Tnhp daniel garber

Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution

DANIEL GARBER

T HE SUBJECT of this conference is Teaching New Histories of
Philosophy. I have been studying the history of philosophy for some
years now, trying to push the limits of the older approaches to the
subject. I have also been teaching it for quite a while too. It is strange,
then, that I have found it difficult to combine the two. In my graduate
seminars I have been proselytizing for newer approaches, but I have
found it difficult to figure out how to introduce some of these newer
approaches into my basic lecture courses. While my own scholarly
work in the history of philosophy has evolved considerably over the
years, I don’t know that I teach the Meditations to undergraduates and
beginning graduate students that much differently now than I did
25 years ago. Shocking. So, inspired by this conference, I have
decided to try to put the different pieces of my life together in a
course that I am teaching right now. The main theme of this paper
will be a description of the outline of the course and its conception
and will include some remarks about how it actually worked in
practice. (As I write this paper I am at the beginning of the semester;
by the time of the conference itself I shall be somewhere in the
middle of the term.) Before I begin talking about the course, I
would like to talk a bit about what these new histories of philosophy
are that we are supposed to be teaching.
There is a tendency in these kinds of discussions to talk in the
singular about the new history of philosophy, as opposed to the old
history of philosophy. This, of course, is nonsense. There never was
a single, old history of philosophy against which my generation of
young Turks was reacting in the late 1970s and 1980s; nor is there a
single new history of philosophy that we intended to replace it with.
(This parallels a theme in my course as well: there was neither a single
scholastic philosophy nor a single new philosophy in the early 17th
century either.) For that reason it is important to read the title of this

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DANIEL GARBER

conference carefully: it is about teaching new histories of philosophy,
and not the new history of philosophy.
What my generation of historians of philosophy was reacting
against was a bundle of practices that characterized the writing of
the history of philosophy in the period: the tendency to substitute
rational reconstructions of a philosopher’s views for the views
themselves; the tendency to focus on an extremely narrow group of
figures (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
in my period); within that very narrow canon the tendency to focus
on just a few works to the exclusion of others—those that best fit with
our current conception of the subject of philosophy; the tendency
to work exclusively from translations and to ignore secondary work
that was not originally written in English; the tendency to treat
the philosophical positions as if they were those presented by
contemporaries; and on and on and on. In the prospectus for the
Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Michael Ayers
and I wrote the following passage, which drew fire even before the
volume was finished:

…[O]ur view of philosophy as a discipline has in large part been
shaped by a standard account and critique, in many respects
tendentious and oversimplified, of the various philosophical
positions for which the great names of the early-modern period
are the supposed spokesmen. Commentators in the analytic
tradition in particular, writing very much out of their own
philosophical interests and preconceptions, have often lost sight
of the complex context in which seventeenth-century philosophy
was written. In doing so, they have not only distorted its
achievements but have denied themselves the tools necessary for
the interpretation of the very words and sentences they continue
to read and expound.

We ourselves were surely guilty of some exaggeration here; what
we presented was a kind of cartoon version of the “analytic”
history of philosophy as it existed at that time. Not all historians
of philosophy were like that even in the period. Even so, the old
history of philosophy was a useful demon to posit, even if it didn’t
altogether fit the practice.

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PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

We were up to something different, something that other scholars
working in the history of philosophy were not doing at the time—at
least not those who were working in English. We were rebels then,
sometimes striking out on new paths, boldly going where no one had
gone before—at least not for a long time. Sometimes we were
recovering older and forgotten secondary literature. Most of all we
were doing something different from what we had been taught as the
history of philosophy: intellectual parricide. It was heady stuff. My
own particular heresies in the history of philosophy derived from my
acquaintance with the history of science. I was a graduate student at
Harvard, enamored of Quine’s program for naturalizing everything.
At the same time I was assisting in a course in which we were reading
Descartes. Reading about Descartes, I learned of his importance for
the history of science. This was particularly interesting to me, given
my Quinean tendencies. If Descartes was both a philosopher and a
scientist, then how did he turn up as the villain in Quine’s story rather
than the hero? This made me curious to read some of Descartes’s
scientific writings and to try to figure out how they related to his more
straightforwardly philosophical writings. I had the feeling that Quine
was reacting to the Descartes of lore and legend and not to the real,
flesh-and-blood philosopher. At the same moment, I was becoming
interested in the philosophy of John Locke and discovered
the wonderful essays of Maurice Mandelbaum.1 Mandelbaum made
the convincing case (convincing to me, in any case) that Locke’s
philosophy had to be read in the context of the mechanical
philosophy as developed by Robert Boyle. All of this stirred my
imagination. I began reading more and more in the history of
science, trying to link the history of science to the history of philos-
ophy. (A coconspirator in this enterprise but from the other direction
was Raine Daston, then a graduate student in the Department of
History of Science at Harvard, and part of this conference.)
This took me in a number of directions. First of all, it convinced me
of the importance of reading the whole corpus of a philosopher and
not just the more obviously philosophical bits. Second, it took me
outside the great philosophers and into a literature in the history of
science, figures generally considered not very relevant to the history
of philosophy. It also took me to other aspects of the background. For
example, when working on Descartes, I became curious about what

