Forgotten Addison, founder of Philosophy of Science, and the patron of bloggers

It gives me much Despair in the Design of reforming the World by my Speculations, when I find there always arise, from one Generation to another, successive Cheats and Bubbles, as naturally as Beasts of Prey, and those which are to be their Food.--Steele (6/30/1712), #444, The Spectator.

Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.--Hume.

Addison is forgotten.

Hume wrote before the revival of professional philosophy, and so assumed an 'equitable posterity' that was not to be. Professional philosophy has not been kind to the very best essayists--Montaigne, Bacon, and Seneca are familiar names vaguely associated with doctrines or moments (history of skepticism, fideism, crucial experiment, inductions, Stoic suicide, etc.), but they  have not attracted philosophical scholarly industries. Even Hume's great essays tend to be read mostly for supporting evidence--the exception, 'Of Miracles,' the least artful or profound of the lot.

Addison gets passing, sometimes respectable mention in works devoted to eighteenth-century aesthetics (sublime, taste, etc.). Yet, together with Steele, Addison is the patron-saint of today's philosophical bloggers. He wrote (near) daily essays with a lively comments section (including trolls), and found a proper mix of familiarity and surprise in keeping readers engaged over extended period. Steel and Addison were also, despite Hume's deflationary representation of Addison in the full paragraph from which I quote above, subtle thinkers, who -- as Steele notes above -- use reflection to reform their world. They are not mere spectators.

For present purposes, I define 'philosophy of science' as the disinterested study of science with the aim of making generalizations about the nature and methods of the science(s) and scientists. Thus defined scientists can engage in philosophy of science as a kind of second-order practice within the science(s), and they have done so even before the category 'science' took on its present (post 19th century) meaning. If we except scholastic text-books and their authors,  until the eighteenth century nearly all 'philosophy of science' was done by practicing scientists or natural philosophers. This changed in the eighteenth century in response to three non-trivial developments:

• (i) people wished to understand and, if possible, replicate elsewhere the nature of the breakthroughs associated with names like Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Boyle, Swammerdam, etc.
• (ii) folk were responding to hegemonic claims inspired by (i) of people that were advocating particular, often mathematical methods associated with the name 'Newton' meant to displace alternative forms of knowing;
• (iii) some were anxious to refute Spinoza and Spinozism, which was critical of features of the mathematical sciences and presented itself in the garb of the new science.

In practice, (ii)-(iii) were often conflated in multi-layered debates over the status of final causes, providence, and action at a distance. That is to say, the origins of our philosophy of science is to be found in very polemical contexts. And some of what we would take to be the best philosophy of science of the period (e.g., Nieuwentyt, Hume, etc.) is clearly motivated to advance/oppose final causes, natural religion, moral knowledge, etc. If one were to take the 'disinterested' in my proto-definition above seriously, there is very little philosophy of science in the early modern period. Even the profound Locke's contributions to epistemology pertain little to philosophy of science because too far removed from the contents of scientific theory and practice. 

Except, Addison. Spectator 420 (7/2/1712), offers the start of a philosophy of science. In his essay, he treats science 'naturalistically' as a human enterprise alongside other forms of human knowledge (history, geographers, etc.). His approach is distinctly social--scientists appeal to each other's passions.* He emphasizes the role of the imagination in science. In fact, his little essay is designed to "shew us the proper Limits, as well as the Defectiveness of our Imagination." His crucial point echoes Descartes and anticipates Hume's arguments in Treatise 1.2; it concerns the gap between the imagination and the understanding.  For Addison, the embodied imagination is inherently limited in its ability to grasp and distinguish among certain purported facts; this matters because the imagination is the empirical faculty (in combination with the senses). By contrast, the faculty of eason can give us a sense of the infinitely large, infinitely small, and infinite variety (etc.), but it does not secure for us access to these as "visible Objects of a real Existence." Addison offers, thus, a critique of the scientific imagination within an empiricist framework.

Strikingly, in essay 420, Addison executes this without even taking notice of the polemics associated with (ii)-(iii). This is not to deny that Addison's project can be turned into an intervention in some such polemic (see some of the other essays). Obviously, Addison's brief piece lacks essential detail, and does not consider a variety of objections, nor does it consider the sciences as themselves the product of historical development.

Adam Smith's "History of Astronomy" adopts Addison's approach without the defects noted in previous paragraph, and develops, perhaps the first full account of a social epistemology adequate to the history and practices of the sciences (and their "revolutions"). While Smith's Astronomy stretches the essay-format (it was first published as the crown-juwel in Smith's Essays on Philosophical Subjects), it can be shown to have prompted the development of professional philosophy of science. Long ago, Laura Snyder called my attention to the following letter from Whewell to Richard Jones, 23 September 1822, to be found in the Whewell Papers (Add.ms.c.51 f.15):

I still meditate doing something about the History of the Metaphysics of Mechanics though as yet it is only intention. Something like Smith’s History of Astronomy but with more historical facts"

Addison's sensitivity to the embodied nature of knowledge remain timely.

 

*This move may well be deflationary; Addison clearly suggests that some of the historian's appeal is grounded in being artfully pleasing.

Comments

[M. Anderson]

I'm pleased to see that you're back, Eric. I've been missing your history/philosophy of science posts over at New APPS.

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you for your kind words.

[Miles Rind]

Addison forgotten? I'll have you know that the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006) contains an article on Addison! I happen to know this because I wrote it. I confess, though, that it never occurred to me in writing it to make any claim for Addison as a philosopher of science, let alone a proto-blogger.

To describe Spectator 420 as a "start of a philosophy of science" that "emphasizes the role of the imagination in science," though, seems to me backwards, or at least misleading. I would rather say that, as the penultimate in the series of essays on the pleasures of imagination, it is a discussion of the exercise of the imagination in all fields of inquiry, among them what we today call "science" ("natural philosophy" to Addison).

I don't understand your description of the imagination as, in Addison's view, "the empirical faculty" (emphasis in original). I've long had my belly full of "faculty" talk from reading beastly Kant, but at least Kant is pretty good about saying what something is supposed to be the faculty of when he uses the word: without that specification, to call something a "faculty" simpliciter is empty. Do you mean that the imagination is a faculty of empirical ideas, because it reproduces ideas derived from experience (that is, of course, as Addison, following Locke, understands it)?

(I have just found on previewing this that the italic html codes that I inserted into my text do nothing. Pfui!)

[Eric Schliesser]

I am sad to go without your italics, Miles.
That an expert on 18th century aesthetics (as you are) is aware of Addison, and has written on it is no surprise. But that does not mean that his significance outside this area is understood or even explored. (I plead guilty, too.)
Yes, for Addison the imagination (and this true for most of the early moderns) reproduces and works with ideas derived from experience. (I didn't mean to suggest he was original on this score.)
I do not deny that Spectator 420 is part of the series on the pleasures and workings of the imagination. (I don't ignore these pleasures entirely, by the way--see the last sentence of the post.) It's just that I focus on the relevance of these pleasures to science in the argument of 420. And that relevance is not exclusively aesthetic.