Author: Bin Song

A Review of Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought

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Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod, Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought, Bloomsbury, 2021, 245pp., $115.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781350082533.

Reviewed by Bin Song, Washington College, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2021.03.01:

Transcendence And Non Naturalism In Early Chinese Thought

To paraphrase Kant’s words on enlightenment, I propound that on the topic of transcendence and non-naturalism in Chinese and comparative philosophy, although we do not have a reckoned book yet, we finally have a book of reckoning.

Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod discern two major reasons why scholars assume there is no robust idea of transcendence, and hence, take naturalism as an inevitable lens for interpreting early Chinese thought: Firstly, some of these scholars would like to find in early Chinese thought something that is different from the West, mainly from Christianity. Secondly, some of them would like to find in early Chinese thought something that looks the same as the West, viz., the same as the scientific and analytic mindset prevalent in Western academia since early modern Europe. Regardless, one common assumption has been taken by these apparently contrasting approaches: All these scholars take what is purported to be the West as a fixed and pre-established standard, and then read early Chinese thought against it. While doing so, they have overlooked other hermeneutical possibilities, firstly, that early Chinese thought may imply more than what comparisons via a set standard can tell. Secondly, the pre-established standard may itself not be adequate to the rich diversity and potentiality of Western thought. Therefore, what Brown and McLeod try to accomplish in this book is to prove there are a number of texts of early Chinese thought (such as the Chunqiu fanlu (CQFL), Xunzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mozi, etc.) which can be interpreted fruitfully by means of a conversation with Western thinkers rich on transcendence and non-naturalism, such as Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, etc. As a consequence, Brown and McLeod also urge the field of Chinese and comparative philosophy to pass the domination of “whether or not” questions concerning transcendence, and instead to ask more interesting questions such as “what these concepts were like in early China, what roles they played in both particular systems and broader swaths of the intellectual tradition, and in what ways early Chinese understandings of these concepts compare with those of other traditions.” (193)

I celebrate that, because of their sophisticated analyses of so many early Chinese texts, Brown and McLeod have accomplished their goal. One good example of this is how they argue the transcendence of the Dao in perhaps still the most well-known ancient Chinese cosmology to the West, viz., Laozi’s Dao De Jing. The text is frequently taken by scholars such as Roger Ames and Francois Jullien as the evidence par excellence that classical Chinese thought lacks the Western idea of hierarchical transcendence, since the Dao is interpreted by these scholars as a hidden force which unfolds within a single plane of being. In comparison, the Western conception of transcendence normally implies a supreme being on a superior plane of being which contrasts with the inferior ones.[1] However, Brown and McLeod argue: “Concepts of transcendence are meant to capture the idea that there are different orders of existence, some of which are outside of or in important ways not subject to the states and conditions of the orders of existence and the rest of the sensible world are subject to.” (185) They also believe that there are good reasons for interpreting Laozi’s Dao as indicating such a different order of existence. For instance, Dao is described by the initial chapter of Dao De Jing as “constant” (常), and therefore, although the Dao is surely a principle immanent to the process of growth and decay of worldly phenomena, we need to admit that “the process of growth and decay is not itself subject to the process of growth and decay.” (151) By the same token, the change of world phenomena is conceptualized by the Dao De Jing as being caused by the interaction between the yin and yang aspects of the Dao. However, yin and yang are “how Dao maintains the generation of the phenomenal world, but the process does not work in reverse.” (152) In other words, as causing the yin-yang change of the phenomenal world, the Dao itself cannot be changed by yin and yang in the same way things in the world are changed. All these analyses by Brown and McLeod demonstrate that Laozi’s Dao indicates significant traits of transcendence, even if these traits may not belong to the hierarchical, contrastive type of transcendence against which Ames and Jullien read Laozi.

