The Historical Development of Philosophy

New Philosophy

Inductive and Deductive Philosophy

Philosophy of Bacon. The inductive approach finds its fullest expression for the first time in the work of Francis Bacon (1561—1626). The shortcomings inherent in Bacon's own scientific attempts, as he was more versed in political and legal matters than in the methods of natural science, intensify the opposition he establishes between empirical and rational approaches. These deficiencies are related to Bacon's one-sided overvaluation of the gathering of facts and his undervaluation of the significance of mathematical auxiliary tools, for which he lacks the necessary qualities of mind for proper assessment. Thus, Bacon was the first to confer upon the "inductive method" the significance it has held in the development of new scientific methodology, which has partly persisted to the present day. While in Aristotelian logic induction plays only a secondary, fundamentally inconsequential role, for Bacon it becomes the inevitable foundation of all scientific knowledge. Only the careful elevation of individual facts, collected systematically through observation and experimentation, to general concepts and laws—representing generalized propositions for specific groups of facts—leads, in his view, to genuine knowledge, which can subsequently be applied to concrete problems for the sake of explanation and practical benefit. Therefore, Bacon consciously contrasts his "Novum Organon," which expounds this new inductive method meant to be extended from natural science to the entire corpus of knowledge, with Aristotle's organon, the compilation of logical writings by the ancient philosopher, whose central point is syllogistics, the doctrine of deriving particular propositions from general premises. The futility of this syllogistics, cherished especially by scholasticism, was quite clear to Bacon, as it presupposes what is the aim of science—possession of general knowledge from which the particular can be understood. It is worth noting that the creator of the new doctrine of induction, despite this awareness, remains subject to the bias of the old syllogism, demanding a complete, or if that is unattainable, as complete as possible, gathering of facts related to the problem at hand. To this end, he establishes his "tables of instances," which must be diligently prepared and executed before one can lean towards a definite conclusion: "positive instances," where all cases in which facts agree are first collected in a haphazard manner; "negative instances," which examine exceptions; "graduated instances," where phenomena are arranged in a gradual order; and then "prerogative instances," where the most significant cases are selected from which one must rise to a final conclusion. However clever and accurate Bacon may have been in describing this ideal method, particularly the experimental induction he excessively reveres, there is no doubt that scientific induction was never truly conducted according to his outlined method, neither before nor after him. By attempting to present a method that, at best, was developed after the model of judicial inquiry, but certainly not according to the model of physics—the "mother of sciences"—Bacon neglects the exemplary instances of natural scientific research that were, in fact, provided by his great contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler. The reason for this is evidently that he still, following Aristotle, considered "complete induction" necessary for valid conclusions, and thus overlooked the enormous importance that the establishment of preliminary hypotheses and the associated trial deduction hold for scientific inquiry, which may later convert into final conclusions when necessary. However erroneous Bacon's methodology may have become through the one-sided requirement of collecting individual experiences, it emerged as a program for a philosophical direction that possessed its strength in this one-sidedness. In the empirical philosophical school, Bacon's doctrine of induction was henceforth regarded as having, for the first time with all rigor, satisfied the demands of science, which should be founded on experience. If, therefore, Bacon does not achieve the goal he sets for himself in his "Novum Organon," the reason lies directly in the philosophical significance imparted to him by the era of conflicting worldviews—an one-sided proclamation of experience that excludes every other direction of thought and method. His doctrine of induction hardly exerted a significant influence on the development of individual sciences, although Bacon might consider himself a legislator of new sciences. However, it had a far greater impact on philosophical direction, whose tendency was to make the natural scientific mode of investigation universally significant, a fundamental proposition declared by him and advanced in his doctrine of induction—that the sole task of science consists in indicating the connections and generalizing facts of sensory experience in the "interpretation of nature," which must be confined to nature itself and never follow the inclinations of thought.

Cartesian Philosophy. Several decades later, a contrary movement to Bacon's emerges, reverting to the mathematical methods of the new science and inclined toward rational discussion of problems in the person of a prominent and influential thinker of the time—René Descartes (Renatus Cartesius, 1596—1650). As one of the outstanding mathematicians of his day, thanks to his significant contributions in geometry and analysis and as the founder of "analytical geometry," Descartes primarily seeks to transfer mathematical methods as far as possible into philosophy. Analysis and abstraction, reducing complex facts to their simple elements, and systematic deduction from evident axioms are, for him, the fundamental methods of scientific inquiry, alongside which the gathering of observations can claim only relatively minor importance. Therefore, at the foundation of Descartes' philosophical aspirations lies an attempt to find evident and thus self-evident propositions, which in the realm of general philosophical knowledge should correspond to mathematical axioms and from which, ultimately, all particular knowledge should be derived.

