The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition

269 Pages·1991·15.78 MB·English

by  Keith Hutchison (auth.)

THE USES OF ANTIQUITY
AUSTRALASIAN STUDIES
IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
VOLUME 10
General Editor:
R. W. HOME, University of Melbourne
Editorial Advisory Board:
W. R. ALBURY, University ofN ew South Wales
D. W. CHAMBERS, Deakin University
R. JOHNSTON, University ofWollongong
H. E. LE GRAND, University of Melbourne
A. MUSGRAY E, University of Otago
G. C. NERLICH, University ofA delaide
D. R. OLDROYD, University of New South Wales
E. RICHARDS, University ofWollongong
J. J. C. SMART, Australian National University
R. YEO, Griffith University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
THE USES OF ANTIQUITY
The Scientific Revolution and the
Classical Tradition
Editedby
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy,
University ofS ydney, Australia
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Uses of antiquity . the scientific revolution and the classical
tradltion / edited by Stephen Gaukroger.
p. cm. -- (Australasian studies in history and philosophy of
science ; v. 10)
Inc 1u des index.
ISBN 978-94-010-5510-9 ISBN 978-94-011-3412-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-3412-5
1. Science, Anclent_ 2. SClence--Philosophy--History--17th
century_ L Gaukroger, S-rephen_ II. Series_
Q124.95.U83 1991
509--dc20 90-26819
ISBN 978-94-010-5510-9
Printed an acid-free paper
AlI Rights Reserved
© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1991
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1991
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permis sion from the copyright owner_
FOREWORD
The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a
distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early -
though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An
initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne
immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appoint
ments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the
1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the
world. Today there are major Departments at the University of
Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of
W ollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia
and in New Zealand.
'Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science' aims to
provide a distinctive pUblication outlet for Australian and New Zealand
scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social
studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a
connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with
special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues,
however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further
more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from
Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no
means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively
encouraged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in
question.
RW.Home
General Editor
Australasian Studies in History
and Philosophy ofS cience
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
STEPHEN GAUKROGER / Introduction: The Idea of Antiquity ix
KEITH HUTCHISON / Copernicus, Apollo, and Herakles 1
JOHN SUTTON / Religion and the Failures of Determinism 25
JAMIE C. KASSLER / The Paradox of Power: Hobbes and
Stoic Naturalism 53
UDO THIEL / Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of
Consciousness 79
ALEXANDER JACOB / The Neoplatonic Conception of
Nature in More, Cudworth, and Berkeley 101
JAMES FRANKLIN / The Ancient Legal Sources of Seven-
teenth-Century Probability 123
KIRSTEN BIRKETT and DAVID OLDROYD / Robert Hooke,
Physico-Mythology, Knowledge of the World of the Ancients
and Knowledge of the Ancient World 145
JOHN GASCOIGNE / 'The Wisdom of the Egyptians' and the
Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton 171
GARRY W. TROMPF / On Newtonian History 213
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 251
INDEX OF MYTHICAL AND HISTORICAL FIGURES 253
Vll
STEPHEN GAUKROGER
INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY
Antiquity was conceived of, put to use, and reassessed in various ways
in natural philosophy and what might broadly be termed metaphysics in
the period between Copernicus and Newton. The papers in this collec
tion deal with questions about the symbolic and polemical uses of
antiquity, with antiquity as a fund of ideas or as a source of evidence,
and above all with the ways in which an image of antiquity was
constructed and put to use in contemporary debates. As an introduc
tion to these questions, I want to set the scene by drawing attention to a
feature of pre-Enlightenment thought about antiquity that, in its more
extreme form, can only be termed a Christian-allegorical reading of
antiquity. It is a reading in which ancient thought is construed as
leading inexorably to, and finding its culmination in, Christian dogma.
This makes the interpretation of antiquity a question charged with
controversy, and no more so than in the period under consideration in
this collection.
During the Enlightenment, the period from Copernicus to Newton
was pictured in terms of a struggle between those who relied exclusively
on the storehouse of ancient wisdom, and those who managed to break
free from the shackles of the past and start out on a fresh path, the
struggle being won decisively by the latter. Voltaire summed up the
victory in his article on Job in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, in the
claim that there wasn't a book in science in his day 'that is not more
useful than all the books of antiquity'. The failings of this picture of
what came to be termed 'the quarrel between the ancients and the
moderns' are now well known. It fails to face up to the way in which the
past was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It fails to take
account of the complex ways in which the past was conceived, and
especially the way in which it was extensively drawn upon to defend or
attack contemporary views both by the followers of the 'ancients', and
the moderns alike. It also fails to take account of the fact that there was
considerable uncertainty as to how the past was to be understood, on
its significance, on what kinds of evidence could be drawn upon, as well
as on the vexed question of cultural diffusion in antiquity. These latter
ix
Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses ofA ntiquity, ix-xvi.
© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
x STEPHEN GAUKROGER
questions, about how antiquity was to be conceived, had a very signifi
cant bearing on how considerations about the past were used in argu
ment, and indeed the two sets of questions are in many respects
intimately bound together.
As an illustration, take the case of Joseph Glanville. Glanville was a
staunch modernist, and was - with Cowley, Evelyn, and Sprat - one
of the principal apologists for the Royal Society in the Restoration. He
was an ardent follower of Bacon, an empiricist, and (despite his belief
in witchcraft) a proponent of scepticism in all matters not scientifically
demonstrable. In A Letter to a Friend Concerning Aristotle (1665), he
spells out his modernist opposition to Aristotle in a way which, far
from pitting the moderns against antiquity, uses antiquity to rebut
Aristotle:
... the reverence 1 have to the more antient Sages, which Aristotle frequently traduced,
and unworthily abused, animated me to more Severity against him, than upon another
occasion had perhaps been so pardonable and becoming. And that Aristotle dealt so
invidiously with the Philosophers that were before him, will not need much proof to
one, that is but indifferently acquainted with his writings. The great Lord Bacon hath
particularly charged him with this unworthiness in his excellent Advancement of
Learning, wherein he says, that 'Aristotle as though he had been of the race of
Ottomans, thought he could not reign, except that the first thing he did, he kill'd all his
Brethren.' And elsewhere in the same Discourse 'I cannot a little marvel at the
Philosopher Aristotle, that proceeded in such a spirit of difference and contradiction to
all Antiquity, undertaking not only to frame new words of Science at pleasure, but to
confound and extinguish all the antient Wisdom, insomuch that he never names any
Antient Author, but to confute or reprove him' consonant whereunto are the observa
tions of Patricius that he carpes at the Antients by name in more than 250 places, and
without name in more than 1000. [H]e reprehends 46 Philosophers of worth, besides
Poets and Rhetoricians, and most of all spent his spleen upon his excellent and
venerable Master Plato, whom in above 60 places by name he hath contradicted. And
as Plato opposed all the Sophisters, and but two Philosophers, viz. Anaxagoras and
Heraclitus; so Aristotle that he might be opposite to him in, this also, oppos'd all the
Philosophers, and but two Sophisters viz, Protogoras and Gorgias. Yea, and not only
assaulted them with his arguments, but persecuted them by his reproaches, calling the
Philosophy of Empedocles, and all the Antients Stuttering; Xenocrates, and Melissus,
Rusticks; Anaxagoras, simple and inconsiderate; yea, and all of them in a heap, as
Patricius testifies, gross Ignorants, Fools and Madmen. How fit then think you is it that
the World should now be obliged to so tender and awful a respect to the Libeller of the
most Venerable Sages, as that it should be a crime next Heresie to endeavour, though
never so modestly, to weaken his textuary and usurp'd authority? when my veneration
of the greater Antiquity extorted from me those strictures against the proud Antagonist
of all the ancient and more valuable Wisdom? I
INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF ANTIQUITY xi
In short, Aristotle is a parvenu, aggrandizing himself at the expense of
his more illustrious predecessors. What Glanville seeks to put in the
place of Aristotelian natural philosophy is a form of atomism, but his
vindication of it lies not in its subsequent success as a natural phi
losophy in his own day, but in its claim to have been the first or original
philosophy, this priority somehow being linked to its present success:
That the Aristotelian was not the antient Philosophy, but the Corpuscularian and
Atomical, which to the great hinderance of Science lay long buryed in neglect and
oblivion, but hath in these latter Ages been again restored to the light and it's deserv'd
repute and value. And that the Atomical Hypothesis was the First and most Antient, of
which there is any memory in Physiology, is notoriously known to all, that know the
Age of Democritus; who was one of those Four Sages that brought the learning of the
Aegyptians among the Grecians: Orpheus bringing in Theology; Thales the Mathe
maticks; our Democritus, natural Philosophy; and Pythagoras all Three, with the Moral.