Although the goal of the book has been accomplished, not all of the concrete interpretations of selected early Chinese texts are convincing. This is mainly because the five key concepts of the framework employed by Brown and McLeod for the interpretations — naturalism, non-naturalism, contrastive transcendence, non-contrastive transcendence, and non-transcendence — are either not clearly defined, or while being clearly defined, not consistently applied in the course of interpretation. For instance, after investigating the ambiguous connotations of “naturalism” in contemporary philosophical scholarship, Brown and McLeod conclude by treating “naturalism” more as an affiliation claim than as a marker of a substantive philosophical position, and hence define “naturalism” as “a commitment to standing with the sciences, to adopting views and constructing systems that are respectable from the point of view of the physical sciences and their practitioners, or at least do not directly oppose them.” (22) In tandem with this treatment of naturalism, they also define “contrastive transcendence” via a quote of Kathryn Tanner’s theological work: In contrastive theories of transcendence, “divinity and the rest of the world taken as whole are viewed as logical contraries within a single spectrum: this forces an a priori separation of the two.” (35) A non-contrastive transcendence of the divinity would underlie the entire spectrum of all beings in the world, and thus would imply that “divine involvement with the world need be neither partial, nor mediate, nor simply formative: if divinity is not characterized by contrast with any sort of being, it may be the immediate source of being of every sort.” (36) In other words, a contrastive transcendence characterizes ultimate reality as a supreme being which stands alongside worldly beings and imposes an imperial order of existence upon the de facto existence of those beings. However, a non-contrastive transcendence explains the origin of the being of the world. While being itself is ultimately unknowable and ineffable, such a ground of being does not dictate what the world is apart from the existing empirical order of the world. Instead, the empirical order of the world would be the only means by which humans can know such an ultimate ground.

Among all the three mentioned concepts, naturalism has not been clearly defined, although Brown and McLeod may have good reasons not to do so. However, according to the presented conceptual framework, we envision there could be a serious philosophical endeavor to construct a worldview which is both transcendent in a non-contrastive mode and naturalistic in the sense that what the worldview presents is compatible with modern physical sciences. This also means that when we discern robust themes of transcendence in early Chinese texts, we cannot infer ipso facto that they are non-naturalistic. However, the core commitment of a philosophy cannot be both contrastively transcendent and naturalistic at the same time. Unfortunately, I find that Brown and McLeod frequently combine these logically inconsistent concepts to interpret selected early Chinese texts. For instance, while analyzing CQFL, they conclude: “in the cosmology of the CQFL, tian is understood in terms governed by contrastive transcendence but the text concomitantly embraces what are apparently both naturalistic and transcendental aspects of tian.” (81) If Brown and McLeod were correct, the thought of CQFL would be incoherent since it is interpreted by them as advocating both the contrastive transcendence of tian, which impinges on the de facto order of the empirical world, and the naturalism of tian. The conclusion is surely worth debating. Similarly, while analyzing the Xunzi, Brown and McLeod say,

we think it is fair and accurate to interpret the Tianlun as defending some aspects of tian’s transcendence . . . Consequently, far from seeing Xunzi as a poor naturalist, we think it is better to interpret him as a very unique and interesting non-naturalist, whose conception of tian should be placed in conversation with other non-naturalist conceptions of the world and the divine. (113)

Readers would wonder why Xunzi cannot be simultaneously transcendent and naturalistic, since this is a reasonable combination according to the adopted framework.

While remaining sympathetic with their overall goal of the book, in the remaining part of this review I will try to perfect Brown and McLeod’s conceptual framework so as to pave a way for future scholars to more consistently and continually furnish novel and legitimate readings of the addressed early Chinese texts. The aforementioned five concepts can be refined as follows, and such a refinement would surely succumb to further critique.

I agree with Brown and McLeod that naturalism is a name of affiliation which speaks to one’s commitment to the concept of “nature” fashioned by modern physical sciences. However, as indicated by historians and philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Geoffrey Lloyd, this name of affiliation also designates a marker of a substantive philosophical position on “nature,” which is predicated on the following two claims: Firstly, there is a set of orders which operates upon the totality of existing realities in the universe, and these orders can be discovered in the form of laws of nature via a bottom-up method of empirical observation and human reasoning. Whether these orders come from a deeper realm of being remains undefined by this concept of nature. Secondly, the set of orders is stable in the sense that these orders remain uninfluenced by unpredictable metaphysical entities, such as souls, spirits and other magical forces which may also exist among the realities of the observed world, and hence the discovered laws of nature are testable, falsifiable, and improvable so that the knowledge of nature can progress on the basis of accumulative human endeavors within scientific communities. Still, whether these unpredictable metaphysical entities exist and whether they come from another realm of being remain unanswered by this concept of nature. In a word, naturalism would refer to a worldview which either affirms or remains compatible with the two conditional claims: the order of the existing world can be discovered empirically via human reason, and the order is recognized as being stable in a certain degree so that derived laws of nature remain debatable. According to this re-definition of “naturalism,” the so-called naturalistic transition detected by Brown and McLeod in early Han texts cannot be assessed as strictly naturalistic, since as admitted by Brown and McLeod (84 and 92), the correlative cosmology of early Han texts enchants the world. Such an enchantment makes the world so full of omens, signs, and mysterious resonances among apparently unrelated things that, as pointed out by Joseph Needham,[2] the theories that are used by early Han thinkers to explain the worldly phenomena, such as the one of yin-yang vital energy and five phases, cannot be seen as laws of nature in the strict sense of modern physical sciences.