To those propositions that present themselves to us as self-evident truths and, at the same time, serve as the foundations of all other knowledge, Descartes assigns, first, the self-evidence of thought, articulated in the statement "cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am); second, the mathematical nature of our knowledge of the external world, manifested in the ensemble of geometric and arithmetic axioms and in the application of the latter to the properties and laws of nature; and finally, third, the idea of God as an infinitely perfect being, an idea that resides within us and which, because it transcends the limits of our finite knowledge, we can account for only by assuming that this idea has been implanted in us by God Himself, thus rendering it a subjective image of God. Consequently, the third of these self-evident propositions in philosophy ascends above the first two, which, due to their universally significant necessary character, do indeed elevate themselves above individual empirical facts, yet do not extend beyond the boundaries of our finite understanding due to their specific nature. These ideas must be demonstrated only through their relation to the idea of God, as innate ideas that possess necessary truth. If the idea of God is to be understood as inherently residing within us because of its own infinite content, then the other two ideas must, due to their claim to absolute truth, which they could not possess as mere empirical truths, be validated through the acknowledgment of the supersensory origin of the idea of God, compelling us to recognize a similar origin for all ideas we regard as equally evident and reliable.

This doctrine evidently draws from Plato’s theory of ideas. However, here we also find the subjectivization of Plato’s ideas, which began with Augustine’s transformation of them into God’s creative thoughts. Yet, moving one step further, by transforming them into innate ideas of human consciousness, subjectivization becomes restricted due to the demand for evident truth, stemming from the unique combination of the prevailing mathematical approach with the speculation of ancient Christian philosophy, focusing on three fundamental ideas: God, the soul, and the spatial physical world. In reality, Descartes appropriates from the scholastic realism of the 11th century the ontological proof of God’s existence in nearly unchanged form; Augustine’s definition of the soul as a thinking entity created by God as a direct reflection of His own spiritual being is transposed into Descartes' notion of the soul. Drawing upon the dominant trends in the mathematics of his time, he establishes extension as the fundamental property of matter, with mechanical laws as principles governing its changes. From these three concepts—God, the soul, and matter, posited prior to any experience—the necessity arises for a purely speculative discussion of the three sciences based on them: theology, psychology, and natural science. Alongside this, Cartesian philosophy paves the way for three subsequent metaphysical disciplines: rational theology, psychology, and the philosophy of nature.

Despite the influence of the preceding theological thought on Descartes' thinking, his focus remains predominantly on secular sciences. From the aforementioned areas, he elaborates solely on the philosophy of nature and psychology, with the former receiving the most comprehensive treatment. In it, we can clearly discern the extent to which the philosophical currents of his time, however diverse in other respects, are all under the dominion of the worldview acquired through natural science. Cartesian natural philosophy represents an attempt at a purely mechanical explanation of nature, the first to emerge since the atomism of Democritus. Operating under the premise that only mathematically evident properties of bodies are objectively real, it seeks to deduce all natural phenomena solely from the concepts of extension and motion, of course always tacitly adding to the first the property of impenetrability. Since matter, continuously filling space, moves in all its parts both linearly and rotationally, it must break down into elements, which, by polishing and compressing one another, assume various forms—some round, others prismatic—characteristic of any speck of infinitely small particles. Thus, Descartes counters atomism with a corpuscular theory, asserting, based on the identification of matter and extension, the impossibility of empty intervening spaces. Conversely, Descartes aligns himself with a modified version of Democritus' teaching regarding the emergence of cosmic movements from vortices. Movements, according to him, must initially belong to individual celestial bodies, but then smaller movements transition into the spheres of action of larger bodies, thereby explaining planetary systems; this marks the first attempt at a cosmogonic hypothesis based on the new Copernican worldview. All movements of bodies are subject to the dominion of unchanging mechanical laws; Descartes dismisses any teleological explanation of natural phenomena. The very assumption of the creation of the world stands for him, evidently, only as an external adaptation to doctrine; it is clear that, in Descartes' view, the cosmos possesses the conditions for eternal existence even more than it did in Aristotle’s time. Among the laws of motion, in which Descartes follows Galileo's dynamics, he primarily contributes the principle of "conservation of momentum" (expressed mathematically as the product of mass and velocity, mv). This principle, stating that the total momentum in the universe remains constant despite changes in individual movements, imparts to Descartes' mechanical system a unity analogous to that which the concept of development imparts to Aristotle's teleological explanation of the world. Moreover, this Cartesian principle gave rise to various attempts to formulate a universal law of the world, culminating in the principle of "conservation of energy," which dominates modern physics. The latter is still related to the principle of conservation of momentum, as it is also a "law of conservation" and possesses, as Leibniz first noted, a teleological character in itself. In other respects, Cartesian natural philosophy represents the first attempt at a complete explanation of the world based on a mechanical worldview. It is unparalleled in the coherence with which it endeavors to deduce all phenomena, from cosmic movements to terrestrial gravity, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism, as they were known at the time, from a single set of premises regarding matter and motion. However, on the other hand, no subsequent attempts have surpassed Descartes' in the arbitrary nature of the hypotheses, to which the philosopher invariably ascribes evident truth and necessity—the conditions he demands from scientific knowledge in general.

