Digressions&Impressions

On adequately filled places (Covid Diaries & Seneca)

After nearly a month, it's time for another long covid update. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, here;  here;  here, here; here; and here). And, as usual, the situation is a mixed bag.

First, the good news. Thanks to non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (basically extra strength Aleve for those Stateside) I have managed to eliminate debilitating headaches. By 'debilitating' I mean: being in bed all day, and being incapable of reading or watching streaming online content. So, the amount of suffering has been reduced dramatically! In addition, if I take the meds before I socialize -- say a lunch in a quiet place -- I am capable of enjoying it without nuisance. So, I have some hope that I can reduce my relative social isolation. My body does notice I have socialized (I have a strange kind of fatigue then), so it's not without consequence, but it's better than it was. 

Unfortunately, some of life's simple pleasures remain out of reach due to my inability to engage in quite modest cognitive multitasking: even gentle walking while talking with others wipes me out cognitively. (I can do serious walking alone.) I am unable to enjoy music in the background while we're talking or even playing silently. I can't cycle in the city, I can't play basketball with my son, etc.

For example, recently, I had a lunch with a college friend in a quiet London club. The background music and noise of other lunch-guests were quite modest. I enjoyed it. (Hurrah!) I did have a vague sense that my capacity to eavesdrop on other conversations was much diminished. Once I walked out of the club into the air, I noticed how exhausted I was; and despite the lack of headache, and more meds, I was unable to concentrate again that day. It would not be wrong to call it 'brain fog', but the fatigue in my body is even worse: I walk slower then, and think slower. As I have mentioned before, I suspect a lot of symptoms commonly associated with aging are really the effects of post-viral syndromes. 

In Seneca's Letter 56, he notes that "words seem to be more distracting" to him "than noises; for words demand attention, but noises merely fill the ears and beat upon them." Seneca mentions that shouting is not as distracting as singing and an intermittent noise more troublesome [molestior] than a steady one, and I would agree. In fact, hearing other people talk or even just hum while I am engaged in some activity of my own drives me batty. (Well not as badly as a few months ago, but still.) I have mentioned, I think, that this makes family life with a teenager challenging. He hums when he is happy.

While Seneca repeatedly suggests in this letter and others that finding inner mental tranquility is fundamentally healing, he also recognizes that rousing ourselves to keeping busy with good works is healing, too [ad rerum actus excitandi ac tractatione bonarum artium occupandi sumus], and, if I read him alright, necessary for the non-sage (that is all of us). A Christian may well think this is a call to charity, but I read it somewhat self-servingly as keeping true to my vocation (as scholar and teacher). I don't want to claim Seneca invents the protestant work ethic, but I do think he is an important voice in its development.

In fact, Seneca notes that when he is in forced retirement (due to illness or political failure--the letter contains a rare admission or at least allusion to it) ambition is often revived [interdum recrudescit ambitio]. I recognize the truth of this because much to my own surprise, in my forced leave of absence, my disabilities have re-directed even expanded my vocational ambitions as a scholar (even if I have come to accept that some projects have to be let go), and (while more challenging) teacher.

Even though I had to withdraw from quite a few projects and also have given up on a number of papers, in some respects being a scholar has become easier because I have so many fewer social interactions and don't travel to conferences. I probably read more than I have ever. 

One unexpected effect -- I have mentioned it before -- of these covid diaries is that other scholars reveal their own enduring challenges with disability to me. I recognize that in my environment I have missed a lot of quiet suffering and almost heroic persistence. It's humbling to recognize what a bad observer of my umwelt I have been and, more importantly, to recognize that so many folk have achieved so much with chronic pain and cognitive instabilities. 

This experience makes me interpret Seneca's suggestion that a hidden disease is worse than one in the open (which is on the road to being cured) in a social way. Norms that internalize suffering, 'being Stoic' as they say, hidden from the world are, while convenient to the powerful, a social evil. In a famous passage, Adam Smith notes that people tend to refuse acknowledgment of poverty and disease and thereby make it worse. (Smith thinks our gaze and recognition naturally falls on the rich, famous, and beautiful/healthy.) Sometimes I wonder if I hear about other people's suffering now because other people sense greater receptivity on my part, or if they think it's only fair that after having read about my trials I ought to welcome learning of theirs, or if I have actually become more willing to discern other people's struggles. Despite my vocation as a teacher, I tend to be skeptical of narratives of growth. 

And after hinting at the need for regular cognitive-therapy -- good and solid thoughts [cogitationes bonas, solidas] -- as the road to wisdom, Seneca grudgingly admits that sometimes the best self-care is to seek out a quiet spot. I laugh, and admit that the reading room of the British Library is indeed my best friend. In fact, I now have my spot in the reading room that the other regulars leave alone -- and the librarians at circulation have started to recognize --; I love quietly reciting, in the spirit of cognitive-therapy, Newton's (early) definition of place being a part of space that a thing fills adequately just before I sit down at 'my' desk. 

This past month a co-authored paper was rejected by referees. And I had hoped to circulate the first seven chapters of my Foucault/liberal art of government book [I am soliciting catchy titles!], which covers his material on the physiocrats and the ordoliberals, to trusted friends. But the manuscript is still too much a mess, and so its circulation has been pushed back into the Summer. No professional life without ordinary professional disappointments, I tell myself. 

This is also my last digression of the academic year. On Saturday, we go on family holiday, and I don't expect resuming D&I until August. Thank you, my dear reader, for your continued interest in my (near) daily mumblings. 

On Esoteric Locke (and Cicero/Newton); Yolton's (and Blau's) Polemics with Strauss, PT 2

Strauss has gone to very particular pains to say that Locke was really a genuine Hobbist in his social theory, a claim Strauss pretends to demonstrate by minute attention to and quotation from the Locke corpus. It is not so much the obvious incorrectness of Strauss's reading which calls for comment as it is the techniques employed in support of his reading. Strauss has an ulterior reason for dealing with Locke as he does: he claims that Locke's real doctrine has been purposely hidden under the show of respectability.5 It is not surprising that the Strauss esotericism turns out to be insupportable when applied to Locke, but it is startling to discover the flimsiness of the pretended support and the unscholarly nature of Strauss's analysis. Strauss's general esotericist thesis suffers a severe blow when we consult the techniques he employs.

5. I do not want to question Strauss's general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of esotericism. His views on this subject are best expressed in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill., 1952). (For a judicious discussion and rejection of this claim as applied against ancient writers, see George Boas, "Ancient Testimony to Secret Doctrines," The Philosophical Review, LXII [I953], 79-92.) What I challenge and charge with irresponsibility is Strauss's application of this esotericist thesis to Locke. The lengths to which Strauss will go in making Locke say what Strauss wants him to say are clearly evident on pp. 207-209 of Natural Right and History. Locke is there made to hold a "view of caution" which accepts the generalization: "cautious speech is legitimate if unqualified frankness would hinder a noble work one is trying to achieve or expose one to persecution or endanger the public peace." Strauss refers to those passages in Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity which discuss Jesus's activities and the way he kept his identity as the Messiah implicit. Locke's point is that Christ did not come right out and say "I am the Messiah" simply because he knew he had to fulfill his mission of preaching the gospel. Locke in no way generalizes from this very special situation to a theory of the art of writing under persecution.--, John W. Yolton (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature." The Philosophical Review 67.4: 478.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in Strauss' lifetime during the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; here; here; and here, which was pt 1 on Yolton vs Strauss) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). In the last post I discussed Yolton's (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" Ethics (65):3, which is a respectful criticism of Strauss' Natural Right and History (NRH). The underlying point is that in his arguments against relativism Strauss has ignored a plausible alternative position. Yolton's argument can fruitfully be read as an immanent criticism (also because of the kind of authors/authorities he appeals to). As I noted, Yolton's argument itself suffers from some weakness, and somewhat surprisingly does not engage with Strauss views on Locke in NRH which diverge greatly from those that Yolton defends in his important monograph, (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP).

In fact, while I have encountered lots of criticism of Strauss, on the whole the criticism is professional in character. Even when there is deep disagreement, there is also a mark of respect. For example in criticizing Strauss' Hobbes' book, J.W. N. Watkins, who later became quite an influential Popperian at LSE, writes (1955), "Professor Leo Strauss's brilliant, influential and, I believe, misguided work." The main exception is Vlastos' (1951) review of Strauss' (1948) treatment of Xenophon's Hiero, but while the review is polemical the tone is more one of disappointment than the disparagement of Strauss he engaged in later in life (see here). 

Yolton's (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4), changes all that. In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) Yolton anticipates, say, the polemics of Ryle's (Yolton's supervisor) review of Bloom's Plato translation (NYRB, 1969 [HT Wiep van Bunge]) and (his student) Shadia Drury (here).

It's very hard to find neutral ground on the issue of Strauss' esotericism. But I warmly recommend Adrian Blau's (2012)"Anti-Strauss." The Journal of Politics 74.1: 142-155, which accepts that for some historical authors esotericism is likely, that most criticisms of Strauss have been lazy/hasty, and who is simultaneously rather critical (even satirical) of Strauss' particular techniques. (This sums up my own position.) Somewhat sadly, in his paper, Blau does not discuss Yolton's paper or Strauss' reading of Locke in NRH. What follows is a mitigated defense of Strauss against some of Yolton's criticism.

Even Yolton, who claims to restrict himself to Strauss' esoteric reading of Locke ("I do not want to question Strauss's general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of esotericism"), immediately adds a reference to George Boas, who is presented as undermining esoteric readings of the ancients. So, while Yolton's official argument is restricted to Strauss' interpretation of Locke, it's pretty clear that Yolton is a critic of esoteric readings more widely. In context, I find Yolton's hostility toward esotericism rather odd because McCarthyism had been a real thing Stateside (and elsewhere).