Non-naturalism would be a view of nature that denies the validity of either of the two conditional claims which naturalism as defined makes. This explains further why an enchanted worldview of early Han cannot be seen as fully naturalistic, since it complies with part of the first condition of naturalism, but is not compatible with the second.

A view of non-transcendence would affirm that the totality of existing realities in the universe has no origin other than themselves. I also agree with Brown and Alexus’s conceptions of contrastive and non-contrastive transcendence, and would furthermore indicate that this distinction is essentially the same as the one by which Paul Tillich distinguishes God as “a supreme being” from “the ground of being.” Consequently, a view of transcendence would aver that the totality of existing realities in the universe cannot explain the origin of themselves, and thus need another realm of being for such an explanation, regardless of whether this original realm of being is contrastive or not.

According to this refined conceptual framework, we can envision multiple possibilities of combination and be better positioned to interpret varying philosophies. For instance, both naturalism and non-naturalism can be non-transcendent. A non-transcendent naturalism would imply the self-sufficiency of the scientifically perceived world to explain itself, whereas a non-transcendent non-naturalism would present an enchanted world not supervised by a supreme deity, such as the one which may be envisioned by astrology, alchemy or other so-called pseudo-sciences. Furthermore, a naturalism could be non-contrastively transcendent. This would be the case when what a thing is gets explained by the de facto relationship among things, whereas where a thing comes from gets explained by another realm of being which does not impinge upon the empirical order of the existing world. However, naturalism cannot be contrastively transcendent unless the order implied by the divine realm of being remains compatible with the empirical order of the existing world. We cannot find an easy example of such a compatibility particularly in the Abrahamic religions, since the idea of a supreme God normally implies a divine plan which is conceived by God even prior to the existence of the world. Moreover, a non-naturalism could be either non-contrastively transcendent, when an enchanted world is said to derive from an ultimately ineffable God, or contrastively transcendent, when the enchanted world is thought of as being grounded within such a divine origin.

If we employ this refined conceptual framework to interpret early Chinese thought, we’ll garner new insights. For instance, CQFL would present a non-naturalistic view of the enchanted world with a contrastively transcendent Tian, which governs the world providentially. Laozi’s Dao De Jing presents a naturalistic Daoist view of nature with a non-contrastive transcendence, but such a view does not prioritize the role of human beings in realizing the cosmic Dao in the human world. However, the Xici (the Appended Texts of the Classic of Change) presents a naturalistic Ruist (Confucian) view of nature with a non-contrastive transcendence, which does prioritize the role of humanity in realizing the humane manifestation of the cosmic Dao. Moreover, the Xunzi presents a mainly naturalistic Ruist view of nature with a mainly non-transcendent view of Tian, because although Tian is still treated as being the evolutionary origin of existing things in the universe, humans are encouraged by Xunzi to utilize Tian to serve the flourishing of human society and, hence, to strip Tian of its divine depth. The view of Mozi would be both non-naturalistic and contrastively transcendent, since the text advocates both the existence of ghosts and the supreme status of Tian as a providential deity.

I would not claim that the refined framework is the right way to interpret early Chinese thought. However, concurring with Brown and McLeod’s urge to ask more interesting questions of Chinese and comparative philosophy concerning transcendence, I do think we need more refined comparative categories to treat both Western and non-Western thought with more respect, nuances, and novelties.

REFERENCES

Song, Bin (2020). A review of Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders, by William Franke (State University of New York Press, 2018). Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 88, Issue 1 (2020): 278-281.
Needham, Joseph (1956). Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II (Cambridge University Press).