In stark contrast to matter, Descartes establishes the second of the "created substances" he acknowledges—the soul. Matter is extended and non-thinking, while the soul is thinking and non-extended. Its essence consists solely in thought, which for Descartes substantially coincides with will, as he perceives all thinking as an arbitrary process. Hence, he limits the life of the soul to that of human beings. Animals are mere natural machines: the purposefulness of their movements exclusively arises from the perfect connection of their nervous system parts, which underlies involuntary movements in humans as well. Since life processes, including all physical phenomena, are purely mechanical in nature, the common understanding of death—where it occurs when the soul departs the body—is incorrect. Rather, we have the opposite relation: the soul departs the body when its mechanism ceases to function. The seat of the soul, as a simple essence, can only be a singular point in the human brain: Descartes firmly believes that the pineal gland serves this purpose as the only unpaired structure in the brain. Here, all nerves converge. The delicate substance flowing through them ("animal spirits," in the language of contemporary physiologists) must act upon the soul in an excitatory manner, and, in turn, receive influences from it.

Through such interactions, sensations, feelings, and passions arise—states that are both physical and psychological. They thus provide content to thought while simultaneously participating in its pure activity.

Descartes' ethical views rest upon these representations of the relationship between soul and body. The dependence of the soul on the body, founded upon its connection to it, primarily manifests in passions. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, as well as excessive desire for all sensory things—of which particular modifications are merely individual affects—are all, in the truest sense, sufferings of the soul, because in these instances, the pure activity of thought is disrupted by the supremacy of sensory impressions. However, the natural law of psychophysical conditioning asserts that passions can never vanish; rather, some may be displaced by others, with the weaker being replaced by the stronger. Hence, the salvation for the soul lies in possessing a singular passion, in which the nature of the soul overcomes all sensory influences, for in this case, desire coincides with the activity most characteristic of the soul—thought. This passion is a purely intellectual interest, "wonder" (admiratio), in which objects are desired not for themselves but as objects of knowledge. It is the result of self-cultivation of will, wherein the latter is limited to striving—for action towards the achievable and in harmony with the spirit's freedom, and for knowledge towards the knowable. The development of these ethical principles, partly reminiscent of Aristotle's dianoetic virtues and partly of Stoic ethics, has been greatly influenced by the personal inclinations of the philosopher, who, after a tumultuous life, immersed himself in reflection. The significance of these ethical virtues primarily derives from their reflection of the contrast between speculative thought during this period and empirical perspectives. While the latter sees the goal of human striving in practical, useful work, for the former, it consists in pure self-satisfaction of thought and a penchant for an ideal world, free from the deficiencies of empirical reality. In this way, the speculative approach again connects with the preceding Christian philosophy, from which it seeks to transfer essential components of its metaphysical systems into the worldview of the new age.

