The question of certainty and the end of natural philosophy in 18th century Holland
Gerhard Wiesenfeldt

April 30, 2014, 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Department of Philosophy, La Trobe University

ED1 room 402
Kingsbury Drive
Bundoora
Australia

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It is commonly held that natural philosophy parted ways with the other philosophical disciplines during the eighteenth century to turn into the scientific discipline of physics – a development often attributed to the impact of Isaac Newton’s mathematical natural philosophy. More recently, Peter Anstey has argued that the distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy from the mid-seventeenth to the end of eighteenth century has shaped the formation of modern philosophy. In my talk, I will discuss the relation between natural philosophy and its co-disciplines in the Dutch Republic. Dutch natural philosophers – most notably Willem Jacob ‘s Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek – played a crucial role in interpreting and disseminating Newton’s work and were thus important figures in the emergence of physics. The talk will take away the perspective on Newton and focus instead on the Dutch debates around Cartesian philosophy and the academic reaction to ‘radical Cartesians’ like Spinoza, Lodewijk Meyer and Balthasar Bekker. My central argument will be that the fundamental distinction in Dutch philosophy was not the one between experiment and speculation but between mathematics and metaphysics. The question of certainty was the debate in which this distinction became manifest around 1700.

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