[1] For details of Ames’s and Jullien’s interpretations of the Daoist metaphysics in the Dao De Jing, please refer to Song 2020.
[2] Needham 1956: 290.

  • I also reviewed this book from the perspective of interreligious studies in the Journal of Interreligious Studies, please click here.

Descartes: Meditation I-III

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Audio: Descartes’s Meditation I-III, by Dr. Bin Song
Video: Descartes’s Meditation I-III, by Dr. Bin Song

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

As explained in the previous unit of Modern Philosophy, underlying the enterprise of modern philosophy termed by Descartes as the “Tree of Philosophy” is the root of “metaphysics” which addresses the most generic traits of basic substances of the world, viz., soul, body and God. Therefore, to appreciate the title of Rene Descartes as “Father of Modern Philosophy,” we will spend the following two weeks to read the entirety of Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy,” and I hope you can get as much insight as you can from this incredibly rich, and quintessentially “modern” text of philosophy.

Being among the enshrined modern philosophical classics, none of a single word in these Meditations can be overlooked by contemporary readers. However, these Meditations were after all written almost 400 years ago, which would naturally indicate some unfamiliar nature to readers today. One of the difficult reasons to read Descartes’s Meditations is to grasp how Descartes used old, scholastic terms and jargons to express his modern thought. If we gradually peel away these pre-modern layers from the kernel of his thought, we will find the distinctively modern traits of Descartes’s thought in the kernel, and thus, feel immediately connected to it. In the following, I will provide a brief and preliminary explanation of prominent themes of Meditation I-III, and I hope it can facilitate your actual reading of the book.

Firstly, the title of the book “Meditations” is fairly interesting. Starting from Aristotle’s “contemplative life,” running through Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Augustine’s “Confessions,” the philosophical tradition of the West evolved into Descartes’s “Meditations” to have indicated a rich “meditative” lineage where “meditation” is understood as a systematic reflection upon philosophical problems, and the reflection is aided by a certain kind of focused mental discipline. This richly meditative tradition of the West tends to be overlooked by contemporary readers since the current use of the term “meditation” is easier to be connected to Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Western practices of meditation. However, if we read the entirety of Descartes’s Meditations, we can still find some similarity between this meditation of a philosopher’s with other more religiously oriented ones. To put it briefly, this philosophical meditation also needs a two-way system of descending and ascending, or one of reduction and recovery. In Buddhist Chan meditation, for instance, you need to focus upon your breathing so as to reduce your consciousness to a peaceful and all-encompassing base, and then, employ that purified consciousness to re-contemplate worldly phenomena so as to live a mindful life here and now. Similarly, Descartes uses the method of “doubt” to challenge the validity of every piece of knowledge he acquired before; once he got to the bottom of his doubt, he found one piece of knowledge that he cannot doubt, viz., the existence of the thinking “I”; and then, he would do further contemplation upon all ideas that exist within this thinking “I” so as to check whether any of these ideas can provide certain knowledge of the outside world. I believe every reader, as long as they closely followed each word of Descartes’ Meditations, would also experience such an intense process of purification and reunification of human mind, which makes Descartes’ thought process deeply “practical” and “performative” in the regular sense of doing “meditation.”

Secondly, the method of “doubt” used by Descartes to get to the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” is not a normal one. It is termed as the “hyperbolic doubt” which would consider any piece of human knowledge as completely false as long as it indicates a scintilla of uncertainty and dubitability. Using this hyperbolic doubt in Meditation I, Descartes threw away all pieces of knowledge, which he acquired through sense, imagination, memory and even pure intellect, with only the sheer activity of “I think” remaining as the rock bottom of human consciousness that cannot be thrown away any more. Here, the radical departure of Descartes’s philosophy from the pre-Modern Aristotelian one cannot be more visible: as we explained before, Aristotle’s natural philosophy is based upon the common-sensical observations of worldly phenomena. However, here, Descartes says that humans’ “common-sense” does not make any sense until every piece of it gets radically doubted and thoroughly scrutinized. Since doubting and scrutinizing require the ability of independent and free human thinking more than anything else, we can surely discern a distinctively “modern” sign of Descartes’s philosophy, just as we once characterized Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy as indicating the same strength of human thinking and thus, as the starting point of modern scientific revolution.

