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: A different view of what fundamentally exists A different view of what causes these fundamental entities. Because of (1) and (2), a deep dispute over which observable features of phenomena MATTER for purposes of scientific explanation. A fundamental disagreement about the nature of scientific laws.

(1) What fundamentally exists? Mechanist Aristotelian/Scholastic Inert bits of matter + Geometric arrangements of collections of these bits of matter Movement or Rest of the collections Paradigm: The mechanical clock Hylemorphic Individuals What does THAT mean? The world is an aggregation of individual entities, each of which is constituted by a 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 (=collections of material bits arranged in various geometric configurations) Efficient causes (=forces generating the motion, or lack thereof, of these collections of material bits) Material causes (=the stuff that takes a form) Efficient causes (=anything capable of acting on the stuff) Formal causes (the individual’s essential properties) Final causes (the purpose of the individual)

(3) Observable Features that Matter for Sci. Explanation Mechanist Aristotelian/Scholastic Observable properties 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 Any observable/ 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 deterministic rules governing how collections of matter must behave. Key: What matters is not an individual thing, but what it has in common with all other individual things, such that universal, deterministic laws fully account for each. Any general laws are only determined by what a set of similar individuals show that they have in common. Key: What matters is the form of individuals. General principles are founded on their behavior, not the other way around.

The Epistemological and Metaphysical Consequences of the Turn to Mechanism 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.