Now, unlike most critics of Strauss' esotericism up to that date (and since), Yolton actually followed Strauss' steps in depth. And it is worth quoting one of Yolton's footnotes to get a sense of what this might involve:

10. I indicate in what follows the more glaring errors made by Strauss and the irresponsible methods he uses to substantiate them. But a word about his method of citation may lend more flavor to the appreciation of what is involved. The pages devoted to Locke in Strauss's book (pp. 202-25i, especially 202- 227) are filled with brief words, phrases, sentences quoted from Locke. After a long series of such quotations, a footnote lists a string of references to the Locke texts. But the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation. In many cases, the references are quite irrelevant to the point Strauss has been arguing. In other cases, parts of sentences have been turned around, a later portion being quoted before the earlier. In all cases, Locke is quoted out of context, the context being ignored or carefully covered up; the references are scattered throughout the Locke corpus. It takes literally hours to trace the references to single words and brief phrases, which usually have a different meaning in their context than they have on Strauss's page. (Yolton 1958: 483, [emphasis added])

At a high level of superficiality/generality, Strauss's esoteric method in NRH is two-fold: first, he interprets texts as if they are written in a code that needs to be broken, and, second, he demands from his readers that his texts are read as if they were scrambled/jumbled ("the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation") and so in kind of code, too. If each code has a different key, then each interpretation will have to be worked out on its own terms; this is one reason why even Strauss' most prominent methods can, as Blau recognizes, be no better than very imperfect heuristics. As Yolton notes this means that one spends hours tracing references in the primary and secondary source(s).

So far so good. But now comes the weird part. Yolton's practice and arguments suggest that he thinks that in order to refute Strauss's irresponsible method "the techniques employed," all Yolton needs to do is show that (i) Strauss is quoting out of context and that (ii) in context Locke is saying something different than what Strauss claims about Locke. If Strauss were not offering an esoteric reading, then (i-ii) would be devastating to Strauss' argument even scholarly standing. (And this is presumably the effect of Yolton's procedure on an impartial bystander.) But they are the wrong sort of argument against any esoteric reading. (I hope Blau would agree.)

Now, Yolton's procedure does make sense if you assume that Locke never practiced esotericism. I have to admit -- and I know I will be ridiculed for this -- that I find this a very strange bedrock assumption, especially (of all books) about the Essay. So, in what follows, I first show why I think this is strange. My argument is my own. I then look at Newton's reception of the Essay to suggest Strauss' response is not a fortiori silly. But, third, I also show that Yolton fails to acknowledge and engage with Strauss' (more or less) explicit argument denying Yolton's bedrock assumption about Locke's esotericism.

On the frontispiece of Locke's Essay, there is a quote from Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods) 1.84: "Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias, quam ista effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi displicere." Here's a recent translation (by Walsh): "How splendid it would be, Velleius, if you were to admit ignorance of what you do not know, rather than puking and feeling disgust with yourself for uttering such balderdash."  Yolton does not discuss the motto in his book on Locke (or 1958 article). 

Now, it's not at all surprising that Locke would use a motto that expresses a skeptical position. The motto also is an injunction to avoid babbling/nonsense [effutientem]. And it foreshadows the Locke we analytic philosophers admire (if only he had been more concise).

Of course, it is a bit peculiar that pious Locke would, of all people, use Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods). It's a book more naturally associated with Hume (whose Dialogues concerning natural religion are clearly inspired by if not modelled on it). The Motto, thus, also invites the reader to reflect on how Locke's Essay relates to theology. How to understand that relationship is, in fact, the core intellectual debate between Yolton and Strauss. (Something I cannot do justice to here.)

As regular readers know (recall), Locke echoes a famous argument from Cicero's De Natura Deorum (without attribution to Cicero or Boyle, who had used the same argument) later in the Essay (at 3.6.9). (For a more scholarly version of this material, see here.) So, the motto is not wholly incidental as a source to the content of the Essay.

So far so good. But in De Natura Deorum, Cicero also has one of his characters say the following:

Undoubtedly closer to the truth is the claim made in the fifth book of his Nature of the Gods by Posidonius, whose friendship we all share: that Epicurus does not believe in any gods, and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods were made to avert popular odium. He could not have been such an idiot as to fashion God on the lines of a poor human, even if merely in broad outline and not in substantial appearance, yet endowed with all the human limbs but without the slightest use of them, an emaciated, transparent being conferring no gifts or kindness on anyone, and in short discharging no duties and performing no actions. ‘First, such a nature cannot exist. In his awareness of this, Epicurus in actuality discards the gods, while paying lip-service to them. (1.123; here's the Latin.)

I quote it for two reasons. Somewhat oddly, Boas, who Yolton cites approvingly, skips this whole passage. Second, Cicero's Nature of the Gods was very widely read and debated in the early modern period. (For evidence of that see my paper.) Of course, this debate also involved debates over Cicero's own position relative to the arguments and character's in the dialogue (with free thinkers reading it very skeptically and more orthodox types reading it in support of design arguments). That is to say, to those familiar with Cicero's text, and its reception, the motto invites alertness to the significance of Locke's doctrines to theology, and to the possibility that Locke may be paying lip-service to orthodoxy. 

As an aside, throughout his life Strauss repeatedly cites Cicero's Nature of the Gods (although I am unfamiliar whether he ever discussed the passage just quoted or the motto to Locke's Essay.) But in NRH Strauss does not use Cicero to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. To the best of my knowledge, the only time that Yolton refers to the work is to alert the reader that Locke's critic, Stillingfleet, is drawing on it (in his Origines Sacrae), when describing the Epicurean version of prolepsis or anticipations of nature (usually associated with Stoicism).

Anyway, on my view Yolton is on shaky ground to assume without argument at all that Locke would never engage in esotericism.  (It would also be odd an claim because we know that Locke was quite interested in alchemy and he definitely hid that interest.) As I noted above, all Yolton's arguments against Strauss presuppose such a denial.  

Having said that, what I have said so far (and below) cannot decide the many first order, interpretive questions between Strauss and Yolton about Locke. However, as Yolton notes (see the quote above), Strauss ends up reading Locke's social theory as a kind of Hobbist/Hobbesian in all kinds of ways. It's quite clear that Yolton thinks this utterly ridiculous. I have to admit that I would never teach or read Locke this way myself. But it is worth nothing that Newton (and now I quote Peter Anstey) "after reading Locke’s Essay he took him for a Hobbist." (See The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3: 280). Locke and Newton shared mutual acquaintances, but when Newton first read the Essay they were not very well known to each other.

I mention this not because Newton's reading of Locke would settle the debate between Strauss and Yolton (it doesn't because it is by no means clear in what sense Newton took Locke to be a Hobbist). But to note that if we take Locke's Essay in context, which is what Yolton claims to be doing throughout his work, the esoteric, Hobbist reading cannot be ruled out by assuming it away or by quoting passages that seem to violate it because it is a natural reading for some of Locke's major contemporaries. (See what I did here; I used a contextualist move to block a contextualist dismissiveness of Strauss.)

Now, Newton himself was rather prone to esoteric readings and (as Steve Snobelen has shown in 2001) practiced the esoteric art of writing even in the General Scholium to the Principia. It's no surprise, then, Newton would engage in such a reading of Locke because (through Boyle) he knew that Locke shared in their common fascination with chymistry (whose practitioners used code to record and share findings). This is not the end of the matter: as Anstey notes, after Newton got to know Locke personally he changed his mind over Locke's Hobbism. (So I am not motivating a Hobbist reading of Locke myself!)

I am close to wrapping up. What I find really odd about Yolton's criticism of Strauss is that he does not confront Strauss' explicit argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke while devoting lots of effort on refuting footnote minutiae. When Strauss introduces his interpretation of Locke, he points out that Locke has a tendency to refer to Hooker as "the judicious Hooker." To the best of my knowledge Locke does this three times in short order in Second Treatise. And admittedly when you hit the third one, it is a bit jarring. Strauss then goes on to claim "But the moment we take the trouble to confront Locke's teaching as a whole with Hooker's teaching as a whole, we become aware that, in spite of a certain agreement between Locke and Hooker, Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally different from Hooker's." (NRH 165)* And at first this seems to be Strauss' ridiculous argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke.

Strauss then skips forty pages (mostly on Hobbes) to indicate the significance of this: Locke "appealed as frequently as he could to the authority of Hooker—of one of the least revolutionary men who ever lived. He took every advantage of his partial agreement with Hooker. And he avoided the inconveniences which might have been caused by his partial disagreement with Hooker by being practically silent about it." (NRH 207) Again, if this were Strauss' argument for his esoteric reading of Locke, I could completely understand Yolton's dismissiveness.

But Hooker is a feint. The real argument follows immediately, and it involves Socrates' fate and Plato's prudence as seen by Locke. Strauss quotes the following passage from Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity:

There was no part of mankind, who had quicker parts, or improved them more; that had a greater light of reason, or followed it farther in all sorts of speculations, than the Athenians, and yet we find but one Socrates amongst them, that opposed and laughed at their polytheisms, and wrong opinions of the deity; and we see how they rewarded him for it. Whatsoever Plato, and the soberest of the philosophers thought of the nature and being of the one God, they were fain, in their outward worship, to go with the herd, and keep to the religion established by law; (NRH 208, emphasis added).

Somewhat oddly Yolton skips this entirely. But Locke is here praising ("soberest") a certain kind of lack of forthrightness when it comes to religious views that may violate common opinion and the law (and with the soberest philosophers seemingly endorsing a Hobbesian claim about outwardly following the law regardless of one's private views). This passage in Locke recalls the passage from Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods 1.123 above. And this motivates Strauss' stance on Locke.

One need not accept Strauss' argument that Locke is an esoteric writer in the Essay. (After all, the Reasonableness of Christianity is the later work.) I am honestly agnostic on the matter.** And I certainly agree with Yolton (and Blau) that Strauss' particular readings often seem strikingly ad hoc and based on selective quotation without method and with confirmation bias. But what I have shown is that Yolton does not address Strauss' own explicit argument and evidence to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. And so the purported refutation with appeal to ordinary scholarly practice, does not get off the ground. That's notable because Yolton's was, I believe, the most elaborate attempt to discredit Strauss' practice in the early English language reception of Strauss. And certainly the most careful before Blau. 

J.E. Ted McGuire RIP (pt 1.)