Thirdly, since Descartes does not take “common-sensical” observation as the starting point of the pursuit of human knowledge, the more authentic approach to obtain human knowledge for Descartes is termed as “idealism,” which is distinguished from another very important, later lineage of modern thought, viz., “empiricism.” Descartes’s idealism suggests that in order to obtain human knowledge about anything in the world, we cannot start from a naïve perception of the world which takes the existence of things in it as granted, since the very existence of things in the world has been put into radical doubt in Meditation I. Rather, because the inner world of human subjectivity, which is termed by Descartes as “I think” or pure thinking, is more certain than anything else, we need to search for “ideas” that exist in our mind first, and then, infer whether these “ideas” correspond to realities outside the human mind; in other words, we need to examine whether these “ideas” can inform us of any knowledge about the outside world. Through this idealistic approach of epistemology, Descartes categorizes the origin of human ideas into three groups: ideas can be innate, invented, or affected from outside. Descartes also scrutinizes these ideas one after another regarding their validity of informing knowledge of objects outside human mind. In other words, rather than taking “realities” to be the prior origin of “ideas,” Descartes pays his primary attention to “ideas” in human mind, and then ask whether “ideas” inform humans of “realities.” Since “ideas” are more primary than “realities,” the role of autonomy and human free thinking gets prioritized and glorified during the process, which is surely a re-affirmation of the “modernity” of Descartes’s thought.

Finally, another significant aspect of Descartes’s Meditations is his theology, viz., his reflection on the existence of God and the role of the idea of God in regaining the validity of human knowledge that he has radically doubted prior to the conclusion of “I think; therefore I am.” For Descartes, it is a crucial step for the aforementioned epistemological approach of idealism to know that God is the creator of “I,” and more importantly, God is so good that He would not make “I” commit mistakes even on ideas which “I” can perceive vividly and clearly. Only after making sure the ultimate kindness of God, viz., “God is not a deceiver” in Descartes’s own words, Descartes thinks that we can believe our “natural tendency” to think of certain ideas in our mind, such as those mathematical ideas and sensory perceptions, as corresponding to realities outside of human mind. Be this as it may, our wondering is that: is God really an absolutely necessary idea to Descartes’s system? Or as some scholars intend to argue, is Descartes’s meandering thinking on God just a sign of Descartes’s “political shrewdness” since he did not want his writings and his person to undergo the same destiny of Galileo Galilei under the censorship of the Church? I would be very interested in hearing your thought on these questions.

In a word, in Meditation I-III, Descartes finds the undoubtable foundation of human knowledge, “I think therefore I am,” via a radical method of hyperbolic doubt, and then, after proving the existence of a kind God, he intends to re-ascend from the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” and regain human knowledge via the approach of idealism. Please do read the Meditations word-by-word, and my summary here by no means captures the full glory of this quintessentially modern writing at the dawn of modern philosophy.

Descartes before His Meditations

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Audio: Descartes before Meditations, by Dr. Bin Song
Video: Descartes before Meditations, by Dr. Bin Song

Hallo, This is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.    

In 1644, Descartes published his Principles of Philosophy, and intended to promote it as a textbook of philosophy to be adopted by universities of Europe at that time. Descartes knew that this was deliberately to challenge the dominant role of Aristotelianism in the European academia. After all, the replacing of one textbook with another means a great deal. Although whether Descartes succeeded to promote his textbook in the institutional level is another story, he is indeed universally acclaimed by later historians as the father of modern philosophy.

Before Descartes, we discussed Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo in this second section of “modern scientific revolution” at the course of “Modern Philosophy.” We find that although Copernicus and Galileo laid out a very robust refutation against key points of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, none of these scientists’ thought is comprehensive enough to address the established Aristotelianism as a whole. As we have discussed, the philosophical system of Aristotle was so comprehensive as to be able to include everything that humans could know in his time. Therefore, to challenge the official status of Aristotelianism, Descartes’s philosophy must also be no less comprehensive. Descartes likened his comprehensive version of philosophy to a tree:

“Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By ‘morals’ I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.” (Principles, 9B:14)

Put in the background of the entire corpus of Descartes’s works, why Descartes thinks of philosophy as such would be more comprehensible. Metaphysics studies the most generic traits of things in the universe which exist under three major categories: soul, body and God. Physics studies the “body” part of the universe, and furnishes the laws of nature which explain the movement of varying bodies in the world. Medicine and Mechanics are two branches of applied physics, which are about how to cure human diseases and how to design technologies to alleviate human labor, two crucial areas pertaining to the convenience and sustainability of mundane human life. The “morals,” or the ethics is about what humans should do in varying situations, and according to Descartes, this is the highest branch of human knowledge since it needs all sorts of other knowledge in order to deliver the right ethical decisions.

