Natural Philosophy and the Cultural Status of Reason

Date/Time
Monday
11 Apr 2011
12:00 am - 6:00 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Peter R. Dear
Professor of the History of Science, Department of History, Cornell University

Seventeenth-century natural philosophy is often associated with empiricism and experimentalism. But reason too, as an element of knowledge-production, played a role as much theorized in practice as in principle. Reason lent an aspect of transcendence to knowledge of nature, because it went well beyond the application of mere logical rules of inference. Even experimental philosophy could only represent itself as true natural philosophy by incorporating a central role for reason. Reason could be glossed as causally structured, even mechanical, as long as it also reflected divine purpose, whereby “right reason” converged with experience. Such diverse philosophers as Descartes and Hooke illustrate similar ways in which “reason,” as well as experience, was turned to account in the making of natural philosophy.

 

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This event is sponsored by CSTMS.
Additional sponsorship comes from:  Office for the History of Science and Technology