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The New Philosophy

In the letter that prefaces the French edition of his Principles of Philosophy (1647), Descartes set out what the word means: “the word PHILOSOPHY signifies the study of wisdom”, and wisdom is “not merely prudence in the management of affairs, but a perfect knowledge of all that man can know, as well for the conduct of his life as for the preservation of his health and the discovery of all the arts” (tr. Veitch). His image is a tree: “Ainsi toute la Philosophie est comme un arbre, dont les racines sont la Metaphysique, le tronc est la Physique, & les branches qui sortent de ce tronc sont toutes les autres sciences, qui se reduisent à trois principales, à sçavoir la Medecine, la Mechanique & la Morale”, thus all philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are all the other sciences, which come down to three, medicine, mechanics and morals. The highest morals, which presuppose all the rest, are “le dernier degré de la sagesse”, the last degree of wisdom, and as with a tree, its fruit is gathered “seulement des extrémités de leurs branches”, only from the ends of the branches. He gave the method as four rules in the Discourse on Method (Part II), the first “never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such”, the last “to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted” (tr. Veitch).

Francis Bacon gave the sciences their goal: “the real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches” (Novum Organum I.81, ed. Devey). He named the way by an image: “Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both … The true labor of philosophy resembles hers” (I.95). In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he divided philosophy into “divine philosophy, natural philosophy, and human philosophy or humanity”, with a first philosophy as “the main and common way, before we come where the ways part”. Natural philosophy remained the name of the work on nature: Newton’s Principia (1687) is the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, and in it hypotheses “have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferr’d from the phænomena, and afterwards render’d general by induction” (General Scholium, tr. Motte).

Locke traced his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) to a discussion that stalled, when “it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities”. He set his work beside the master-builders of the sciences, “a Boyle or a Sydenham … Huygenius”, and Newton: “it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”. His method was a “historical, plain method”, an account of “the ways whereby our understandings come to attain those notions of things we have”.

Spinoza began from the search for a good. “After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile … I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good.” The chief good is “the knowledge of the union existing [between] the mind and the whole of nature”, and “it is part of my happiness to lend a helping hand, that many others may understand even as I do”. To that end moral philosophy, education, medicine and mechanics are needed, but first “a means must be devised for improving the understanding”, for “I wish to direct all science to one end and aim” (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect 1, 13–16, tr. Elwes).

Leibniz hoped to settle philosophy’s disputes by calculation: “quando orientur controversiae, non magis disputatione opus erit inter duos philosophos, quam inter duos Computistas. Sufficiet enim calamos in manus sumere sedereque ad abacos, et sibi mutuo (accito si placet amico) dicere: calculemus”, when controversies arise there will be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants; it will be enough to take pens in hand, sit down at the abacus and say to one another, with a friend as witness if they like: let us calculate (Gerhardt VII 200).

The sorting of these thinkers into rationalists and empiricists is later; Alberto Vanzo has traced it to Kant’s own sketches of the history of reason, on Enlightenment to Kant.