Spring 2025 | Princeton University
In this seminar, we will explore the uses of experience and reason in exploring nature in the early modern period, roughly from the late sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Some, like the debates over the vacuum, or scientific method, will be familiar, but some like the existence of ghosts and witches, or the history of the earth, may be less so. In each case we will be particularly interested in understanding the different ways in which experience and rational arguments are used to arrive at conclusions about the way the world is.
General
Readings
While much of the material we will discuss will be made available on Canvas for you to download, and some will be available online, the following books have been ordered through the Princeton Online Bookstore:
[\c] Descartes, ed. and trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
[\c] Descartes, ed. and trans. Ariew, The World (Hackett, 2023)
[\c] Bacon, ed. Jardine and Silverthorne, The New Organon (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
[\c] Shaffer and Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton University Press, 2011)
[\c] Leibniz and Clarke, ed. Ariew, Correspondence (Hackett, 2000)
Below are the tentative readings for the term. I realize that the program of the seminar is wildly overambitious; the syllabus may be altered as we go. Before each session of the seminar, I will send out a long note with some thoughts about how to approach the readings and what the emphasis in class will be.
Week 1 (Jan. 30): Introductory remarks and Descartes I: Method and experiment
[\o] Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rules 1–8, with particular attention to Rules 5–8
[\o] Descartes, Meteorology, Discourse 8 (On the Rainbow)
[\c] Buchwald, Jed, “Descartes’s Experimental Journey Past the Prism and Through the Invisible World to the Rainbow”
Week 2 (Feb. 6): Descartes II: Descartes meets Galileo
[\o] Excerpts from Galileo, Two New Sciences
[\c] Garber, “A Different Descartes”
[\c] Babeş, Ovidiu, “Mixed Mathematics and Metaphysical Physics: Descartes and the Mechanics of the Flow of Water”
Week 3 (Feb. 13): Descartes vs. Pascal on the Vacuum
Texts from Descartes, Pascal, and others
Week 4 (Feb. 20): Baconian Experimentation
[\o] Bacon, “Great Instauration” and excerpts from The New Organon
Week 5 (Feb. 27): Bacon and the Royal Society
[\c] Bacon, New Atlantis
[\o] Spratt, History of the Royal Society
Week 6 (March 6): The Royal Society and the Vacuum: Leviathan and the Air Pump
[\c] Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump
Week 8 (March 20): Ghosts and Witches in the Royal Society
[\o] Excerpts from Henry More and Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, and other selected authors [On Canvas]
Week 9 (March 27): Experimentation in Alchemy
Visiting session by Jennifer Rampling (Program in the History of Science). Readings to be announced.
Week 10 (April 3): Empirical Investigations of the Anatomy of the Earth
[\o] Descartes, from the Principia philosophiae, part III
[\o] Nicolaus Steno, from the Prodromus
Week 11 (April 10): Newton’s Theory of Color
[\o] Newton, “New Theory about Light and Colors” and excerpts from the Opticks
Week 12 (April 17): Realism and Relativism in Time, Space, and Motion — Descartes, Leibniz, Newton
[\o] Excerpts from Descartes, Principia philosophiae; Newton, Principia; and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence
Week 13 (April 24): Gravitation and Conclusion
[\o] Newton, from the Principia; the Newton/Bentley correspondence; Cotes’s introduction to the second edition of Newton’s Principia; excerpts from Leibniz