Nearly everything that's written, even by highly accomplished philosophers, about canonical historical figures is a weird kind of functional garbage. I call it 'functional' because often the disfigurations can be explained by the role the canonical figure plays in some grand narrative about the past, in undergraduate or graduate education, as a bit-player in some more recent partisan debates, and so on. I don't want to claim that Newton fared much worse than most canonical figures, but ever since the Leibniz-Clarke debate, through Kant, Mach, and the reception of Einstein's revolution very impoverished images of Newton displaced whatever nuance one can find in Newton's own writings. Even the one exception, Koyré, is more informative on other figures of the scientific revolution than he is on Newton.

Now, as history of science became a professionalized field, Newton studies helped constitute it. This is associated with names such I.B. Cohen, Westfall, Whiteside, Hesse, Dobbs, the Halls, Herrivel, Dijksterhuis,  Sabra, and so. (And Kuhn, of course.) To the best of my knowledge, Ted McGuire was the first philosopher, or one of the first ones, to pick up on the opportunity to harvest the fruits of this historiographic revolution, or professionalization. And in a series of papers, he reintroduced a complex, messy and endlessly fascinating philosophical figure, Isaac Newton, to his peers and later readers. I have these papers in mind: 

• McGuire, James E., and Piyo M. Rattansi. "Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’." Notes and records of the Royal Society of London 21.2 (1966): 108-143.
• McGuire, James E. "Force, active principles, and Newton's invisible realm." Ambix 15.3 (1968): 154-208.
• McGuire, J. E. "Atoms and the ‘analogy of nature’: Newton's third rule of philosophizing." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 1.1 (1970): 3-58.
• McGuire, James E. "Body and void and Newton's De Mundi systemate: Some new sources." Archive for history of exact sciences 3.3 (1966): 206-248.

I put the full citations in because each of these papers are lengthy, complex affairs in their own right. Often I cite one paper Y (on topic X). And then years later, I rediscover that X is one of the minor gems in Y, and that there is whole lot more to (say) McGuire 1966b. All these papers were written while he was at Leeds before he helped found the Pittsburgh HPS program (together with Larry Laudan) in 1971. When Ted and I first started corresponding, he once mentioned that he had been "pushing Newton as a philosopher, epistemologist and an ontologist" for most of his career. I was born in 1971, and Pitt HPS has been the dominant HPS program for most of my life. (Yes, Indiana and Madison gave it a run for its money, and for some periods my own Chicago could compete in a number of areas, and now, perhaps, Irvine LPS has taken over the torch. Time will tell.) And so Ted helped train in some fashion or another a whose who in HPS, including a whole number of people who are now shaping Newton scholarship, and who I hope will share their memories of life in daily company of Ted.

Now, most obituaries are more informative about the author than the deceased. In this case more than usual because I came late to Ted in my academic development and so I don't have a lot of anecdotes of him as (say) dissertation supervisor. But I hope what follows is also instructive about Ted, too.

I came to Newton scholarship through George E. Smith's now legendary two-semester year-long undergraduate course on Newton's Principia. And George had a habit of roping his undergraduate students into discrete research projects. Many of these projects developed what's known as the research frontier in Newton (and Huygens) studies (see, for example, this paper). We didn't know any better. George's main focus is evidential arguments, and he ignores issues most other professional philosophers want to talk about when they discuss Newton (or history of science more generally). So, I rarely heard of Ted.

I went to Chicago, to work with Howard Stein. And Stein also did a three-quarters year-long space-time course in which Newton figures heavily. And it was very clear that George and Howard were part of a mutual admiration society (mediated by Bill Harper up in Western Ontario, I believe). Howard also taught a lot of Newton in his empiricism course (where obliquely Newton was pretty much presented as superior not just to Descartes, but also to Locke and Hume). 

Now, Howard had also written a number of astonishing papers on Newton in the late 1960s:

• Stein, Howard. "On the notion of field in Newton, Maxwell, and beyond." (1970). 
• Stein, Howard. "Newtonian space-time." Texas Quarterly 10.3 (1967). 174--200

The second of these didn't just shape a new philosophical Newton, it also influenced contemporary space-time studies.

I mention this because to the best of my knowledge McGuire and Stein never cite or mention each other in print then and since. (If this turns out to be poetic exaggeration, I apologize.) I know they were aware of each other! When I came out of Chicago, with a PhD primarily on the reception of Newton, I knew of McGuire's existence, but it  was more as a distinct orbital body on the horizon than an important influence. But action at a distance, even joint action, is a funny concept.

A few years later, together with Andrew Janiak, I hosted a conference on Newton and/as Philosophy, and I met there some of McGuire's great students including Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk (both of which I have since collaborated with in co-authored papers and edited volumes). I also met Doreen Fraser and David Miller in that period. Some of his other Pitt students include Brian Hepburn and I think Peter Harman (who I never met). He was also John Henry's supervisor at Leeds. (I am sure I am missing folk.) Ted himself had been one of the first people I invited to keynote in Leiden; he had accepted enthusiastically and I used his name in the call for papers. But at the last minute, he had to withdraw due to a hip replacement.

The conference was an important few days in my life because I met so many people who have become lifelong friends and important interlocuters. In addition, I realized that I had been wrong to think 'all the action was in the reception of Newton because Stein, McGuire, Harper, Smith, Ernan McMullin, Mary Hesse, and Domenico Bertoloni Meli had exhausted the topic.' In front of me the students of Stein, McGuire, Harper, Arthur Fine, Harvey Brown, and Michael Friedman were reading each other's teachers and each other's papers, and just beginning to ask some tough questions. McGuire himself kept learning from the youngsters, engaging with us in print and in private correspondence, and when he couldn't beat us he joined up with some of us (especially Ed Slowik).

After the conference, I returned to Ted's early papers in earnest. And also started pestering him with letters like this, "I am about to write a paper on Newton's Fourth Rule of Reasoning; other than George Smith's work, the most helpful thing I encountered was your long footnote 8 in your 1970 paper on the third rule." The answer was a sweet, "I did consider writing a paper on the fortuna of the rule up to the time of Darwin but never got around to it."

Once you see the footnote, you can see why that's not an empty boast. Here's that eight footnote:

See, for instance: Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (London, x728), 24-5; Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (London, 174B), 22; Gowin Knight, An Attempt to demonstrate that all the Phenomena of nature may be explained by two simple active Principles Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748), 7; George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion : Natural and Revealed (London, 1715), 36; Willem Jacob Storm-van 's Gravesande, Physices Elementa Mathematica...sive Introductio ad Philosophiam Newtoniam (Editio Secunda, Lugduni Batavorum, 1725), Praefatio, and Liber I, Caput I, I-7; Benjamin Martin, Philosophia Britannica: or a New and Comprehensive System of the Newtonian Philosophy (Reading, 1747) , 1-42. In his first lecture, Martin discusses Newton's four rules in some detail. Thus when 'we take survey of the visible world', we conclude that all bodies 'consist of one and the same sort of Matter or Substance'. He concludes that 'Matter, thus variously modified and configurated, constitutes an infinite variety of bodies, all of which are found to have the following common Properties...'. Thomas Rutherforth, A System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, i748), Introduction. The first three rules are discussed as the only means of making 'knowledge real and universal'. Rule Three is seen primarily as an inductive rule. Richard Helsham, A Course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, published by Bryan Robinson, 5th edition (London, 1777). The four rules are quoted in full in the Preface. Robinson notes that 'This method and these rules, have been carefully observed by our author in these Lectures...' (viii). George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London, t794) , vol. II. In a lengthy lecture entitled 'In the method of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy' Adams concludes his discussion of the history of analogy to extend our conclusion to all other bodies, and thus make it universal: a way of reasoning, that is agreeable to the harmony of things, and to the old maxim, ascribed to Hermes... (p. 34). For this maxim see note 38 below, on Maclaurin. Adams is drawing on Maclaurin's treatise. Tiberius Cavallo, The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy (London, 18o3), vol. I, 7. Quotes Newton's four rules and connects them with the generality of the three laws. William Nicholson, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy (London, 18o5) , vol. I. In his introduction he discusses intuition, demonstration, and probabilistic knowledge, saying of natural philosophy that it is based on analogy: 'To give stability to this science, it is necessary to admit no probabilities, as first principles of analogy, but those which possess the strongest and most incontrovertible resemblance to truth. For this purpose, the following rules are adopted': the first three rules are then quoted without comment. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 2nd edition (Birmingham, 1782), sections I and II; Etienne Bormot de Condillac, OEuvres Completes de Condillac, tome troisieme (Paris, i8o3) , chapitre XII, 327-58; Petrus van Musschenbroek, Elementa physicae (Lugduni Batavorum, 1734), 6, and Introductio ad philosophiam naturalem (Lugdunl Batavorum, 1764), vol. I, 14; Roger Joseph Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy (Latin-English Edition, London, x 922), sections 4o-2. Boscovich is critical of the third rule on the grounds that induction does not support the transference of many physical properties to the parts of phenomena. The Theory was first published in 1758. Brian Higgins, A Philosophical Essay Concerning Light (London, 1776), 18--19; James Hutton, Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1790), part III, 279-3o0; William Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery (London, 186o), chapter XVIII, 181-2oo, section 14. Whewell is mainly concerned in this chapter with the notion of vera causa as discussed in Newton's first rule. He points out, however, that the third rule's conception of universal laws is inconsistent with the stricture of the fourth rule that a 'law may be inaccurate'. See also Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 184o ), vol I, 4-6, where Whewell observes that the third rule is circular. James Challis, 'On Newton's "Foundations of all Philosophy" ', Phil. Mag., 26 (1863), 28o-92. In this particular article Challis is attempting to base a theory of science on Newton's third rule.
These discussions are the most interesting in the literature I have examined. Most of these writers are concerned with the problem of generalizing properties of matter, rather than with Newton's criterion for deciding essential qualities. Many other writers such as Halley, Sterling, Ferguson, Desaguliers, Wright and Worster mention or refer to the rule; these with the above references are more than sufficient to establish the widespread influence of this aspect of Newton's methodology throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  I am grateful to Laurens Laudan for the references to Condillac and Musschenbroek, and to Peter Heimann for calling attention to Higgins.

