Atomism after Wyclif: the cases of Robert Alyngton and Roger Whelpdale (original) (raw)
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Metascience, 2006
This book represents an attempt to give a positive account of Gass-endiÕs contribution to philosophy and science, in contrast to those accounts of his work that tend to see him either as a critic, especially of Aristotle and Descartes, or as a historian of philosophy noted for his expositions of Epicurean atomism. Fisher argues that Gassendi gave a novel articulation of an empiricist theory of knowledge and also defended atomism, and did so in a way that aspired to fashion these two sets of claims into a coherent whole in spite of the difficulty of giving an empirical justification of knowledge of unobservable atoms. On this interpretation, Gassendi made a profound contribution to philosophy in the early modern period that was of lasting value and is even of contemporary relevance. The author documents his account of GassendiÕs views, drawing on a broad sweep of source materials including manuscript materials and lesser-known texts. In Part 1, the first of the bookÕs four parts, the author gives a detailed account of GassendiÕs empiricism, which takes EpicurusÕs position as its starting point and attempts to improve on it. Epicurus had recognised that the senses can mislead, as in the case of a distant square tower appearing round. Epicurus took refuge in the appearances themselves, insisting that, for instance, the brute fact of the apprehension of a round tower by an observer cannot be denied. The key problem with this position is how one gets from the having of a perceptual experience to vindicating some propositional truth about the world. Fisher explores various ways in which Gassendi grappled with the issue. One strategy involved adopting a reliabilist account of the senses that gave up on the idea that the
19th Century Atomism and the Empirical Nature of the Chemical Atom: Dalton Against Lavoisier
This paper addresses the fundamental disagreement between the views of Antoine Lavoisier and John Dalton regarding the scientific and epistemic value of positing indivisible atoms as the most simple and fundamental particles of matter. Lavoisier rejects the epistemic value of such positing and considers it to be mere metaphysical speculation. His emphasis on both empirical data and quantitative analysis greatly influences his position on this issue. In his view, since atoms have no empirically determinable or quantifiable properties, they contribute nothing to actual experimental work or to the chemist’s understanding of chemical elements. Thus, for Lavoisier, the term ‘element’ should not be applied to atoms or to fundamental particles, which he considers to be suspect metaphysical entities. Instead, by ‘element’, Lavoisier means those substances that remain as the last product of chemical analysis. John Dalton, on the other hand, seeks to establish an empirical link between ‘elements’ and ‘atoms’, through the notion of ‘chemical atom’. The challenge for Dalton, however, is to avoid any metaphysical implications in his atomism by employing the experimental and quantitative criteria advanced by Lavoisier. Dalton purports to establish that chemical atoms are empirical entities, that is, that they have empirical and quantifiable features that can be experimentally determined. For Dalton, the primary determinable feature of chemical atoms is their weight. Dalton claims that, since elements are composed of atoms and since there are differences between elements, there must also be differences between the atoms that compose those elements. His chemical atomic theory seeks, among other things, to establish how the atoms of different elements combine to form compounds. He concludes that atoms of different weights combine differently, according to specific laws of proportion, to form the different elements. What this paper seeks to establish is that, despite its flaws, Dalton’s chemical atomism represents the first major attempt at reconciling the empirical and quantitative criteria of modern chemistry with the long-standing theory of discrete particles that account for the fundamental nature of substances. With the support of experiment, analysis, and quantitative data regarding weights, Dalton establishes that chemical atoms have a demonstrable empirical status and are not, as Lavoisier had believed, suspect metaphysical entities.
Atomism and Cartesianism: Gassendi and Gorlaeus (and More) in Utrecht Disputations in the 1650s
Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2023
In the 1650s, two professors of philosophy at the University of Utrecht defended atomism. Interestingly, one of them, Johannes de Bruyn, is considered to be a staunch Cartesian, while the other, Daniel Voet, was a neo-Aristotelian and strongly opposed to Descartes’s philosophy. This article examines this curious situation and analyses the theories of both professors. While converging with Gassendi on several crucial points, their theories relied mainly on other sources. Since De Bruyn’s atomistic view has never been studied before, the main part of the article is devoted to him and his sources. Surprisingly, it turns out that David Gorlaeus was a source of inspiration for De Bruyn’s development of a new type of Cartesianism.
An Atomist Genealogy of New Materialism
European New Materialisms, eds. F. Colman and I. van der Tuin (under contract, forthcoming), 2020
Categories such as chance, contingency, probability, and aleatoricism are often used, but not spelt out as the foundation for neomaterialism or more general materialist philosophies. As Marx and Engels (1968) point out, materialism has occupied a largely marginal position in the history of philosophy and, for Marx at least, even the staunchest materialists, such as Feuerbach, reveal a covert idealism. The problem lies, Marx (1959) argues, in the fact that practically all materialist philosophers-including Feuerbach-have maintained a 'subjective' perspective instead of moving towards a more third-party's view, one pertaining to science. This statement bears a striking resemblance to François Laruelle's project of non-philosophy, which calls upon the abandonment of the 'principle of philosophical sufficiency', assuming instead a posture of thought that emulates science's treatment of the real. 1 The latter concerns the fact that science does not seek to 'express' or convey 'the essence' of anything 'in itself'. Rather, it recognises 'the indifference of the real' to its aspirations and assumes a relation of unilaterality vis-à-vis the real (Laruelle 1989: 56). The outside world-exteriority-is not 'endowed with meaning' that science seeks to relay, but rather submits to its constitutive foreclosure whilst explaining 'how it works'. The latter is termed 'description' by way of 'cloning' the real (Laruelle 2014: 28, 51 et passim), or by way of superposition (Gangle and Greve 2017). The use of physics and categories of natural philosophy for contemporary materialist philosophy draws on the legacy of Greek atomism. In order to speak of materialism proper, rather than the one criticised by Marx as merely covert or reversed idealism, we claim that, following Marx, any contemporary re-appropriation of Greek atomism ought to posit the notions of clinamen (in Greek: παρέγκλισις), aleatoricism, uncertainty, and transcending the philosophical-theological belief in ideality, as its founding tenets. Materialist atomism seeks to traverse the membrane between subject and object, and to position itself beyond the logic of subjectivisation. In this way it transcends the centrality of subjectivity as the core problem of the pseudo-materialism criticised by Marx. Materialist atomism is implicitly projected onto the boundary between subject and object whilst displacing them, decentering them from their classical positions-as, for example, in the speculative binary criticised by Luce Irigaray (1985) in Speculum of the Other Woman. Therefore, its explicit problematisation needs to be articulated in a way that genealogises the origin of that very boundary. In this chapter we provide a genealogy of new materialism rooted/