Background to the Meditations

Mechanistic Science vs. Teleological Science

How do these Differ?
Answer:
Two Radically Incompatible Metaphysics of Nature
What does THAT mean?
Three Things:
(1) A different view of what fundamentally exists
(2) A different view of what causes these
fundamental entities.
(3) Because of (1) and (2), a deep dispute over
which observable features of phenomena
MATTER for purposes of scientific explanation.
(4) A fundamental disagreement about the nature of
scientific laws.
 (1) What fundamentally exists?
Mechanist
• Inert bits of matter
+
• Geometric arrangements
of collections of these bits
of matter
+ which is constituted by a
• Movement or Rest of the
collections
Paradigm:
The mechanical clock
Aristotelian/Scholastic
• Hylemorphic Individuals
What does THAT mean?
The world is an aggregation
of individual entities, each of
form (=“way of being/set of
essential properties that
determine how it exists”) + a
matter (stuff that takes the
form)
Paradigm:
Mr. Potato Head
 (2) A Difference in Causes
Mechanist Aristotelian/Scholastic
• Material causes • Material causes (=the
(=collections of material stuff that takes a form)
bits arranged in various • Efficient causes
geometric configurations) (=anything capable of
• Efficient causes (=forces acting on the stuff)
generating the motion, or • Formal causes (the
lack thereof, of these individual’s essential
collections of material properties)
bits) • Final causes (the purpose
of the individual)
 (3) Observable Features that
Matter for Sci. Explanation
Mechanist
• Observable properties • Any observable/
that can be described
using Geometry +
Coordinate System
(shape, spatial
arrangement of material
parts + motion/rest)
What this Excludes:
• Color, taste, odor, sound,
hardness and softness,
hotness and coldness
Aristotelian/Scholastic
perceptible feature of a
thing can be one of its
essential properties, and
thus constitute a part of
its material, formal or final
cause, and anything
observable in its situation
can serve to reveal its
efficient cause(s)
 (4) The Nature of Scientific
Laws
Mechanist Aristotelian/Scholastic
• Fully general and • Any general laws are only
deterministic rules determined by what a set
governing how collections of similar individuals
of matter must behave. show that they have in
Key: common.
• What matters is not an Key:
individual thing, but what • What matters is the form
it has in common with all of individuals. General
other individual things, principles are founded on
such that universal, their behavior, not the
deterministic laws fully other way around.
account for each.
 The Epistemological and
Metaphysical Consequences of
the Turn to Mechanism
Epistemological:
If perceptible features of phenomena are mostly irrelevant
to a successful scientific explanation of their nature and
existence, what justifies our inclination to think that we
actually observe objects in their True Nature? (the
relationship between conscious experience and the nature
of the world-as-perceived appears problematic, and can
promote indirect realism about the significance of
perceptual experience as a source of knowledge of
Nature).
 Metaphysical:

Given that everything is to be explained by appeal to

geometrically-arranged collections of matter and their
motions, what is the existential status of human
consciousness? Is the mental, either as entity (Mind)
or as phenomena, a real constituent of the World?

As Margaret Wilson puts it: “How might human

consciousness, purposiveness, and sense of freedom
be brought into harmony with the materialistic,
mechanistic, and deterministic outlook of science?”
 Descartes’ Contribution

Descartes is the first great thinker to

address these problems arising from the
many conflicts and incompatibilities arising
from the change to mechanistic science
from its Aristotelian/Scholastic predecessor.
A Commonly-Held, but Mistaken
View of Descartes’ Role in these
Changes
Many think Descartes somehow is responsible for
creating these problems (for example, the dualistic
view of a human being as a combination of mind and
body, each radically distint from each other), but in
fact, as I hope you will see in the course of our work
on his Meditations, he is merely facing up to the
challenge posed to ancient assumptions about nature,
the mind, and human beings, that mechanistic science
and its underyling metaphysics pose.