The philosophy of Descartes exerted a powerful influence on the philosophical movement of subsequent times. It repeatedly incited a struggle of worldviews and imparted direction to them. In the dispute over Cartesian teachings, the opposing, Baconian naturalistic mode of thought gained strength. Among its followers, two notable figures emerged who developed a worldview more as a program than as a realization, as indicated by Bacon: Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi. Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679) stands out as the foremost, most comprehensive, and most astute defender of this direction. If Bacon considers physics the "mother of sciences," Hobbes endeavors to reduce all other sciences to physics. He addresses psychological and social problems in precisely the same manner as natural scientific issues, attempting to resolve them in line with the prevailing trends of his age and in direct accordance with Galileo's mechanics, reducing all phenomena to manifestations of motion in indifferent, continuously occupying matter. Therefore, while Hobbes shares with Descartes a mechanical interpretation of the philosophy of nature, he significantly diverges in his understanding of spiritual life. Galileo had already established a law according to which only mathematical properties of bodies truly exist for physicists—namely, space, motion, and number—while qualities such as light and darkness, heat and cold, and all other sensations attributed real significance by the Aristotelian school are merely subjective phenomena. Hobbes generalized this law into a philosophical postulate, striving to reduce spiritual phenomena to mechanical laws of motion. As immediate experiences, mental processes are, according to his doctrine, mere signs indicating actual natural processes from which they arise: they are "phantoms," not realities. Only physical bodies are real. In the movements of their smallest particles lie the sources of our sensations, affects, and volitional processes. Thus, Hobbes becomes one of the first thinkers to rigorously derive the fundamental laws of modern materialism from a naturalistic worldview, wherein the distinction from naive ancient materialism—recognizing the autonomy of the soul, as in Democritus' atomism—immediately emerges. For Hobbes, the mental process does not represent the motion of a separate substance—the soul—but constitutes the action of the body, a "function of the brain," as expressed in later materialism, an action that, while always remaining corporeal, is concealed behind our subjective sensations. Correspondingly, he resolves the epistemological problem in the sense of the preceding scholastic nominalism, which actually prepared the ground for naturalistic views. The universal is not merely unknowable; it is an illusory deception, at the foundation of which always lies a particular sensory object. Thus, only individual things are knowable. General concepts are mere simple names encompassing a whole collection of individual things. Among the innate ideas of Descartes, the idea of God is a completely inaccessible object of faith for science, while the soul is a fiction; thus, only the mathematical properties of the physical world remain valid, but they are not innate ideas; they arise from sensory perception, from which we extract them through arbitrary separation from its other content.

If the body is the only truly existing object, then this concept must apply not only to the individual person but also to human society. The state is an artificial body formed when many individuals, through a covenant, submit to the will of one person. The ultimate foundation of this union lies in the inherent drive for self-preservation found in all bodies, which, in its primal state, compels each individual to struggle against their neighbors, contesting possession of what they themselves desire. Therefore, the state is a defense created by humanity in the transition to a cultural condition against the blind action of an instinctive egoism that ultimately acts against itself. By adopting the theory of the covenant, which scholastic philosophy utilized to highlight the secular and transient nature of the state in contrast to the divine and eternal nature of the church, Hobbes simultaneously alters its content in the spirit of the new era. He teaches that citizens cannot submit until they reach an agreement among themselves. Thus, the covenant of submission already presupposes a social contract. The latter emerges as the result of the free will of individuals who recognize that establishing a legal order is the sole salvation from the dangers of that wild, primal state in which people, like wolves, fight against each other—"homo homini lupus." In this way, the idea of the social contract already contained, albeit in a latent form, the modern concept of popular sovereignty. Although Hobbes himself, whose doctrine matured during the upheaval of the English Revolution, undoubtedly considered absolute monarchy to be the best form of government—believing that through the unconditional dominance of a single will, the competition of individual wills is forever restrained—his idea of the social contract made him the father of later revolutionary state theories. While the German professor of jurisprudence Johann Althusius (circa 1600) predated him in developing this doctrine, Hobbes's political writings first introduced new ideas to a broader societal context. Hobbes is also a child of the new era in that his theory of the contract, regarding the relationship between church and state, stands in stark opposition to scholastic teachings. According to him, the social contract is indissoluble; thus, the order established through it is, strictly speaking, eternal. However, since only a single will can prevail in the state, the church is inevitably subordinate to the state. The only permissible form of the church is that of a state church. “Faith,” in Hobbes's cynical expression, is “that which the state allows one to believe; superstition is that which the state forbids one to believe.”

Similarly, for Hobbes, morality is also a product of the carefully calculated self-interest of the individual. A person restrains their natural passions solely for their own benefit and, for that same reason, bestows blessings upon their neighbors. The deepest motivation for action always rests on individual advantage, on the pursuit of pleasure, which freely dominates in the primal state of humanity and ultimately acts against the individual's own good. In the cultural state, this pursuit is moderated by reason, thus becoming a source of enduring happiness. Just as Descartes's ethics logically resulted in the revival of a distinctive, transformed Stoicism in the spirit of the new age, so Hobbes's naturalism systematically leads to hedonism and Epicureanism. The latter, thanks to its high valuation of cultural goods in opposition to the brutality of the primal state, acquires a unique character, linked to a new understanding of human society as a cultural product created for the benefit of the individual.