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DANIEL GARBER

Descartes learned in school and how his later thought was affected
by it. More generally, I became more and more curious about the
scholastic background to 17th-century philosophy. This, in part, is
what led me to some of the non-English literature in the history of
philosophy. Much of what I was interested in also interested other
commentators, such as Martial Gueroult, or Henri Gouhier, or
Etienne Gilson. From them I also was led to other non-English
literature that my teachers had not told me about. But it also led me
farther afield, outside texts and ideas and into the world. One of the
important trends of history of science in the 1980s and 1990s was its
interest in the social background to science. There was the extreme
group that thought it was all sociology and that content and
argument had no interesting role to play in the process. (This isn’t
strictly true, insofar as argument itself can be given a sociological
gloss.) But whether or not you thought that it was all sociology, it
was hard not to be impressed by the increasing role that sociological
factors were playing in histories of science. To focus on texts and
the transmission of ideas began to seem downright old-fashioned. I
began to wonder if as a historian of philosophy I shouldn’t be paying
more attention to those sorts of factors as well. And so, I made some
stabs at trying to integrate aspects of these more sociological
approaches into my work in the history of philosophy.
Which brings us back to a central question: what are the “new”
histories of philosophy anyway? What characterized the new attitude
that my generation brought to the study of the history of philosophy
was the more serious emphasis on the “history” in the history of
philosophy. We were (and still are, I suppose) accused of neglecting
the “philosophy” part, of being “mere” historians of ideas (or even
antiquarians) as opposed to real philosophers. This is not the place
to defend the philosophical importance of the approaches to the
history of philosophy that I favor, and I do think that they are
philosophically significant. My interest in making the history of
philosophy more genuinely historical did lead me in the direction of
my colleagues in history and in the history of science and did lead me
in the direction of research that, at least on the surface, didn’t look
as if it had much immediate philosophical payoff. But just as there
is no single correct way of approaching the history of a period or a
place or an event, there is no unique way of making the history of

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philosophy historical. In this way the new histories of philosophy in
my domain constitute a grab bag of different approaches that
have in common only the idea that the history of philosophy should
grapple with philosophy in a seriously historical way. Whatever
that means exactly.
But how can that be translated into an undergraduate course?
There are constraints on what can be done. Students (and
colleagues) have expectations that certain texts and authors will be
covered. One can stray outside the canon from time to time and
perhaps supplement canonical authors with other, more obscure
texts, but there is a legitimate expectation that as the historian of
philosophy in a department of philosophy, I will teach the students
what they need to know about Descartes and Leibniz and Hume in
order to prepare them for other courses in philosophy. A second
constraint is student interest. I may be fascinated by the minutiae
of 17th-century epistolary practices, or by Sir Kenelm Digby’s
eccentric theories of the dense and rare, or by the organization of
social services in Paris in the 1630s, but I can’t necessarily expect that
students who sign up for a class in the Department of Philosophy
will feel the same way. Another constraint is language. Few
undergraduates (not to mention graduate students) feel comfortable
working in foreign languages such as French and German, and it
has been a long time since you could count on your students to be
able to read, write, and speak Latin.
What I decided to do was a course on philosophy and science in the
17th century called Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution. The
core of the course is a reading of some of the canonical writers of the
period. On the syllabus are the following: Descartes, Bacon, Galileo,
Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. This by itself is hardly innovative.
What is new about this part of the course is this. Now, the older
histories of philosophy read philosophical figures such as Descartes,
Locke, and Leibniz in isolation from their scientific contemporaries.
This course, of course, puts them together with some important
scientific texts. In addition, I am asking the students to read scientific
texts written by people who are generally considered philosophers,
such as Descartes’s Le monde and some of Leibniz’s dynamic writings.
This is a new history of philosophy, in a way, but kind of an old new
history of philosophy—something that was being done years ago. But