Now the learning of the Aegyptians came from the Chaldeans, and was convey'd to
them, as some learned men affirm, by Abraham, who was of kin to Zoroaster to great
Chaldean Legislatour and Philosopher; which Zoroaster lived 290 years after the
Flood, and as Pliny saith, was the Schollar of Azonaces, whom Antiquaries affirm to
have been of the Schoole of Sem and Heber. The Atomical Philosophy then coming
from the Aegyptians to the Grecians, and from the Chaldeans to them; is without doubt
of the most venerable Antiquity; and the Aristotelian a very novelty in compare with
that grey Hypothesis: at the best, a degeneracy and corruption of the most antient
Wisdom. Yea, and 'tis the complaint of several learned Men, which whoever knows any
thing of Aristoteles Sectators will justifie, That the Modern Peripateticks have as farr
receded from his sense, as from the Truth of Things. For it hath been the Fashion of
his Interpreters both Greeks, Latins, and Arabians, to form whole Doctrines from
catches and scraps of sentences, without attending to the analogy and main scope of his
Writings. From which method of interpretation hath proceeded a spurious medly of
nice, spinose and useless notions, that is but little of kin to Aristotle or nature. So that
whatever of genuine Aristotelian is in those works that bare his name; There's little of
Aristotle in his Schools. And 'tis no indignity to Antiquity or the Stagyrite, to oppose
the corruption and abuse of both. And to endeavour to restore the Antients to their
just estimation, which hath been usurp't from them by a modern and spurious Learning.
And though I grudge not Aristotles esteem while it is not prejudicial to the respect we
owe his Betters; yet I regret that excessive and undue veneration which fondly sets him
so much above all the more valuable Antients.2
This kind of attempt to find the most ancient sources of modern
doctrines is a coman one in the seventeenth century, and it has seemed
to many commentators that Hermeticism provides the key to under
standing what lies behind such a project.3 But the reconstruction of
ancient sources was not confined to Hermeticism at all, and the kind of
project in Georg Horn's Historiae Philosophicae (Leiden, 1655) for
XlI STEPHEN GAUKROGER
example - where all philosophy is traced back to Adam, the various
philosophical schools or sects being simply a result of the fall - is just a
more orthodox version (at least in Protestant countries) of the kind of
enterprise fostered by the Hermeticists. Moreover, Isaac Casaubon's
demonstration, in 1614, that at least a very significant part of the
Corpus Hermeticum dated from the Christian era, seriously under
mined the Hermetic attempt to establish the identity of Platonism and
Christianity. It is true that writers such as Cudworth questioned a
number of aspects of Casaubon's dating: he refuses to accept, for
example, that the presence of elements of Greek philosophy precluded
an earlier dating, on the grounds that since 'Pythagorism, Platonism and
the Greek Learning in general, was in great part derived from the
Egyptians, it cannot be concluded, that whatever is Grecanical, there
fore was not Egyptian.' But Cudworth does not rely on Hermetic
4
sources as evidence, as Fieino has done in his Theologia Platonica
(1469-7 4), the pioneering Hermetic work of the Renaissance. This is
instructive, for both the Theologia and Cudworth's True Intellectual
System of the Universe were concerned to combat materialist and
naturalist philosophies which defend such doctrines as the eternity of
the world, the mortality of the soul, and the regulation of nature by
blind necessity. Moreover, both see the sources of these doctrines in
Epicurean atomism, or in Stoicism or variants of Aristotelianism, both
rely on Plato and especially Plotinus, and both provide complex gene
alogies for their own views. But whereas Ficino can simply take it that
the Corpus Hermeticum provides conclusive evidence that Platonism
and Christianity were essentially the same system, expressed differently,
Cudworth is forced to be much more circumspect about the historical
evidence. Moreover, his core metaphysical/natural-philosophical thesis,
that an atomist natural philosophy entails a commitment to dualism, is
supported both on historical grounds, by an elaborate reconstruction of
early thought on which it transpires that the Pythagoreans were the first
atomists, and on quite independent conceptual grounds, by means of an
argument designed to show that an atomist construal of matter as
essentially inert requires us to postulate active agencies in nature over
and above matter.
Given this last argument, one may wonder why Cudworth devotes
such an immense amount of attention to the historical case: just as one
may wonder why Glanville - albeit no doubt influenced by his friend
Cudworth - chooses to defend atomism, the scientific success of which