Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

Thought experiments

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Gooding
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Real World ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Experiments ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Thought experiments are strange: they have the power to present surprising results and can profoundly change the way we view the world, all without requiring us to examine the world in the way that ordinary scientific experiments do. Philosophers who view all hypothetical reasoning as a form of thought experimentation regard the method as being as old as philosophy itself. Others maintain that truly informative thought experiments are found only in mathematics and the natural sciences. These emerged in the seventeenth century when the new experimental science of Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, Newton and others forced a distinction between the passive observation of Aristotelian mental narratives and the active interventions of real-world experiment. The new science gave rise to a philosophical puzzle: how can mere thought be so informative about the world? Rationalists argue that thought experiments are exercises in which thought apprehends laws of nature and mathematical truths directly. Empiricists argue that thought experiments are not exercises of ‘mere thought’ because they actually rely upon hidden empirical information – otherwise they would not count as experiments at all. More recently it has been argued that thought experiments are not mysterious because they are constructed arguments that are embedded in the world so as to combine logical and conceptual analysis with relevant features of the world.

Experiential Caribbean

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Origin ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This book examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative knowledge about the natural world, and particularly the body, during the long seventeenth century. It reveals a hitherto untold history about the transformation of early modern natural and human landscapes, one that unfolds outside existent analytical frameworks for the study of the Atlantic world. The book introduces some of the earliest and richest known records carrying the voices of people of African descent, including African themselves, to change our understanding of the dynamics and intellectual spaces in which early modern people produced transformative ideas about the natural world. Caribbean cultures of bodies and healing appeared through a localized epistemological upheaval based on the experiential and articulated by ritual specialists of African origin. These changes resulted from multiple encounters between actors coming from all over the globe that occurred in a social, spiritual, and intellectual realm that, even though ubiquitous, does not appear in existent histories of science, medicine, and the African diaspora. The intellectual leaders of the mostly black and free communities of the seventeenth century Caribbean defined not only how to interpret nature, but also the very sensorial landscapes on which reality could be experienced. They invented a powerful and lasting way of imagining, defining and dealing with the world.

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

Naturalism in social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Benton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Success Of Science ◽  
The One

Naturalism is a term used in several ways. The more specific meanings of ‘naturalism’ in the philosophy of social sciences rest on the great popular authority acquired by modern scientific methods and forms of explanation in the wake of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. For many of the thinkers of the European Enlightenment and their nineteenth-century followers the success of science in uncovering the laws governing the natural world was used as an argument for the extension of its methods into the study of morality, society, government and human mental life. Not only would this bring the benefit of consensus in these contested areas, but also it would provide a sound basis for ameliorative social reform. Among the most influential advocates of naturalism, in this sense, was the early nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. The authority of the new mechanical science, even as an account of non-human nature, continued to be resisted by romantic philosophers. However, the more limited task of resisting the scientific ‘invasion’ of human self-understanding was taken up by the Neo-Kantian philosophers of the latter part of the nineteenth century, in Germany. Followers and associates of this tradition (such as Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey and others) insist that there is a radical gulf between scientific knowledge of nature, and the forms of understanding which are possible in the sphere of humanly created meanings and cultures. This view is argued for in several different ways. Sometimes a contrast is made between the regularities captured in laws of nature, on the one hand, and social rules, on the other. Sometimes human consciousness and self-understanding is opposed to the non-conscious ‘behaviour’ of non-human beings and objects, so that studying society is more like reading a book or having a conversation than it is like studying a chemical reaction.

scholarly journals A Rhapsody in Pink: Reflections on Seducing Nature through World Philosophies by way of James Joyce’s Ulysses

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-264
Author(s):  
David Jones
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The World

Through a reflection on color in the natural world by way of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this paper is an ebullient, rhapsodic, and free-flowing associative meditation on the embodied place of humans in nature. Various sources are employed through a variety of philosophic literature: ancient Western, such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, and Plato; the Continental philosophical tradition, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty; and Asian sources, especially Buddhism (Dōgen and Thich Nat Hanh) and Daoism (Laozi and Zhuangzi). The meditation metaphorically opens with an encounter of the color pink, which is allegorically represented as our entry into the natural world, and how this color has been neutralized through its human intensification in the color red, which in its attempt to exaggerate pink and the natural accomplishes the opposite – the covering up the self-same reality of the world and the human place in the world. The liberation of the feminine by way of Joyce’s character Molly Bloom is heralded as a call to turn again to nature’s world as the only means of human redemption. This turn, or return, is a returning to the natural order by means of learning afresh how to seduce nature to love us as a species again; and in turn, nature holds out an existential challenge to our species – how to say yes, again and again, to who and what we truly are. And the what and who we are is to be in and a part of nature once again.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Staging the World: The Devils as Theatrum Mundi

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-514
Author(s):  
Christophe Van Eecke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Tidal Wave ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Political Allegory ◽  
The World

When Ken Russell's film The Devils was released in 1971 it generated a tidal wave of adverse criticism. The film tells the story of a libertine priest, Grandier, who was burnt at the stake for witchcraft in the French city of Loudun in the early seventeenth century. Because of its extended scenes of sexual hysteria among cloistered nuns, the film soon acquired a reputation for scandal and outrage. This has obscured the very serious political issues that the film addresses. This article argues that The Devils should be read primarily as a political allegory. It shows that the film is structured as a theatrum mundi, which is the allegorical trope of the world as a stage. Rather than as a conventional recreation of historical events (in the tradition of the costume film), Russell treats the trial against Grandier as a comment on the nature of power and politics in general. This is not only reflected in the overall allegorical structure of the theatrum mundi, but also in the use of the film's highly modernist (and therefore timeless) sets, in Russell's use of the mise-en-abyme (a self-reflexive embedded play) and in the introduction of a number of burlesque sequences, all of which are geared towards achieving the film's allegorical import.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

Dreams Give Birth to Reality”. Engraving Austroseraphicum Coelum as an Attempt to Create a New Reality by the Spanish Habsburgs Dynastic Propaganda / Sny rodzą rzeczywistość…”. Grafika Austroseraphicum Coelum jako próba kreowania nowej rzeczywistości za pomocą propagandy dynastycznej Habsburgów hiszpańskich

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kurowiak
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Mission Of God ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church

AbstractAs a work of propaganda, graphics Austroseraphicum Coelum Paulus Pontius should create a new reality, make appearances. The main impression while seeing the graphics is the admiration for the power of Habsburgs, which interacts with the power of the Mother of God. She, in turn, refers the viewer to God, as well as Franciscans placed on the graphic, they become a symbol of the Church. This is a starting point for further interpretation of the drawing. By the presence of certain characters, allegories, symbols, we can see references to a particular political situation in the Netherlands - the war with the northern provinces of Spain. The message of the graphic is: the Spanish Habsburgs, commissioned by the mission of God, they are able to fight all of the enemies, especially Protestants, with the help of Immaculate and the Franciscans. The main aim of the graphic is to convince the viewer that this will happen and to create in his mind a vision of the new reality. But Spain was in the seventeenth century nothing but a shadow of former itself (in the time of Philip IV the general condition of Spain get worse). That was the reason why they wanted to hold the belief that the empire continues unwavering. The form of this work (graphics), also allowed to export them around the world, and the ambiguity of the symbolic system, its contents relate to different contexts, and as a result, the Habsburgs, not only Spanish, they could promote their strength everywhere. Therefore it was used very well as a single work of propaganda, as well as a part of a broader campaign

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