So, that footnote was constructed decades before the internet. It's an astonishing synthesis that basically tells future grad students where to look. I am sometimes disparagingly called 'widely read' or broad. But I am still busy tracking down some of Ted's leads in this note! (I had some pride in my dissertation because McGuire misses Adam Smith's and Diderot's treatment.) At the time, the idea to put any scholar in historical context was still radical. But even more innovative was the idea that this context included lots of now forgotten people. In addition, that material not thought of as 'scientific' like Newton's theology and angelology was crucial to understanding his more 'philosophical' views. 

Our correspondence took off after he read a draft of my paper on gravity as a relational quality in Newton. He discerned at once that I was defending (and updating) a version of his position against Stein and Janiak. He suggested some improvements including a thought experiment that when a while later I ran it past Bill Harper at an airport, Harper just sat there and said (at least according to my self-serving memory), in awe, 'you have battled Stein to a draw.' (And I noted quietly 'with the help of McGuire.') After that, our correspondence took on a more chatty and more equal flavor. (Ted had that capacity to make you forget he had heard it all before.) And he would read and improve many of the Newton papers I wrote in the next decade.

In a recent self-serving "introduction" to my collection Newton's Metaphysics: Essays (OUP 2022), I added a note qualifying my own claim to originality, "Obviously that diagnosis does no justice to Ted McGuire's contribution to Newton scholarship. McGuire's work anticipates most of my own efforts."

I finally met Ted at an APA session in Chicago organised by Geoff Gorham, February 2010. I don't want to claim we hit it off at once. But I was impressed by his kindness, his wit, and his sharpness (he was already in his late 70s). He was a much abler drinker than I am, too. But shortly thereafter we got chance to deepen our connection. My then new Ghent colleagues, Maarten Van Dyck and Steffen Ducheyne, had nominated Ted for a special Sarton Chair at the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Sarton Chair, and Ted came to Ghent for a few fantastic days, where I got to enjoy his witty stories and to pick his brain on lots of arcane knowledge. (One of the highlights of my intellectual life is to witness the logician Dirk Batens and Ted debate Descartes' alleged Spinozism.)

After that Ghent visit he always greeted me with a clear fondness as we kept crossing paths on the Newton circuit. He helped sponsor and put together a conference on Newton and Empiricism that Zvi Biener and I hosted at Pitt. I finally got to see the Cathedral of Learning inside, as well as some terrific bars. And I kept sending my draft Newton papers to him for comments. Since he was often in Poland with his partner Barbara Tuchanska at Lodz University (where Ted also did some teaching--I hope the lecture notes show up some day), it was easy for him to come over to Belgium or Holland and I enjoyed sparring with him.

Since this post is already long, and I realize I have not told you anything yet about Ted's many substantive contributions to Newton scholarship (other than that my own work is greatly indebted to it), I'll start doing a series of Ted-mania posts in the next few weeks to invite some of you to join in the fun that is scholarship, but also to appreciate some of Ted's towering contributions to it. He will be missed. A giant has passed.*

 

*HT James Lennox for sharing the news of Ted's passing away a few days ago.

Leibniz, Clarke, Newton, and Reformation of the Solar System

Thanks to Leibniz, there is a common reading of Isaac Newton in which Newton is committed to the idea that God periodically restores the solar system. I do not mean to suggest Leibniz is solely responsible for this; Clarke's response to Leibniz fails to disabuse clearly the reader of this. And since for a long time Clarke's response was taken to be authoritative of Newton's views the idea has persisted.  

Here is Leibniz's charge right at  the start of the Correspondence:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He did not, it seems, have sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; he must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. Leibniz to Clarke (November 1715), Letter 1, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition).

The charge is curious because [A] Newton never claims that God needs to rewind the universe (or solar system) and [B] Newton never compares, I think, God's work and his creation to a watchmaker and watch. Newton's favored analogy is God as the perfect geometer. There are subtle similarities and differences between the two analogies, but I will explore these in a future post.

In his response Clarke comes very close to noting [B], but he fails to do so unambigiously and simultaneously muddies the waters: "the notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." Clarke's first response, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition). It is quite natural to read Clarke as accepting [B] and endorsing [A].

As an aside, that Clarke actually rejects [B] (the clock analogy) only becomes clear indirectly. In the fourth response to Leibniz, in the context of explaining that gravity does no fit the mechanist's conception of causation by contact, Clarke writes: "If the word natural forces means here mechanical, then all animals, and even men, are as mere machines as a clock. But if the word does not mean mechanical forces, then gravitation may be effected by regular and natural powers, though they are not mechanical." (par. 46) The natural powers that Newton has really shown to exist make it impossible, ipse facto, to conceive the universe as a (mechanical) clock. (See also Clarke's fifth reply ad 110-116, which also seems to assume this kind of argument.)

Notice, too, in his first response to Leibniz, Clarke does not actually concede the mending charge. All he wants to insist on is God's "providence and God's government." And this he is opposes opposes to "materialism" (Epicurean/Hobbesian system) and "fate" (Spinozism).  The key here is their denial of (general) final causes and the idea that there is really a three-way debate among the systems of fate, materialism, and mind/providentialism. Of course, this also turns on what he might mean by 'government.' I also think Kenny Pearce (whose tweets on the topic prompted this post) is right to claim that "Clarke's response to Leibniz's allegation that Newton's God is an incompetent watchmaker depends essentially on Clarke's view that there are no absolute miracles, only relative ones." I'll let him explain why this is so.

As it happens, in my own work on Newton (following Ted McGuire and Howard Stein) I am not inclined to treat Clarke as authoritative on Newton. So, it is worth explaining why I think Leibniz's charge shouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

It is, I believe, agreed by all that the following passage from Query 31 of Newton's Opticks gave rise to Leibniz's original charge:

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in concentric orbs, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase until this system needs a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice.

I included the final sentence in the quote because I think this helps explain Newton's reasoning. Notice, first that Newton does not mention clocks or watches here. Second, the argument is directed against the system of blind fate and in favor of the system of God's (providential) choice. I think this nobody would deny. 

Now, it is natural to assume that [C] Newton is here anticipating the eighteenth century debate over the stability of the solar system. And that [D] his answer is negative. And if one thinks Newton is committed to [C&D] then it's quite natural to assume that Newton thinks that God needs to rewind the solar system regularly. But I don't think Newton should be taken here to be committed to be thinking about [C-D.]

For, notice, that the claim about the system requiring a reformation is offered as a reductio of the system of fate. And the underlying claim is that the particular patterns of motions we see in the solar system, must be the product of intelligent choice.  That is to say, rather than being worried about the stability of the solar system, Newton is interested in cosmogony (the origin and evolution of the system). And the underlying claim is that from the perspective of the system of necessity one cannot device a system of laws that can account for the simultaneous origin and evolution of the irregular motions of the comets and the regular motions of the planets (and their moons) and their interactions. So, the charge is that Spinozism (which, as Clarke and Newton argue elsewhere, lacks a compelling physics) does not provide an account of the particular motions we observe and would be internally inconsistent if it tried. In my view (see here for details) variants of this argument are trotted out by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and in the General Scholium, and by Clarke in his Demonstration (also directed against Hobbes and Spinoza). 

 

On Using Context to Claim Newton is Anti-Metaphysical

Contrary to recent historiographical consensus, we shall find that Newton did not hold an elaborate 'metaphysics' that explained God's relationship with the world and thus the operation of forces such as gravity - rather, he despised the discipline of metaphysics, and his seemingly 'metaphysical' statements were, in fact, anti-scholastic polemical salvoes: a crucial fact that has been missed in all the previous literature.--Dmitri Levitin (2016) "Newton and scholastic philosophy" British Journal for the History of Science; 49(1),  (Mar 2016): 54-55. [HT Somebody on twitter]

While many anti-metaphysical readings of Newton are Kantian or positivist retrodictions, no such claim can be lodged against Dmitri Levitin's broadside. The subtext of Levitin's polemic is: let me tell philosophical bunglers what real historical scholarship is about. Levitin is especially critical of philosophers who, among fellow historians of philosophy, are, in fact, known as 'contextualists.' And so one might expect from somebody like me, trained by such contextualists, but who now embraces methodological anachronism and defends the utility of history of philosophy as prophecy, schadenfreude. Somewhat unexpectedly I will treat Levitin as an anti-exemplar of a bad form of criticism of philosophical historians of philosophy (to distinguish them from intellectual historians, historians of ideas, and science study types). 

Levitin claims that Newton “had no time for metaphysics as a discipline,” (68). And this claim is part of a much larger argument, rooted in a study of Newton’s manuscripts and with repeated appeals to ‘contextual’ evidence that Newton affirmed the “rejection of metaphysics.” (70; I counted ten polemical uses of 'context/contextual'!) Levitin claims that Newton was “far from engaging in an elaborate metaphysical enterprise,” (73). Since I am about to publish a volume of my own papers with “Newton’s Metaphysics” in its title, it may be thought useful to respond to Levitin’s arguments.

First, I agree with Levitin that Newton rejected metaphysics as a discipline, especially as it was still taught in universities. Second, I also agree with his quite salutary criticism of those (especially, my friend, Ducheyne 2011) that have tried firmly to connect Newton’s use of the analytic/synthetic distinction to the Aristotelian regressus tradition. In re-reading and editing my own essays I was pleased and relieved I was never tempted to do so myself.

Third, one strain of Levitin’s argument is directed at the claim that for Newton causes are forces, which Levitin calls the “causal reading of Newton on force.” If this can be denied then ipse facto, for Levitin, Newton is anti-metaphysical. This is one of the points singled out as a “larger philosophical significance” of his argument by Levitin (65). Even if 'the causal reading of Newton on force' were false it does not follow one cannot attribute to Newton a metaphysics. (One may even say, as I say below, that one has done so!)

