| |
|
Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
The revolutionary thinking of the 16th and 17th Centuries began with a new view of the physical universe and proceded to a new view of the human being.
Copernicus won acceptance for the view that the earth moved round the sun; Kepler that the planets followed ellipsoid paths; Galileo using his new telescope pushed the envelope of human understanding of their universe further and further out.
(I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics, Penguin/Pelican edition 1992; 1st published 1960)
The law of inertia was formulated by Galileo, and incorporated by Newton into a new system of laws.
But beyond these developments a new idea of physicality took shape.
The new view of the physical universe involved a new view of 'physicality' or 'corporeality'.
It may be said that the Scholastic conception of the human being drew a distinction between 'body' and 'mind', but drew the dividing line in a different place (Kenny). But this might be misleading if it camouflaged the fact that the understanding of 'body' shifted decisively too.
It is easier for us to recognise a view which achieved consensus towards the end of the 17th Century: the view that everything physical consisted of configurations of small simple particles or corpuscles. This is an example of the idea that there is a stuff out of which everything physical is made, just as every piecrust is made of pastry.
Aquinas did not think of a material thing as made up of either particles or a stretch of the continuum. He thought an animal (for example) was made of 'matter' but in a completely different sense from either of these. Matter for Aquinas was a 'potential'.
Today people speak easily of 'matter' being 'made up of' this and that. But perhaps they shouldn't! The notion of 'matter' is a complicated one, with a complicated history.
The Scholastics thought in terms of something they called 'prima materia', a forerunner perhaps of the mosern notion of 'matter'. But materia prima was nothing like a 'stuff', nothing like a 'thing', nothing like a configuartion of atoms.
The notion of Prime Matter was reached for by the Scholastics in order to give a way of talking about a certain kind of change. What makes a thing the sort of thing that it is, according to Aquinas, is what they called its 'form'. When eg a dog got older it remianed the same sort of thing - a dog: and many changes seemed to be like this. But sometimes one type of thing seems to change into another, as when milk turns into cheese. In these cases it's not that one thing stuff passes out of existence and another comes into being - in some sense there is continuity. How are we to think of this continuing stuff? The Scholastics had a problem in answering this because they thought that everything had to be a thing of a particular sort; and every stuff (wood) had to be a stuff of a particular sort. So what sort of stuff could it be that survived the change from milk to cheese? It couldn't be any sort of stuff!
It can't be any kind of stuff if it's true, as the Scholastics took it to be true, that there can't be stuff without it being a particular kind of stuff.
Or would one solution be to say it is a kind of stuff, and we should call this kind of stuff 'matter' - ?
We should then have the implication that milk and cheese were both at the same time matter.
In fact however Aquinas adopted another alternative, which was to hold that the continuity between milk and cheese wasn't a continuity of stuff at all but continuity of 'potential'. It's not at all clear what this suggestion amounts to, and it's even less clear when the label 'materia prima' is attached to it. Is it any more than the assertion that the milk had the potential of becoming the cheese? This makes sense without throwing any light. But to call the potential 'materia prima' is positively obfuscating, because it suggests there is something which is first milk and second cheese but which is not a stuff at all.
Scruton says that Descartes was influenced by his reading of Galileo (Dialogues on the two Principal World Systems, 1625-9)but was himself responsible for emphasising the significance of the law of inertia. Scruton says the traditional understanding had been that behind every movement was a 'mover': the law of inertia stated that a thing carried on moving (or stationary) unless acted on. According to Scruton, it was this that paved the way for Newton.
Paradoxical! If he is right, the new science was born on the thought that somethings don't need explaining! Is this Scruton stirring?
There nothing wrong with this I don't think. It was acknowledged that one kind of stuff could be at the same time
This stuff is first milk and then cheese. What we seem to asking is what is it
Whatever it is that is common to the milk and the cheese couldn't be
, because what made it the sort of thing that it was was its Form, and we are trying to think of what sort of stuff it is when it is neither milk nore cheese.
 |
Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
|