A preface (co-written with Zvi Biener), defending the title 'Newton and Empiricism,' has come under fire from the Otago-school (see this post by Kirsten Walsh). The Otago-school insists that 'empiricism' is anachronistic and that we need to use a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophers (they use the acronym ESD) in order to do justice to even Newton. Here's Walsh:
Over the last four years, we have provided many arguments for the superiority of the ESD over the RED. An important line of argument has been to show that ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘speculative philosophy’ were the key terms of reference used by the actors themselves, and that they characterised their own work in terms of this division. For example, I have argued here, here, here and here that Newton is best understood as an experimental philosopher.
It's true there are features of Newton's enterprise that fit the 'experimental' paradigm (as understood by early modernists) nicely--the Opticks is characteristic this (as I.B. Cohen recognized a long time ago). The problem is 'Otago' has never come to terms to the fact that Newton's Principia is much better understood in terms of Huygens's Horologium Oscillatorium, which is presupposed in a lot of the technical discussions of the Principia. Huygens' book does not fit the ESD at all. Strikingly in her blog post, Walsh misses this point even though it was signalled in the very first paragraph of our introduction: "Newton...explicitly affiliated himself in the Principia with the mathematical-experimental tradition of Galileo and Huygens." That is to say, the ESD fits the mainstream in the Royal Society (say between 1660-1685) very well, but is un-illuminating in other respects.* Sure, it's legitimate to claim that in some respects Newton is a "development of the experimental philosophy," (emphasis in original) but if you systematically overlook the Horologium, you can't even begin to do justice to Newton's Principia. It's like discussing Virgil in the context of Roman poetry without ever mentioning Homer.
To put the point in the previous paragraph in a counter-factual way: if Newton had not replaced his original draft for the system of the world (now known as the Treatise, it was published shortly after his death), then the different parts of the Principia would have fit much more easily into the ESD. In the published introduction to Book III of the Principia, Newton writes he suppressed his Treatise in order to “avoid lengthy disputes” with others’ “preconceptions.” (Newton 1999: 793) The prejudices he has in mind are not merely “vulgar,” but rather philosophical, that is, those in circulation amongst the learned (especially, Hooke and others at the Royal Society). For the Treatise is more speculatively metaphysical than the published version of Book III. So, Newton knew what he was rejecting--a whole package of practices that are (implicitly) captured by ESD.
Now, one might read my argument so far and say, 'well Schliesser, all you have shown is that the Otago school is adopting the wrong actor's categories, not that there is a problem wit h doing so.' Now, it's true that for some purposes actor's categories may well be illuminating. But if you presuppose "the superiority" of this approach, you better make sure your categories can do the job you want from it. Even if we leave aside the future development of philosophy -- in which 'empiricism' and 'empiricism's' do quite a bit of work --, the actor's categories of 1685 could not do justice to what Newton does in the succesive editions of the Principia; building on existing practices he creates something new: (a) one that stretched the very best mathematical minds of Europe, who assimilated and, in part, domesticated it into a very different mathematical-physical framework, for close to a century and (b) one that has taken close to half a century of recent scholarship (by people like McGuire, Smith, Harper, Hesse, Stein, etc.) to reveal the contours obscured by centuries of practice and myth-making. While Newton sometimes believed that he was recovering Ancient Wisdom, Newton himself had no doubt, as he explains in the preface to the Principia, that his work would generate new research that could make the framework, which displaced the style of natural inquiry familiar to folk in the Royal Society, he had provided obsolete.** Almost nobody could read his work when it appeared, and this alone should make us cautious in thinking that pre-existing actor's categories are very useful. The meaning of the text and practices generated by the Principia were discovered over time and it is quite possible that (a) some of this meaning escaped even Newton's attention and, more likely (b), that by the time he got to the third edition of the Principia, Newton intended the meaning of his work to be disclosed in such a temporally extended fashion. This is why it is just a mistake to think that, as Dennis Des Chene claims, "The time of a work, so far as explanation is concerned, is the time of its production."
Note that the problem here is, in part, the fetishism of actor's categories (the other part is philosophical--Biener and Schliesser are interested in different philosophical projects than Otago);*** focusing on ESD has been beneficial to scholarship, historical and philosophical, in lots of ways. But the repeated insistence that ESD is the only legitimate, historical conceptual framework does not only lead to overconfidence (recall "superiority"), and to a misplaced methodological/taxonomic moralism and monism ("Newton’s position diverged in a way that should be viewed as a development of this tradition"), but also to a kind of in-attentiveness to the historical record: things that do not 'fit' are simply ignored and this is always the danger when you work with an exclusive, privileged framework.
*This is not to deny that there are problems with 'empiricism' as a category (and Biener and I try to acknowledge some of those in our piece). But to claim that "the label ‘empiricism’ has no such historical relevance" is to be ignorant of the multiple ways later 'empiricists' inserted Newton into their narratives (of progress, of proper method, etc.)
**Now, obviously, Newton is more than the Principia. In fact, Zvi and I are proud that most of the chapters in our volume focus on the Opticks.
*** As Dennis Des Chene aptly notes (in commenting on my methodological posts of last week), I also oppose "the priority or the exclusivity of the constative," mode in writing history (maybe Biener does not), in part, (a) to save the constative mode of history from its proud practitioners, and (b), to provide us with relevant access to key evidence required for the constative mode. (I have other reasons, too.)
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