But in his arguments against the causal reading of Newton on force, Levitin conflates treating (i) forces as causes and (ii) the causes of forces. There is a further conflation by Levitin in treating Newton’s professed (iii) agnosticism (in the Principia) about the cause of the gravitational force as (iv) agnosticism about the causes of all forces. The 'causal reading of Newton on force' (which I happen to endorse) claims that Newton treats forces as causes, but in the Principia denies knowing the cause of forces.

It's only if you think -- say because you embrace a Bradley-esque version of the PSR -- that in order to treat X as a cause of Y, you must know Z (the cause of X) that (i) and (ii) start to collapse on each other. But in the Principia there is no sign that Newton conflates (i) and (ii) or embraces a version the PSR. I have explained elsewhere (here; here) why these distinctions matters to understanding Newton.[1] But is worth noting here that Newton needed (i) in order to settle or at least provide a new kind and compelling answer to the Copernican controversy. This is why, in his preface, Newton writes about his own view,

“rational mechanics will be the science, expressed in exact propositions and demonstrations, of the motions that result from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever...For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. (Newton 1999: 382)

Levitin himself seems to embrace what he calls a ‘phenomenalist’ interpretation of Newton ( 65-67). In so far as properly categorizing Newton’s causal talk as either phenomenalist, structural realist, instrumentalist, naïve realist (etc.), and drawing the kind of distinctions I have in the previous paragraph counts as ‘metaphysics’ that’s metaphysics enough for my present purposes. 

Of course, lurking here is a kind of fetishism of actor's categories. Because it's possible that what I call 'metaphysics' in the previous paragraph is not what Newton has in mind when he uses 'metaphysics' according to Levitin. Now I am not against attention to actor's categories as such. But to adopt them as one's own is. as Daniel Schneider first noted to me, often no better than to take sides in the polemics of the past. This is precisely such an instance. Newton is critical of certain kind of metaphysicians and metaphysical practices, but from that one can't infer he is not doing metaphysics (by 'our' lights) at all (even if he were to say so). Levitin actually offers no evidence that Newton rejects all metaphysics.

As it happens, I agree with some of Levitin’s exegetical claims.[2] For example, Levitin claims that Newton professes agnosticism about the nature of the interaction between God and the world (Levitin 2016: 70). He relies on manuscript evidence to argue this. That is what Newton explicitly says in the General Scholium: "he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us, (Newton 1999: 942).  I think Newton's language is, in context, ratherLockean.[3] In my own work I use this agnosticism about the interaction between God and the world as an argument against those (Kochiras, Janiak, Ducheyne, etc.) that attribute to Newton a Principle of Local Action. But it does not follow from this that Newton is not doing metaphysics. For, pretty much on the same page, Newton himself asserts that there is a relationship of necessity between God and space as well as God and time (Newton 1999: 942). To appeal to necessity may not be a species of metaphysics. But to rely on arguments from necessity to settle claims about the nature of, say, space and time, and even the reality of final causes, I consider a contribution to metaphysics, or at least worth puzzling through as metaphysics.

Even so, there is a broader methodological point to be made here (in addition to the risk of using actor's categories to settle present disputes over the philosophical significance, if any, of thinkers). And this is the use of ‘context’ as a neutral and decisive arbiter of significance. I am open to Levitin’s invitation to “delve into the scholastic textbooks” (73), which he treats as the privileged context to treat many of Newton’s more speculative remarks. That it is useful and appropriate to do so, if only for debunking purposes, he shows with great expertise. But he closes his polemic with the claim that “Ralph Bathurst or Nathaniel Highmore” are the most important figures (he even uses “heroes” behind the “institutionalized intellectual culture” that Newton inhabited. (77) And  the implication is that this institutional culture is really the most fundamental context for understanding Newton “mature” philosophy (Levitin uses variants on “mature” throughout his paper).

In my own work on Newton I explore how the Principia got embroiled in the reception of Spinoza and a much broader history of Spinozism, including views we would not consider Spinozist at all (such as Epicureanism). This system of metaphysics is not Newton’s. But as I show, to articulate differences with it required not just polemical tropes but some subtle distinctions. And to mark that fact, and use it fruitfully does not require to treat it (Spinoza/Spinozism) as the only or most important context for thinking about Newton’s (to use Levitin’s phrase) ‘mature philosophy.’[5]

That Newton’s mature philosophy got embroiled in the reception of Spinozism is clear since Rosalie Coli 1959 & 1963). But it does not follow from that that Newton was not also responding to say, Descartes and Huygens or very engaged in various priority disputes with (say) Leibniz and Hooke. I take that to heart.

So, I close by distinguishing three uses of context. First, one stipulate that a certain corpus is the relevant material one is going to use to establish the historical meaning of a text. (Mogens Laerke has explained how to do so. Justin Smith has offered a different account.) While judgment is involved here, this is really a matter of stipulation or legislation.

Second, one uses a certain corpus to rule out causal claims of influence or significance (by showing that a certain transmission is, say, impossible) This is what Levitin does in his criticism of Ducheyne. In these two approaches, one can use only one context at a time. And this is why they appeal to those who wish to be professional scholars. Notice that once context has been set in such a way one can make further decisions about which categories an distinctions to rely on and what disciplinary standards one will use to explain what one has done.

Third, one uses real interlocutors of Newton and those that read/edited Newton to explicate a construct an abstract entity, (say) 'Newton's metaphysics'. This construct can be projected onto a scholarly community of a time, which read particular and overlapping texts, or onto Newton's own mind (say, in a period; Levitin's use of 'mature' engages in such a practice without being explicit about it). Or it can be a construct that it is in some sense unmoored from the lived experience of any historical agent, but rooted in some texts and their evolving reception or in a disciplinary practice today (etc.).

The downside of this approach is that it looks undisciplined and unprofessional because eclectic and in principle open-ended. The upside, if there is one, is that one can approach a fairly limited number of Newtonian texts (as I do) from different mutually supporting and refining angles. In so doing I draw on scholarship about the variety of contexts (in the first two senses) that Newton inhabited and was received in as well as more reconstructive scholarship by philosophers about the underlying arguments and concepts. By using these different angles one may build such a construction. Depending on one's claims such a construct can be very robust or fragile. 

One may wonder what the benefits of this third kind of use of context is. As I noted yesterday, it is likely that what I call "Newton's metaphysics" made possible evidential arguments that helped completely re-shaped how we understand science, philosophy, and their interaction. If that is so, then understanding Newton's metaphysics is a way to understand much larger forces that shape our philosophical and scientific scene. Such a construct, thus, enters into philosophical and historical understanding.

On the Significance of Newton to Philosophy

Not so long ago the scientific revolution was interpreted in terms of competing metaphysically loaded worldviews. For example, Koyré argued, to simplify, that Huygens and Leibniz rejected Newton’s physics because they (correctly) thought it incompatible with the mechanical philosophy, which Newton, in turn, rejected as wedded to hypotheses (of the wrong sort) (see, e.g., Koyré 1950: 262). And those that objected to this somewhat Hegelian narrative argued, in the spirit of Cassirer, that from this conflict a more modest and simultaneously more general science of law-like quantitative relations was born during the eighteenth century.

While not strictly false this picture is misleading because the debate between Huygens and Newton was also centered on empirical arguments (as George Smith and I showed). In fact, by building on Cohen’s idea of a ‘Newtonian style,’ and by focusing on Newton’s evidential arguments, George Smith (see, especially, his "Closing the Loop") and Bill Harper revolutionized Newton studies. One casualty of their research (see also this influential paper by Howard Stein), was the idea that Newton embraced hypothetico-deductive reasoning in  his 'deduction' of the gravitational law.* This is a fascinating topic, but one may well wonder why this matters to philosophy in a broader sense.

But I think the strength of Newton’s evidential arguments are intrinsic to the significance of Newton to the history of philosophy in four ways. (I leave aside here the would be emulators of Newton in philosophy!) First, because in virtue of the these he was capable of transforming many questions central to philosophy into empirical questions or into significant, distinct empirical research projects (as Katherine Brading argues). Second, in so doing he contributed to the emerging split between philosophy and science. In particular, and to speak anachronistically, within science questions that increasingly came to be associated with ‘philosophy’ could be forestalled or postponed indefinitely (or so I argue here; and with Zvi Biener here.) Feynman's “Shut up and calculate” is an extreme, but historically well-trodden version of this. (To be clear: I am not claiming this is always true in science, or that Newton intended this outcome.)

In addition, Newton helped make prominent -- and this he did intend -- a style of argument such that the authority of science could be used to settle debate within metaphysics and philosophy more generally. I have called this latter move ‘Newton’s Challenge’ to philosophy (including a number of distinct versions of Newton’s Challenge). And while plenty of self-described philosophical naturalists and synthetic philosophers would defend this stance, it has put many forms of philosophical activity on the proverbial back-foot.

Finally, the stunning success of Newton's evidential arguments helped stimulate a certain style of argument in philosophy that relied on a decisive open-ended progressive conception of science. I think this is pretty clearly happening in Clarke's use of Cicero/Tully and Newton in his Demonstration on the Attributes and Being of God. And it is implied by Halley's use of tropes from Seneca, although Halley seems to think Newton may have completed science. That is to say, rather than promoting a cyclical or degenerative meta-philosophical horizon, Newton helps inaugurate an age of open-ended progress.

Notice that all  these four points are, in a sense, orthogonal to the content of Newton's own metaphysics and ethics.But it is possible that Newton's metaphysics, his relentless conceptual tinkering and innovations, made these four effects possible. If that is so, then understanding Newton's metaphysics is a way to understand much larger forces that shape our philosophical scene. In particular, but that is a promissory note, it is possible that the content of Newton's metaphysics has generated path dependencies that are otherwise invisible to us because they operate, as it were, behind the scenes of our conventional philosophical self-understanding.