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DANIEL GARBER

while I am using some canonical texts from the history of philosophy
and the history of science, I am trying to reorient them in a significant
way. In recent years a certain master narrative of the period has
emerged. On that narrative, the rise of the so-called mechanical
philosophy is seen as the main alternative to the Aristotelian
philosophy of the schools; the scientific revolution is seen as a battle
between these two titans, with the mechanical philosophy winning in
the end. (On this, see Westfall or Dijksterhuis.) On this view of the
period, characters such as Descartes and Galileo and Bacon represent
a united front against the Aristotelianism of the schools, attempting
to substitute explanations in terms of size, shape, and motion for
explanations in terms of substantial forms and real qualities of their
opponents. This is not entirely false; it is, for example, very close
to the way in which Descartes presents himself and his own
historical situation. But it is a kind of caricature of the real historical
situation. There are, on one hand, significant differences between
different strains of Aristotelianism, though they do have a great deal
in common. But it isn’t too much of an exaggeration to see the
Aristotelianism of the schools as a kind of unitary opponent. On the
other hand, there were considerable differences among the
opponents of Aristotelianism. In addition to the mechanical philoso-
phers, there were Platonists, and alchemists, and magicians, and
those, like Fludd, who were very difficult to put into a single category.
In a genuine history course, I would emphasize the variety of the
scholastic traditions and the variety of the alternatives available
through much of the 17th century. But there isn’t time to do that
here: in a course offered in a department of philosophy I still feel
some obligation to cover a certain number of canonical texts. My
strategy is to use a smaller number of the canonical texts to tell a
different story, teaching many of the same texts but giving them a
rather different spin and trying as much as possible to include some
background material that is a bit different.
The story I want to tell is this. There is such a thing as
Aristotelianism, as codified in the textbooks that every educated
person had to study. There are differences among Aristotelians, but
there is also a common heritage, something that every educated
person could be assumed to know, if not necessarily to believe. And
it was against this that a number of people in the period reacted.

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But—and this is the crucial thing—they didn’t always react against it
in the same way. Descartes maintained the form of scholastic learning
in many ways, but the content he poured into that form was very
different. He questioned the senses and made them subordinate to
reason, and he substituted for a world grounded in the senses a world
of purely geometrical bodies governed by laws of nature—a world
built by a solitary thinker. Bacon, too, rebelled against the schools,
but in a very different way. His conception of science was grounded
in natural histories, observations sorted into tables and then sifted
into empirical regularities—a conception of science suited for a
corporate science situated in a scientific society. And Galileo, too,
rejected the Aristotelian model, but in a different way still. His view
of the world starts not from the classroom and the Aristotelian
textbook, but from the arsenal. Largely uninterested in the
foundations of philosophy or the theory of method, Galileo
attacked problems in understanding nature with the tools of the
mathematician, which included optics, astronomy, and above all,
mechanics. The point is that these three fathers of modern
philosophy—Descartes, Bacon, and Galileo—don’t represent a single
alternative to the Aristotelian philosophy, mechanical philosophy or
otherwise: they are competing programs, alternative ways of seeing
the brave new world of post-Aristotelian thought. The so-called
mechanical philosophy arises only later, in the thought of Robert
Boyle. Boyle took these competing accounts (and others as well),
put them together, and dubbed the result the mechanical or
corpuscular philosophy. By setting aside points of difference among
competing camps of anti-Aristotelians and by emphasizing
commonalities, Boyle created a new program in the 1660s. Even then,
it wasn’t the only alternative to the Aristotelian program around. It
was visible, though, and it did capture the imagination of other
philosophers such as Locke and Leibniz, who in different ways
elaborated on it. But it was also rather short-lived. By the late 1680s,
there was a new kid on the block, Isaac Newton, whose program
represented a serious repudiation of the mechanical philosophy
that Boyle had cobbled together.
This is my story. It isn’t altogether original, of course. The texts I
am teaching are much the same as the texts that have been taught
for years in courses of this sort, though I am orienting them a bit

