Table Of ContentBoston 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
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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
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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 explana-
tion 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 expla-
nation 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).