On the Epicurean Conception of Gravity, and Newton

[T]here is a second aspect of Newton’s thought that is relevant: there are numerous instances in which both Newton and his followers reject action at a distance in strong terms. Newton’s apparent rejection of distant action in the correspondence with Bentley has been subject to considerable debate, but Newton makes similar points elsewhere, even in unpublished works that cannot be read as involving a hedging of his bets. For instance, in the unpublished corollaries to propositions 4 through 9 of Book III to the Principia, written in the early 1690s, when Newton thought a second edition of his text might appear, he writes:

For two planets separated from each other by a long empty [vacui] distance do not attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle [movente principio] interceding between them by which the force is transmitted from one to the other.[1]

Unlike the Bentley correspondence, this is a direct expression of Newton’s own understanding of gravity, one that is entirely independent of the questions about Newton’s views of the essence of matter and his attempts to distance himself (perhaps) from what were then called “Epicurean” conceptions of atoms in the void (cf. Henry, 2011). There cannot be a clearer statement of his views: two planets do not act on each other in any way except through some mediating item.--Andrew Janiak (2013) "Three concepts of causation in Newton." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44.3 (2013): 403

As regular readers may recall, I am one of Janiak's targets in context.* And I have to admit that when I first read Janiak's paper I thought his evidence was so strong that I had to concede that after the publication of the Principia, Newton did not return to the position that I attributed to him (here; here) based on my reading of the posthumously published Treatise of the System of the World, an early version of what became book III of the Principia.

But before I was going to throw in the towel, I wanted to check out the wider context of the passage quoted by Janiak. It reads as follows:

The Epicureans making a distinction of the whole of nature into body and void, denied the existence of God, but very absurdly. For two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle that stands between them by means of which force is propagated from one to the other. [According to the opinion of the ancients, this medium was not corporeal since they held that all bodies by their very natures were heavy and that atoms themselves fall through empty space toward the earth by the eternal force of their nature without being pushed by other bodies.] Therefore the ancients who grasped the mystical philosophy as Thales and the Stoics more correctly taught that a certain infinite spirit pervades all space, and contains and vivifies the entire world; and this supreme spirit was their numen; according to the poet cited by the Apostle: In him we live and move and have our being. Hence the omnipresent God is recognized, and by the Jews is called 'place'. To the mystical philosophers, however, Pan was that supreme numen...By this symbol, the philosophers taught that matter is moved in that infinite spirit and by it is driven, not at random, but harmonically, or according to the harmonic proportions as I have just explained.[2]

As McGuire notes (1968: 169), the manuscript probably dates from the mid-1690s when Newton became eager to situate his own work in light of ancient epicureanism. (I have tried to explain why this would be so here.) Here the mediating active principle just is the Stoic world soul, which appears to be an electric spirit of some sort. So, at first glance the wider context seems to support Janiak’s position.

And before I address the position, I have to note a complication. A very natural reading of the General Scholium, which was drafted a decade or two later, of the Principia is that he denies that God is a world soul (Newton 1999: 940; recall last week's discussion.) Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. So, we are by no means required to accept this manuscript as authoritative expression of Newton’s all-things-considered views. But because I have expressed some doubts that Newton really does reject the world soul altogether, this move is not entirely open to me.

However, and more controversially, I now think Janiak was wrong to think that the manuscript offers "a direct expression of Newton’s own understanding of gravity, one that is entirely independent of the questions about Newton’s views of the essence of matter and his attempts to distance himself (perhaps) from what were then called “Epicurean” conceptions of atoms in the void." In fact, now I deny that we are supposed to treat the key sentence – “For two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity” – as really expressing Newton’s own position. For, he could be expressing the Epicurean position here. In fact, I think it is a natural reading of Epicurus' physics as expressed in the "Letter to Herodotus" reproduced in Book X of Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers.  

Epicurean gravity is directed down to a privileged place (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 61). And this is so in infinite worlds (section 45). In a void atoms, which constitute bodies, do not interfere with each other unless they accidently deflect each other from their path (Epicurus, Letter to Herodutus, section 44). So, in Epicurean cosmology, the atoms on a planet move down, barring deflection and the swerve, and planets do not attract each other. So, a natural way to read the Epicureans is that two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not “mutually attract each other by any force of gravity.” The atoms that constitute such planets have a tendency to press toward the center of each planet. But there is no reason to think they attract each other across the void. 

So, if one is antecedently convinced that Newton rejects the possibility of action at a distance, then, indeed taken in isolation --- "for two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle that stands between them by means of which force is propagated from one to the other" -- seems like a smoking gun. But the sentence before it and the sentence after it discuss ancient theories. In fact, the following sentence ("bodies by their very natures were heavy and that atoms themselves fall through empty space toward the earth by the eternal force of their nature without being pushed by other bodies") just conveys the Epicurean position. 

So, a natural reading of the first three sentences of the manuscript is as a description of a debate between Epicurean atheists and ancient (mystical-theist) critics. And I am willing to believe that Newton agreed with the critics that the Epicurean position was absurd. Not just because the Epicureans could be taken to deny God's existence, but also because Newton himself has established that Jupiter and Saturn did influence each other (Principia, Book III, Proposition 18, Theorem 18; Newton 1999: 818)

 

 

Newton, Spinozism, and mind/body interaction

Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God. Every man, insofar as he is a thing that has senses, is one and the same man throughout his lifetime in each and every organ of his senses. God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially, for active power [virtus] cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him, experiences nothing from the motions of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God's omnipresence.---Newton, "General Scholium" Principia, translated by Cohen & Whitman (1999), 941-942

The first three sentences of the quoted paragraph were inserted into the  third (and final) edition of the Principia (while the rest was added to the second edition). They have become subject of intense scholarly scrutiny because of the light they might share on the constraints on any possible explanation of the cause of gravity. So, for example, my good friend Andrew Janiak thinks that in the quoted passage there is a hidden premise that 'a substance cannot act where it is not substantially present' and this reinforces his argument that Newton (always) rejects unmediated action at a distance (Hylarie Kochiras has also argued this; in context my work is one of their targets.) Here I want to bracket that debate (but will return at the very end to it), and reflect a bit on Newton's underlying metaphysics of mind and mind-body interaction.

In context, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, Newton has just asserted that God is eternal and omnipresent ("will not be never or nowhere," (941)) And in the paragraph following the one just quoted he claims that "the supreme God necessarily exists, and by the same necessity he is always and everywhere." (942; emphasis in original) That is to say, Newton's God is immanent in the universe. Quite a few more remarks in the General Scholium suggest this.

And, in fact, as 'the same necessity' suggests Newton's God's relationship to space and time is very tight (I would say an internal relation). Rather than creating space and time, by an act of will, they exist when he exists in virtue of the same necessity. How to think of Newton's modal metaphysics here is no simple matter (and I have devoted some space to it recall here; here; here). In an early text, De Gravitatione, Newton had tried to characterize this relationship in terms of an emanation doctrine, and there, too, it signals that space and time are not created (or so I argue here).

It's crucial to Newton's general argument that space and time are not nothing or merely ideal or useful conventions. (In De Gravitatione he makes a point of emphasizing this. In the General Scholium it's treated as self-evident.) And it follows from this that there are structural features of the universe (space and time) that are as infinite and eternal as God is. My interest is in trying to characterize one of the relationships between sentience and this spatial-temporal structure.

Now, a few paragraphs before  Newton had explicitly denied, and he added a second denial to the third edition, that God is a world soul (940). But a natural reading of the quoted passage at the top is that God is sentient with a soul. (I return to this below.) And such ensouled sentience makes a person. But unlike say, in Descartes' metaphysics, Newtonian ensouled sentience can be spread out in space and time. Yet, like a Cartesian soul, such a Newtonian ensouled sentience does not, despite existing in space and time, itself have parts or is even divisible.

As an aside, my own view is that Newton is a substance monist. For Newton, a substance is a directed source of activity, that is an agent.* (Janiak and I agree about this. But we differ on the monism.) And that the only truly active agent in his metaphysics is God. I grant that Newton uses the plural 'substances' (942) in order to deny, in Lockean fashion, that we have knowledge of their essences (and even less of God's essence). But when he uses 'substances' he means it in the more innocent sense of a 'material entity' not an 'agent.' 

Now, an obvious way to make sense of the contours of Newton's position on ensouled sentience in the General Scholium is that he thinks sentience is a kind of emergent property of matter immanent in nature. And so Newton articulates a kind of property dualism.+ This works well for what he says about human persons. 

In fact, Newton returns to the question of ensouled sentience in his fascinating closing paragraph of the General Scholium:

A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; by its force and actions, the particles of bodies attract one another at very small distances and cohere when they become contiguous; and electrical [i.e., electrified] bodies act at greater distances, repelling as well as attracting neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words; furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. (943-944)

As Dempsey has argued, building on I.B. Cohen's interpretation of some draft manuscripts while Newton was developing a response to Leibniz (published in 1715 Account), Newton explicitly refers to experiments done by Hauksbee. Here it looks like Newton is sketching how sentience itself is ground in a powerful, "very subtle spirit" that pervades bodies. In particular, the presence of this spirit helps explain the exciting of sensation in beings like us. Now ''spirit" is a fluid (we use it in that sense when we describe liquor as 'spirits'). And for Newton a kind of (subtle) matter. So, this fits with the emergentism I attribute to Newton. (To be sure, I agree with Stein (2002) and Dempsey that Newton viewed this as a research program because we simply know to little about the nature of mind--so my claim is not meant to be doctrinaire, although Newton is an adamant critic of some positions he rejects.)

In particular, Dempsey calls attention to a passage, "if this spirit may receive impressions from light and convey them into the sensiorium & there act upon that substance which sees & thinks, that substance may mutually act upon this spirit for causing animal motions’" (quoted by Cohen in Newton 1999: 282) I agree with Dempsey that Newton thinks this spirit is a key element in mental causation. But the most natural reading of the passage is, I think, that this subtle spirit is a mechanism by which mental causation takes place. It is not obvious that this spirit also helps constitute or ground the substance which sees and thinks.

Interestingly, Dempsey argues it is likely that Newton is "not here endorsing the independent existence of the mind, but rather is distinguishing it from the organs of sense and the brain. What is more, one straightforward explanation of the natural interaction of this spirit and the mind is precisely that the mind and the spirit with which it interacts are quite similar in nature." (Dempsey 2006: 438) And this fits very nicely with my own emergentist reading. But as I note this very monistic interpretation of Newton's metaphysics of mind is rather speculative.