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DANIEL GARBER

differently, telling a different master narrative than is usually taught.
But if there is an innovation, it is in where I begin the story. I want
to begin by giving the students some sense of what it was like to be a
student in 1600 or so, what an educated person could have been
expected to know, the classroom experience that they could have
been expected to share. If I were more theatrically inclined, I could
dress in an academic robe and lecture them in Latin while they
copied my lectures into their copybooks with quill pens. But I am not,
so I have to content myself with lecturing in my normal academic
garb in English. We began by discussing the early-17th-century
classroom: who was there, how old they were, what they did in the
classroom. Here I am greatly aided by my vade mecum: Laurence
Brockliss’s superb book French Higher Education in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries.2 This I supplemented with a translation of
the Jesuit Ratio studiorum of 1599, which I found on the Internet at
a Jesuit site.3 I think that students are quite interested in finding out
how students of the past lived, what it was like to sit in the classroom,
how they were taught and learned. What is remarkable is how
little things had changed. It was amusing to watch them as I stood
on the dais, lecturing them in fixed seats, describing how their
early-17th-century counterparts attended classes in similar circum-
stances. Even the discussion section existed in the period. Large
classes divided into sections of 10 each, led by an advanced student
(a decurion), who drilled them and corrected their lessons.
The Ratio studiorum gives an outline of the curriculum. Using the
Ratio studiorum, we talked about what it meant to study philosophy in
the period, the general contents (logic, physics or natural philosophy,
metaphysics, and ethics), the period of time spent on philosophy (two
years at the University of Paris, three in the Jesuit schools), and the
fact that the physics seemed to take up the bulk of the curriculum.
We also talked about the place of mathematics in the curriculum and
the way in which it was studied as a supplement to the physics
curriculum. But for any real content, one has to go to the textbooks
themselves. In a way, this is easy: many textbooks of the period
survive. A number of them are also available on the Internet. For
example, through the Web site Early English Books, one can
download a complete copy of Eustachius a Sancto Paulo’s widely used
textbook the Summa philosophiae quadripartita, first published in 1609

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but widely reprinted. (The edition I used was Cambridge, 1648.) The
problem, of course, is that it is in Latin, as were almost all of
the classroom materials. The compromise I made is this. I made
available to the students the table of contents of the “physics” section
of Eustachius’s textbook in Latin. Thanks to the Internet, it was easy
to post it on the course Web site for them to download. In addition,
I posted the tables of contents of two mathematics textbooks:
Bartholomaeus Keckermann’s Systema compendiosum totius
mathematices hoc est geometriae, opticae, astronomiae, et geographiae (pub-
lished in Oxford, 1661, though it is the record of a course given in
1605) and Petrus Galtruch’s Mathematicae totius (London, 1683),
also in Latin. Both are later than my target period but representative
of what would have been taught in the mathematics part of the
curriculum earlier in the century. Even though they are in Latin, it
was easy enough to go through them in class and show students the
general structure of the physics as it was taught. In Eustachius I
emphasized the distinction between the general part of physics and
the discussion of particulars (cosmology, terrestrial physics, etc.),
particularly the fact that living things and their souls were discussed
as a part of the physics unit. In the mathematics textbooks I
emphasized how little pure mathematics they get. Galtruch gives
about 30 pages of elementary arithmetic (whole numbers, fractions,
ratios, and a couple of pages on logarithms) followed by 20 pages of
pure geometry and 30 of practical geometry. Keckermann dispenses
with the arithmetic altogether and begins with about 70 pages of
geometry. Neither treats algebra. In both, the emphasis is on “mixed
mathematics,” what we might call applied mathematics: optics,
geography, astronomy, and music.
This gives us the bare outline of the course in natural philosophy
and the supplementary course in mathematics. However, to
appreciate the new philosophies that follow, it is necessary to have a
more detailed knowledge of the course. For this the Latin of
Eustachius was a real obstacle. After some searching about on the
Web, I found in Early English Books two texts that looked like they
might be appropriate. The first was a curious book by one Daniel
Widdowes (or Woodhouse) called Natural Philosophy, or, a Description
of the World and of the several Creatures therein contained (London, 1631).
This is a short book, a paraphrase/translation/adaptation of a

