and Mechanical Laws in the Early Royal Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Francesco G. Sacco 12 Necessity, Contingency, and Freedom in Descartes’ Physiology: Spontaneity in Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Balint Kekedi 13 Losing One’s Temper: Contingency in Early Modern Medicine . . . . 265 Sean Dyde 14 The Immanent Contingency of Physical Laws in Leibniz’s Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Tzuchien Tho 15 Ars experimentandi et conjectandi. Laws of Nature, Material Objects, and Contingent Circumstances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Enrico Pasini Chapter 1 Overview: Contingency in Nature Stephen Gaukroger As far as scientific theories are concerned, contingent events are those that fall outside their explanatory framework, either because the theory doesn’t have the resources to explain them or because the events are unpredictable in principle. In what follows, the focus is on contingency as a problem about how we describe those features of the world that fall outside our best theories including our best high-level theories. On this understanding of contingency, contingent things are things that just happen. I want to explore how contingency, in this sense, has remained a problem from ancient to early modern scientific theories and to sketch how what might be termed “the problem of contingency” has been transformed. Let me start with Aristotle, who brings out the issues well. There are two kinds of contingencies in Aristotle, which may be connected, but which for simplicity I want to keep apart.1 The first is the distinction between events that have an explanation and accidents. Consider Aristotle’s example of two cases. In the first, I learn that a man who owes me money is going to be at the market at a particular time on a particular day, and knowing this I go to the market to confront him. In the second, I do not know where the man is, and I just happen to be in the market where he is. For Aristotle, the first meeting has an explanation: I purposely went to the market to meet the debtor. The second is accidental. It was pure chance that I happened to be in the market at the same time as him, and accidents do not have explanations: that is why we call them accidents. The Stoics, by contrast, did not believe in accidental events. They were determinists, and they argued that, in the second case, there was a chain of events that caused me to be in the market at a particular time and there 1 For a full and detailed account of contingency in Aristotle and in the Stoics, see Richard Sorabji (1980). S. Gaukroger (*) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_1 2 S. Gaukroger was a chain of events that caused the man to be there at that time, and if we go back far enough in the chains of events, we can connect the two. For the Stoic, there are no contingencies in nature, whereas for Aristotle there are. But what I want to focus on is a second kind of contingency, which is specific to scientific explanation. Aristotle’s conception of scientific demonstration is that demonstrations identify the nature of bodies and account for their properties in terms of these natures. I say that this tree puts out broad flat leaves in Spring because it is an elm, and that is what elms do. I say that this body falls to the ground when released from my grip because that is what heavy bodies do. I have accounted for the behavior of the body by identifying its nature. But some behavior that bodies manifest is not due to their nature. When I throw a body in the air, then its behavior is not due to its nature: it is unnatural. Aristotelian physics does not explain such unnatural behavior: it falls outside the domain of science. The problem was of course that much of this inexplicable behavior turned out to be basic to natural processes. The ancient practical mathematical disciplines that captured it—such as statics, optics, and astronomy—were neither physics, which derived things from physical natures, or mathematics, which derived behavior from mathematical natures (as in deriving the sum of the internal angles of a triangle from more basic properties of triangles). What replaced the Aristotelian notion of explanation in the seventeenth century was mechanism, which had two features.2 First, macroscopic physical events are reducible to the interactions between micro- corpuscles that make up bodies: there is nothing in the natural realm that cannot be accounted for in micro-corpuscularian terms, and this is the ultimate form of all natural explanations. Second, all interactions between these micro-corpuscles are deemed to be a result of exchange of motion resulting from physical contact and are as a consequence characterizable wholly in terms of mechanics. For mechanists, anything that fell outside these constraints—anything not susceptible to micro-reduction and whose constituents were not describable wholly in mechanical terms—was not part of the physical domain. The mechanists had two options in such cases. First, it could be reduced to something physical. Life, for example, was reduced to biomechanics, so that there were no genuinely living things: life was just an appearance caused by a particular kind of mechanical com- plexity. The second kind of case is the one of relevance to us here. This is where qualitative features of the world, such as colors and sounds, are construed as psychic additions of the perceiving mind. In the second half of the seventeenth century, mechanists were fixated on the task of absolving physical enquiry of responsibility for a huge range of questions that had been the staple of physical enquiry since antiquity. These were effectively treated as merely contingent features of the uni- verse, by contrast with the real physical core. Of course, mechanists would not have put it in these terms. They insisted that the mechanist core was all there was to the world: it was just that there were all these added extras which one could ultimately get rid of. But they were not added extras: they were events that it was beyond the resources of mechanism to explain. 2 See Gaukroger (2006).