In fact, I often read Newton in Spinozistic fashion in which God is the one and only substance. (This is, in fact, Clarke's position in 1704, which is what made him a juicy target for Leibniz.) And the universal quantifier in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph, seems to suggest that what Newton says about human minds must fit also God's mind: "Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person." And if this 'every' includes God, this suggest that God is not just immanent nature, but also material (e.g., "motions").

But I have always hesitated about this because in the General Scholium Newton rejects, as I noted above, the idea of God as a world soul and he writes shortly hereafter that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). So, I think it is not obvious that God's sentience is an emergent property of matter. For (a) God's sentience cannot be grounded in such matter, and (b) in various places, Newton seems to suggest that conceptually and temporally God precedes matter. (In the General Scholium that is not explicit, but it is a kind of implication of his claims about the designed nature of the visible universe.)  And so if this is right God's sentience and personhood is not ensouled. But something altogether mysterious.

The passage in which I take him to reject God as the world soul reads as follows:

But, in looking again  He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Newton adds a note: 'that is, universal ruler.'] For "god" is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body fas is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. (940)

Drawing on early work by Dobbs, Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. The effect of this Lipsian reading is that God remains immanent to nature, but is not ground in body. 

In re-reading the passage, it is not obvious to me anymore that Newton rejects conceiving God as the world soul as such. Rather, he is rejecting analyzing God's rule in terms of the world soul because it does not capture the hierarchical nature of God's dominion.

So, it is possible that Newton thinks God's sentience in the pervasive more subtle (electric) fluid/spirit. Even so, given that Newton is explicit that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). it seems unlikely that we're supposed to read Newton as claiming that God's sentience is ground in, and emergent of a, subtle electric (etc.) spirit.++ So, I don't think it is correct to treat God's sentience in terms of emergent properties (in the way, say, Spinoza's parallelism encourages).**  Even though Newton and Spinoza agree that thought is a something like an attribute of substance.

So, where does this leave us? First, rather than seeing Newton as relying on a principle of local action, he is articulating an account of the relationship between sentience and body. For human sentience this is ground in a kind of emergent quality of body, especially a subtle fluid. Second, God is immanent in nature, and features of his existence can be derived from the study of nature. Ordinarily,** bodies are not hindered by his presence, and "he does not act on them nor they on him." In so far as God does interact with the bodies and spirits in nature this is fundamentally mysterious, as mysterious as his substance. In fact, in a passage that echoes a skeptical trope in Locke, Newton really stresses the fact that we really have no epistemic access, not even analogical, to God's sentience.

he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the ways in which the most wise God senses and understands all things. (942)

Third, rather than positing a principle of local action, Newton is developing an account of sentience that may be illuminated by experiments on electricity. But leaves us without any resources to make claims about God's agency.

 

 

Newton and Passivity of Matter

In an unpublished manuscript sheet, which was part of Newton’s preparations for the second edition of the Principia, Newton recorded that the most wise order of things could not have arisen “from matter alone and motion or from the nature of things [a materia sola et motu aut a rerum Natura].”102 Newton argued that God regulates the natural world by means of certain “active Principles,” which cause—inter alia—gravitation, fermentation, and cohesion.103 Correspondingly, in an unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, he wrote,

Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its ↓laws of↓ motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in or selves a power of moving our bodies by or thought ↓Life & thinking ↓will↓ are active Principles by wch we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us↓==Newton [CUL Add. Ms. 3970, 619r [drafts prepared for Opticks (1717)].]

The above remarks square nicely with Newton’s denial that motion results from qualities that are inherent to matter itself and with his belief that for their motions bodies require divinely governed secondary causes, which serve as the immaterial sources of activity and motion. Steffen Ducheyne, "Newton on Action at a Distance." Journal of the History of Philosophy 52.4 (2014): 691-692

As I noted yesterday, inspired by, and partially correcting, Howard Stein, according to my interpretation of Newton, as Newton developed the ideas of the Principia in the 1680s, Newton came to the following position: a body has (at least) two dispositions: (i) a “passive” disposition to respond to impressed forces which is codified in the second law of motion; (ii) whereas an “active” disposition to produce gravitational force is treated as a distinct interaction codified in the third law of motion. And the “cause” of the action is “the conspiring nature of both” bodies. For the “conspiring” to occur, the bodies must share a “nature.” (For the full defense of these ideas see here and here.) And I argue that for Newton the disposition to gravitate is a universal, albeit contingent, relational quality of matter.  Despite grounding my views in a textial analysis Treatise of the System of the World (a work that appeared shortly after Newton died), my view has not generated consensus.

Among my critics, Ducheyne is most inclined to draw on archival material. And the passage quoted above is especially important to his (2014) attempt to refute my position. He refers back to it twice more (on pp. 692-693). The reason why it is important to Ducheyne's argument is that it seems to give him the smoking gun he needs. It's one of the few places where Newton explicitly says that matter is passive.

Now, I had already (in 2011) responded to this passage, in a (2009) criticism of Hylarie Kochiras (who had criticized an early version of my argument). (Looking back, I am quite amazed by how polemical we all were!) I wrote (now quoting myself): "Yet, the published version of the Opticks, is agnostic on this matter. In Query 31 he contrasts the “passive principle by which the bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted” with “active principles, such as are the cause of gravity, by which planets and comets keep their motions in their orbits, and bodies acquire great motion in falling; and the cause of fermentation,” and so on. Shortly thereafter, he lists “gravity, and that which causes fermentation, and the cohesion of bodies” among the “active principles” (Newton, 1952, pp. 400–401)." 

My response to Kochiras clearly did not convince Ducheyne (who cites Kochiras' exchange with me, so he is aware of it). So, normally I would now throw up my hands and leave it to others to figure out who gets the better of the burden shifting. But two distinct new, additional arguments occur to me. The first argument would be to concede Ducheyne's (and Kochiras's!) reading of this passage, and fall back on the acknowledgment that Newton changed his mind and that after 1700 he was more inclined to accept the passivity of matter as the draft suggests. This response would be open to me because officially I am primarily committed to attributing to Newton the view sketched above to the mid 1680s (as he was drafting the Principia). In the Principia itself he is explicitly agnostic, after all--and this is agreed by everybody.

This (first) concessive response fits would also allow me to take on board some of Ducheyne's arguments about the theological significance of embracing the passivity of matter; or at least recognizing that Newton actively distanced himself from being taken to embrace active matter after the initial reception of the Principia. These theological issues and the question of the nature of mature are related to the challenge to Newton being taken as a kind of neo-Epicurean (and Kant and Adam Smith hint) or a(adherent of "blind fate") crypto-Spinozist (as Leibniz suggested at the start of his correspondence with Clarke). I have explored this connection in various places; see here & and forthcoming.

But as Ducheyne correctly notes in his paper, I have been greedy; I have also used other passages from different periods in Newton's life as converging evidence for my  interpretation of his view in the mid 1680s. And so I have kind of suggested that except for when Newton toys with ether theories, my reconstruction of his dispositional account of gravity is Newton's fall-back position. And so now I would have give up on that material.

However, another position, is not to be concessive at all. So, second, I can also simply deny that in the unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, Newton is presenting his own view about the passivity of matter at all. For it seems to me that one can read the italicized passage (the italics are Ducheyne's [here is an image of the manuscript; [here is a transcription] as Newton simply reporting or summarizing the Cartesian position on matter. Before I explain that let me quote a wider version of the passage (with a lot of editorial markings removed--Newton obsessively corrected his own texts): 

Qu. 23. By what means do bodies act on one another at a distance. The ancient Philosophers who held Atoms & Vacuum attributed gravity to Atoms without telling us the means unless perhaps in figures: as by calling God Harmony & representing him & matter by the God Pan & his Pipe, or by calling the Sun the prison of Jupiter because he keeps the Planets in their orbs. Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its laws of motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thought Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.

So, Newton here is taking on the question of action at a distance. And he first describes the innate gravity position of the ancient atomists. He also calls attention to the possibility that they used esoteric and figurative speech to explain the mechanism behind their position. (This sentence inspired one of the most famous papers by McGuire and Rattansi in contemporary Newton scholarship.) He sums up his treatment of the ancients by suggesting they thought God was needed to account for the laws of motion and the existence of matter.

As an aside, something of this view of the Ancients survives in the General Scholium added to the second (1713) edition of the Principia. Against the evidence of the Ancients, who freely speculated about to what degree God/Gods are dispensable to the Epicurean natural philosophy (and who claimed that the Gods were introduced to modify larger population), Newton reads them here as natural philosophical theists of a certain sort.  My own view is that he is doing this in order to try out saying that the a-typical epicureanism people are attributing to him need not be "Atheists" in character. (And he may have even sincerely thought that this was a solid reading of the Epicureans.) That fits a lot of other material in this manuscript (which offers a robust assertion, inter alia, for the reality of final causes in experience).

He then moves on to describing the cartesian position. Now on the reading advanced by Ducheyene (and Kochiras) the description of the cartesian position is a sentence: "The Cartesians make God the author of all motion." This would attribute to the Cartesians, in effect, Malebranche's interpretation of Descartes (or at least his own preferred position) being a kind of occasionalists such that God is the author of all motion. But there is an equally respectable Cartesian interpretation in which occasionalism is not the proper Cartesian position, but rather that  God is responsible (or the author of) the laws of motion, that's the next half of the sentence ("its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion.")

And on the reading advanced by Ducheyne and Kochiras, Newton then moves on to state his own view. But it is equally plausible, and in fact, I think more plausible (yes, really), that here Newton gives a summary of the Cartesian metaphysics of nature: "Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed." So, pace Ducheyne and Kochiras, I think the natural reading here is that what they take to be Newton's position is really just Newton giving a quick and dirty summary of the Cartesian natural philosophy he rejects! 

To be sure, I do not mean to deny that in this manuscript Newton does shift to explaining features of his own position--he regularly invokes the authority of experiments. And where exactly he does that is a matter of judgment. But at the same time he also keeps shifting toward describing alternative views he rejects. 