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DANIEL GARBER

book published about 50 years earlier: Rerum naturalium doctrina
methodica by Wilhelm Adolf Scribonius (1579).
Widdowes gives a whole course in natural philosophy in just 65
pages, with very short definitions and copious dichotomies, in the
style of Ramus. This isn’t exactly what a textbook would have looked
like, but I had high hopes that it would quickly give students an idea
of what the world looked like to an educated person in 1600. It
didn’t work, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was just too short
and didn’t give enough detail. But more important, it didn’t have the
style of argument one finds in a textbook of the period, the constant
references and appeal to authorities. Much better in this regard, I
found, is a book by Daniel Sennert, Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy
(London, 1660). The first eight of those books turn out to be a
translation of his Epitome naturalis scientiae. (The other five books are
translations of later essays on natural philosophy.) While not exactly
a textbook, the Sennert is rather close in both form and content to
what would have been used in a classroom. Sennert, of course, was
an original thinker of the period, an alchemist, an atomist, and a
physician who had his own distinctive point of view. But in the Epitome
he is less the original thinker and more the teacher, transmitting the
basics of Aristotelian natural philosophy to the student. Again,
through the miracle of modern Internet wizardry, I was able to
download the book, and post generous selections on the course
Web site for students to download. We used Sennert as the basis
of discussions of some of the basic issues in scholastic natural
philosophy: matter and form, the four causes, the concept of motion,
the distinction between the celestial and terrestrial realms,
the four elements, etc. But with the text, they could see something
about the style of philosophizing that would be difficult to
communicate through a lecture.
Sennert typically begins any discussion by canvassing the variety of
opinions that others held, citing their views and comparing them
before finally arriving at his own. The cast of characters is somewhat
different than one finds in Eustachius, for example; Sennert
constantly cites Aristotle, with whom he agrees most often, but
Scaliger seems to come up rather often as well. But even so, the
constant citation of authorities, the idea that philosophy is done in
the context of a deep tradition, and the scholastic method of

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weighing what others have said before expressing one’s own position
all come out loud and clear. This, as much as the content, is what
these young students were expected to absorb. And it is this, as
much as the content, that the revolutionaries of the 17th century
were reacting against.
So there it is: my attempt to teach one of the new histories of
philosophy, ironically enough by trying to teach the old philosophy
in the old-fashioned way, trying to return to early-17th-century
practice in the teaching of philosophy.
For your reading pleasure I am including an appendix with the
syllabus of the course. The supplementary materials can be found
on the Web, on the Blackboard site for my course, and can be
downloaded at will.4

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DANIEL GARBER

APPENDIX: COURSE S YLLABUS
PHI332, SPRING 2003

This course will focus on philosophy and the scientific revolution of
the 16th and 17th centuries. We will read a mixture of philosophical
texts, scientific texts, and contemporary philosophical texts. We will
discuss both the relations between what we now call science and what
we now call philosophy in the period of the scientific revolution,
as well as the way in which these historical episodes are reflected in
more recent literature in the philosophy of science. The material is
divided into the following five parts.
1. We will begin with a survey of what an educated person would have
believed about the physical world circa 1600–1650, a view of the
world grounded largely in the philosophy of Aristotle. We will try
to use contemporary materials to re-create something of the
classroom experience during that period. This will constitute a
kind of baseline against which we will be able to measure some of
the innovations that we will examine later in the course.
2. We will then look at a group of three important innovators in
natural philosophy from the early 17th century: Descartes,
Bacon, and Galileo. While all three rejected the traditional
Aristotelian teaching of the schools, they represent different and
largely incompatible programs for natural philosophy.
3. We will then turn to some of the writings of Robert Boyle and John
Locke. While Descartes, Bacon, and Galileo represent competing
visions for natural philosophy, Boyle represents an attempt to
consolidate a number of different alternatives to Aristotelianism
into one coherent program—what he called the corpuscular or
mechanical philosophy. Locke represents a philosophical
elaboration of this program, which came to dominate natural
philosophy in the later part of the 17th century.
4. We will end the historical part of the course with a discussion of
the magisterial systems of Leibniz and Newton, which draw on the
mechanical philosophy but step well beyond.

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5. The final unit of the course will treat the larger historical and
philosophical questions of what a scientific revolution is and
whether the changes that took place in 17th-century Europe
constitute such a revolution. We will read and discuss Thomas
Kuhn’s seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The following books are on order for the course and will be
available at the Princeton University Store:

Required
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Cambridge University Press,
paperback.
Boyle, ed. Stewart, Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle.
Hackett, paperback.
Descartes (ed. Stephen Gaukroger). The World and Other Writings.
Cambridge University Press, paperback.
Galileo (tr. Drake). Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Anchor
Books, paperback.
Galileo (tr. Drake). Two New Sciences. Wall and Emerson,
paperback.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of
Chicago Press, paperback.
Leibniz (Ariew and Garber, eds.). Leibniz: Philosophical Essays.
Hackett, paperback.
Locke. Essay concerning Human Understanding. Oxford University
Press, paperback.
Newton (ed. H. S. Thayer). Newton’s Philosophy of Nature. Macmillan
USA, paperback.