The second of the aforementioned defenders of the naturalistic direction during this period, Pierre Gassendi (1592—1655), holds lesser significance. While for Hobbes the restoration of Epicurean ethics stemmed from materialism derived from the school of natural philosophy and nominalism, Gassendi, in contrast, primarily seeks to oppose the ascetic ecclesiastical morality produced by the spirit of the Renaissance with an ethical ideal of joyfulness and pleasure. Finding this ideal realized in the highly disapproved Epicurus, he inevitably engages with other aspects of Epicurean thought. Thus, he is the first in modern times to extract atomistic ideas from oblivion. This leads Gassendi, a cleric who nevertheless remains loyal to his church, to a naturalistic and materialistic worldview. However, precisely following his ancient prototype, being more a philologist than a natural scientist, he once again brings forth alongside Hobbes's contemporary form of materialism his ancient dualistic form. Gassendi's philosophy, in its purest form, did not exert any notable influence on subsequent thought. The era of dualistic materialism had irretrievably passed; it was compelled, under the influence of a new scientific worldview of humanity, to give way to a similar direction in monistic form. However, Gassendi's indication of atomism had a considerable impact on natural science, more so as philosophers—Descartes, Hobbes, and later Leibniz—struggled against it, for whom the acceptance of empty space seemed impossible.

The struggle of worldviews, which began with the emergence of the aforementioned opponents of Descartes in the philosophy of the 17th century, continues in the activities of numerous thinkers everywhere opposing naturalism, who, aligning with Descartes, attempt both to further develop his doctrine and to reconcile it with more ancient philosophical perspectives. Among all these Cartesian thinkers, the ethical and religious opposition to the new naturalism comes to the fore. Consequently, their efforts are primarily directed toward ethics and theology. The main defenders of religious Cartesianism are the Dutchman Arnold Geulincx (1624—1669) and the French priest Nicolas Malebranche (1638—1715). Both strive to restore the spirit of ancient Christian ethics based on Descartes's teachings—Geulincx, in a more ascetic direction, and Malebranche, a member of the Oratory of Jesus, in a mystically contemplative manner. For both, the connecting point with Descartes's teachings is the relationship of the idea of God to the two other innate ideas—the soul and the body. Since, on one hand, religious need seeks to emphasize more strongly the dependence of the soul and the world on God, while on the other hand, doubts arise regarding the purely external relationship between the two substances accepted by Descartes, both thinkers attempt to resolve the problem of psycho-physical interaction by allowing for God's creative activity, continually acting in every single instance of the influence of the soul on the body or the body on the soul. Malebranche extends this perspective even to the interaction of things in general. He proclaims the presence of God everywhere in nature, whose substrate he believes to find in pure, intellectual contemplation of space, conceived independently of any sensory content. Thus, these philosophers establish a doctrine known as “occasionalism,” as it considers the interaction of the soul and body in each individual case as merely apparent, occurring only under the influence of chance, “per occasionem.”

Occasionalism, in principle, holds significance even to this day, as it was the first to establish a principle now commonly characterized as the "principle of psycho-physical parallelism." Indeed, in occasionalism, the interaction between body and soul is accepted for the first time as being non-causal in nature. However, as this relationship is reduced to the continuous, mystical presence of God in all human actions—and according to Malebranche, in all phenomena of nature—it already hints at a further transformation of Cartesian doctrine in a mystical direction. This transformation is championed in England by Cambridge theologians, such as Kedworth and Henry More. In their works, a clear attempt emerges to more closely link Cartesian philosophy with Platonic ideas, an endeavor already noted in Malebranche. Alongside this mysticism, which in some of these writers, such as More, reaches the realm of the fantastic, we frequently encounter a prevalent mystical-skeptical direction of thought that is partly encouraged by Cartesian philosophy while simultaneously engaging in polemics against it. The eminent defenders of this mode of thinking, who are typical representatives of the fusion between the strictly mathematical and critical approaches with the mystical, include Blaise Pascal and, later, Pierre Bayle.

The outcome of this philosophical development is a rare clarity regarding two metaphysical directions: materialism and spiritualism. The former emerges from an inductive-empirical mode of thought that resolutely leans toward a one-sided naturalistic approach. The latter, as its connection to the evolution of mathematical natural science reveals, generally acknowledges the autonomy of material substance and thus follows essentially the same path as the materialist understanding of nature. However, it also unequivocally recognizes the independence of spiritual substances. In this sense, while it is dualistic, the high regard for spiritual substances and the related approach to epistemological issues—manifested in the acknowledgment of innate ideas, as well as the ethical perspective that places emphasis on subjugating sensory affections to the intellect—imparts a distinctly spiritual character to such dualism.