So, if we read the manuscript in the way proposed by Kochiras and Ducheyne then Newton draws a sharp contrast between entities with minds, who can be active, and passive entities that lack such power. In fact, Kochiras and Ducheyne end up treating Newton by implication as a property dualist (with living things being the only kind of entities that can be substances). 

But Newton himself is much more cautious than that in the manuscript quoted. He makes it clear that all living things are active. And it is, for Newton in this very document, an open question whether (as the Stoics thought) all of nature is alive in that relevant sense: "We find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts ] & see the same power in other living creatures but how this is done & by what laws we do not know. We cannot say that all Nature is not alive. not know her laws or powers any further then we gather them from Phænomena." (Emphasis added.) Nobody has doubted that this is Newton's own position. And this suggests to me that Newton is  much more agnostic about the nature of matter in this document than Kochiras and Ducheyne have allowed. Because Newton allows (as Spinoza did) that there may be as of yet undiscovered principles and laws that can explain the materiality of living things. On my reading, these would also be laws and principles of matter.

What Newton does explicitly deny is that vis inertia can explain the generation of (new) motion: "vis inertiæ they continue in their state of moving or resting & receive motion proportional to the force impressing it & resiste as much as they are resisted, but they cannot move themselves; & without some other principle hen the vis inertiæ there could be no motion in the world." For reasons I do not fully understand Ducheyne thinks this shows that for Newton matter is passive. But that's not right. For even I assert -- and this also follows naturally from the second law of motion -- that vis inertiæ is a passive principle, but does not constitute the whole of Newton's matter theory in the Principia. 

 

 

 

 

Does Newton's The Treatise of the System of the World rule out Metaphysics? [Hint: No!]

To ascribe to Newton what I have called robust action at a distance, is to miss out on significant features of his methodology, namely his desire in De mundi systemate to remain neutral with respect to defining “a species or mode of action, or a physical cause or reason [modum actionis causamve aut rationem physicam].”... Furthermore, there are clear indications that Newton thought that De mundi systemate contained no speculations or hypotheses on the cause of gravitational interaction. Newton wrote, for instance, that he wanted “to avoid all questions about the nature or quality of this force, which we would not understood to determine by any hypothesis” (Newton, A Treatise of the System of the World, 4;]--Steffen Ducheyne,  "Newton on Action at a Distance." Journal of the History of Philosophy 52.4 (2014): 690 and note 95 (on p. 690).

In a classic paper, quoted above, Steffen Ducheyne went through then quite recent, renewed scholarly recent debate over the physical and metaphysical underpinnings of law of gravitation in the Principia. It was then, I think, agreed by all parties to the debate that in the Principia itself Newton intended [A] to be agnostic about its underlying cause. That is compatible with four other claims: (i) that Newton's early readers attributed all kinds of non-agnostic positions to Newton; (ii) that the Principia itself constraints any possible physics and metaphysics of the law of gravitation; (iii) that there is evidence of Newton's own views on the physics and metaphysics of the law of gravitation in his other writings that may either bear on (ii) or explain (iv) what Newton himself held about the physics and metaphysics of the law of gravitation, but did not print in the Principia.

In a number of papers, I have tried to contribute to debates over (i-iv). In particular, following (2002) work by Howard Stein, I claimed [and this bears on (ii)-(iii)-(iv)] that Newton's discarded original draft of the system of the world (which ended up being book 3 of the Principia), the so-called Treatise of the System of the World (published shortly after Newton died) --offers evidence for attributing to Newton the idea that, while drafting the Principia, he thought that gravity was the effect or manifestation of a two-fold disposition, a non-intrinsic relational quality of matter. And so lurking in the Principia is a kind of matter theory (something Katherine Brading, Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk have argued on different, more (ahh) solid grounds.)

On my view A body has two dispositions: a “passive” disposition to respond to impressed forces which is codified in the second law of motion whereas an “active” disposition to produce gravitational force is treated as a distinct interaction codified in the third law of motion. And the “cause” of the action is “the conspiring nature of both” bodies. For the “conspiring” to occur, the bodies must share a “nature.” (For the full defense of these ideas see here and here.) In my argument, and again following Stein, I relied on passages like the following: 

For all action is mutual, and makes the bodies mutually to approach onę to the other, and therefore must be the same in both bodies. It is true that we may conſider one body as attracting, another as attracted. But this diſtinction is more mathematical than natural. The attraction is really common of either to other, and therefore of the same kind in both.

And hence it is that the attractive force is found in both. The Sun attracts Jupiter and the other Planets. Jupiter attracts its satellites. And for the fame reason, the ſatellites act as well one upon another as upon Jupiter, and all the Planets mutually one upon another.

And though the mutual actions of two Planets may be diſtinguiſhed and conſidered as two, by which each attracts the other ; yet as thoſe actions are intermediate, they don't make two, but one operation between two terms. Two bodies may be mutually attracted, each to the other, by the contraction of a cord interposed. There is a double cause of action, to wit, the dispoſition of both bodies, as well as a double action in ſo far as the action is conſidered as upon two bodies. But as betwixt two bodies it is but one ſingle one. 'Tis not one action by which the Sun attracts Jupiter, and another by which Jupiter attracts the Sun. But it is one action by which the Sun and Jupiter mutually endeavour to approach each the other. Newton Treatise System of the World (1728 translation), pp.38-39

Now, confronted by my interpretation of this passage, Ducheyne wants to argue that Newton's language is "rather loose, and without aiming at “speculatively metaphysical” conclusions." (689-690) And Ducheyne's evidence for this is the following passage he (partially) quotes in the footnote above:

But our purpoſe is only to trace out the quantity and properties of this force from the phænomena, and to apply what we diſcover in some simple cases, as principles, by which, in a mathematical way, we may estimate the effects thereof in more involved caſes. For it would be endleſs and impossible to bring every particular to direct and immediate observation.
   We said, in a mathematical way, to avoid all questions about the nature or quality of this force, which we would not be understood to determine by any hypothesis; as it is a force which is directed towards some center; and as it regards more particularly a body in that center, we call it circum-solar, circum-terreſtrial, cir cum - jovial, and in like manner in respect of other central bodies. (Treatise pp. 4-5; emphasis in original)

And I certainly agree with Ducheyne that this passage seems to be a problem for my interpretation. It seems that when Newton composed the Treatise System of the World, he had the same methodological stance of the Principia, that is [A]. In context, it is clear that "this force" refers to the force that keeps planets in orbits. And Newton discusses and rejects a number of hypotheses (solid orbs; vortices, principle of impulse or attraction, etc.) which he attributes to Ancient and seventeenth century thinkers.

Now, I think Ducheyne misreads the the significance passage. But let's first assume Ducheyne gets it right. Notice that on Ducheyne's reading of the passage, Newton's mathematical way avoids discussion of the ontology and metaphysics of forces, that is, avoids speculation.  

Now, if we go back to the first paragraph of the Newton passage I quoted above, in light of Ducheyne's emphasis on the mathematical way, we notice something fascinating:

For all action is mutual, and makes the bodies mutually to approach onę to the other, and therefore must be the same in both bodies. It is true that we may conſider one body as attracting, another as attracted. But this distinction is more mathematical than natural. The attraction is really common of either to other, and therefore of the same kind in both.

Newton explicitly offers a contrast here between the "mathematical" and natural way. And he treats the natural way as what "really" is. So, here Newton explicitly violates the injunction Ducheyne attributes to Newton. And Newton does so in terminology that evokes the passage Ducheyne offers as evidence against this happening.

One way to handle this is to claim that Newton is contradicting himself in the Treatise. (Nobody has suggested that, as far as I know.) Another, which is Ducheyne's approach, is despite the rather technical description, to treat the passage on pp. 38/39 as loose talk. But this means that Ducheyne must explain away Newton's invocation of the very contrast that grounds Ducheyne's original interpretation and he has not done so. Another way, which is the one I preferred, is that Newton means what he says and says so explicitly.

But does that leave me attributing to Newton a singular violation of his own methodological principle [A]? I don't think so. Because I deny that Newton holds [A] in the Treatise.

For, the point of Newton's mathematical way is to use it as a means to infer stuff about the nature of reality (including that Copernicus is true, etc.). This becomes clear if we look at what Newton does after he has explained the nature of centripetal forces. For example, he then goes on to "infer" that "That there are centripetal forces actually directed to the bodies of the Sun, of the Earth, and other Planets." (p. 10) In fact, Newton argues from "astronomical experiments" it "follows by geometrical reasoning, that there are centripetal forces, actually directed (either accurately or without conſiderable errour) to the centers of the Earth, of Jupiter of Saturn , and of the Sun." (12; emphasis added. Yhe nature of an astronomical experiment is of interest, but I leave it aside here)

So, it is misleading to use Newton's claims about the mathematical way as ruling out the possibility that Newton is making claims about the nature of reality. Rather, Newton treats them as a means to infer all kinds of things about what actually or really is the case. That is to say, the mathematical way is a mechanism to make inferences from theory-mediated measurements and (astronomical) experiments to the nature of reality.* Of course, to say that is not to do justice to the nature of Newton's inferential arguments (see Smith 2014).

That Newton does not treat the passage on pp. 38-39 as loose talk is also evinced by his illustrative claim directly following it that the "action betwixt the load-stone and iron is single, and is considered as single by the philosophers." (40; emphasis added) In fact, it is no coincidence that Newton draws attention to magnetism because his treatment here (of the analogy between magnetic and gravitational action) evokes, as I have argued in work unfamiliar to Ducheyne, Gilbert's (1651) De Mundo. That is to say, Newton draws attention to the fact that the very conceptual apparatus he is deploying is one used by other philosophers (including the expert on magnetism). That would be very odd if he were merely talking loosely.+ 

Of course, my position does entail that Newton came to see that his way of putting things in the Treatise was likely to be thought a kind of speculative talk he was ruling out when he rejected the explanatory demands (the "hypotheses") of the mechanical philosophers to put all explanations in terms of the  size, figure, and motion of colliding bodies.