Supplementary
Cohen, I. B., and George Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to
Newton. Cambridge University Press, paperback.
Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes.
Jolley, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge
University Press, paperback.
Machamer, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Galileo.

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DANIEL GARBER

Peltonen, Markku, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bacon.

Some additional material will be available at the Blackboard Web
site. All required reading will be in English, though some foreign-
language materials may be made available for students who would
like to use them.

Papers
There will be two papers due during the term—a shorter one (four
to six pages) due on March 12—and a longer one (seven to
eight pages)—due on April 14. Students will have a choice among
several topic questions. In addition, there will be a take-home
final examination, due on May 13. There is a grade penalty of 1 point
(on a scale of 100) per weekday to a maximum of 10 (or one full
letter—for example, from A– to B–) for unexcused lateness.

Readings
Week 1 (Feb. 3/5)
Introduction: what every smart person knew in 1600
Reading:
Texts on Blackboard Web site in Course Documents, under
“Scholastic Textbooks, etc.” Read the Widdowes and Sennert in their
entirety; the other documents will be discussed in class. (Don’t worry
that some of the reading is in Latin: it will be explained in class.) Print
out all except the Jesuit “Order of Studies” and bring it to class.

Week 2 (Feb. 10/12)
Introduction, continued (M).
Descartes’s New Philosophy (W)
Reading:
Discourse on the Method I–III (on Web)
The World: Treatise on Light (in Gaukroger, ed., The World and
Other Writings and on Web)
Other selections to be announced.

Week 3 (Feb. 17/19)
Descartes, continued.

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Week 4 (Feb. 24/26)
Bacon’s New Method
Reading:
Great Instauration and New Organon (in Sargent, ed., Selected
Philosophical Works)
New Atlantis (in Selected Philosophical Works and on Web)
Other selections to be announced.

Week 5 (March 3/5)
Bacon, continued (M).
Galileo’s New Sciences (W)
Reading:
1. Observational astronomy: Starry Messenger (in Drake, ed.,
Discoveries and Opinions)
2. Copernicanism and theology: Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina (in Discoveries and Opinions)
3. Matter theory: Assayer (in Discoveries and Opinions, pp. 272–9),
Two New Sciences, day 1.
4. Motion: Two New Sciences, days 3 and 4, selections to be
announced.
First paper topic distributed: March 3

Week 6 (March 10/12)
Galileo, continued.
First paper due: March 12

Week 7 (March 24/26)
Boyle and the Mechanical Philosophy (M)
Reading:
Origin of Forms and Qualities (in Stewart, ed., Selected
Philosophical Papers)
Locke and the Philosophical Elaboration of the Mechanical
Philosophy (W)
Excerpts from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
selections to be announced.

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DANIEL GARBER

Week 8 (March 31/April 2)
Locke, continued (M).
Leibniz (W)
Readings:
Excerpts from Ariew and Garber, eds., Philosophical Essays,
selections to be announced.

Week 9 (April 7/9)
Leibniz, continued.

Week 10 (April 14/16)
Newton
Excerpts from Thayer, ed., Newton’s Philosophy of Nature
Second paper topic distributed: April 14

Newton, continued (M).
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (W).
Second paper due: April 23

Kuhn, continued.
Take-home final examination distributed: April 30
Take-home final examinations: Due May 13 (dean’s date).

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NOTES
1. Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1964.
2. Oxford University Press, 1987.
3. The translation used can be found on the course Web site mentioned
below, with complete directions for accessing it.
4. The Web site is on the Princeton Blackboard site. To get there, go to
https://blackboard.princeton.edu/. To the left of the main log-in box,
there is a button that reads “preview.” Press it. Then follow the links: click
the “Courses” tab on the top of the page; then click “Spring 2003,”
then “Humanities,” then “PHI,” then the “Preview” button to the right
of the “PHI332” entry. That gets you into the course Web site. On the
course Web site, click “Course Documents,” and within that, “Scholastic
textbooks etc.” That will give all of the texts that I mentioned in this essay.

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Tnhp daniel garber

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