Among all these parts of philosophy, we’ll focus upon “metaphysics” in the following weeks, where we’ll scrutinize Descartes’s famous argument for “I think therefore I am” and how he built his metaphysical system addressing the substances of soul, God and body. However, when Descartes presented his tree of philosophy in an intended textbook, his thought was in a relatively mature stage. The tree didn’t include much information about how he got to the root of his philosophy, viz., that dualistic metaphysics of soul and body, in the first hand. In order to understand how he got there and prepare our study of his metaphysics, we therefore need to trace his philosophical career back to a much earlier stage.

Before Descartes turned into his metaphysical thought in 1628, he was a very successful mathematician and physicist. Seen from the perspective of the on-going scientific revolution, the greatest contribution Descartes made as a scientist is surely his invention of analytic geometry, which unifies algebra and geometry, and hence, paves the way for the birth of calculus in Newton’s and Leibniz’s thought.

There are two major points we need to grasp in the ground-breaking work of the Geometry of Descartes.

Firstly, the unification of algebra and geometry leads to the full digitization of the objective natural world, which is unimaginable before Descartes. The crucial step for Descartes to achieve this is to illustrate that all major algebraic operations in Descartes’s time, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the square root, can correspond to a certain segment of a line, and hence, there is no reason to limit human imagination of a magnitude within three dimensions. Instead, a simple line segment can express a magnitude of any dimension, and once discovering the way how to express geometrical figures using algebraic means, the capacity of measuring and calculating natural movement in reality will be exponentially increased. If any one wonders where the idea of the digitization of the entire world in the movie of “Matrix” originally comes from, let’s ask Descartes.

Secondly, to resolve complex geometrical problems in his time, Descartes indicates an unusually high awareness towards the underlying “method” for the desired solutions. For instance, to resolve a geometrical problem, Descartes would firstly assign a letter to each of the known and unknown magnitudes. Then, he would write down as many equations as he can find to express the varying relationships between these unknown and known magnitudes. In the following, he would try to reduce the complex level of these equations so as to find a way to express the unknown from the known. Finally, once he found the answer of the unknown, Descartes would furthermore deduce complex relationships among magnitudes from the newly discovered simple ones. In the work of the Geometry, we can find many concrete examples about how Descartes described and applied this “method.” And the application of this method is so successful that Descartes furthermore thought he should use it to resolve all questions humans can ask, including those most abstruse and abstract ones in metaphysics.

Therefore, in 1637, Descartes published his “Discourse on the Method,” and generalized his “method” in four points:

“The first was never to accept anything as true if I didn’t have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include in my judgements only what presented itself to my mind so vividly and so clearly that I had no basis of calling it in question. The second was to divide each of the difficulties I examine into as many parts as possible and as might be required in order to resolve them better. The third was to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by starting with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to move up gradually to the knowledge of the most complex, and by stipulating some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. The last was to make all my enumerations so complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.” (pp. 9, Discourse on the Method, trans. Jonathan Bennett 2017.)

The four rules are quite self-explanatory, and they can all be understood against the practice Descartes conducted in his analytical geometry. In other words, in any pursuit of human knowledge, Descartes believes we should aim for evident knowledge, which should be as vivid and clear as the one of math. Then, we would find all available chunks of information relevant to the solution of puzzles, put them into order, and then, reduce the complex ones to the simple ones, and address the simples ones first with a final synthesis to move from the simple to the complex. Since the aforementioned tree of philosophy is just a result of Descartes’s application of his method which ultimately derives from math, we can safely conclude that although metaphysics is seen as a root of the tree, the real soil to grow the entire tree of philosophy of Descartes is actually his mathematics. So, whoever said that nobody unfamiliar with math cannot learn philosophy? I hope you find some historical predecessor to Descartes’s thought here.

So, how would Descartes employ this “method” so as to create the dualistic metaphysics of “mind” vs “body” as the foundation of modern thought? That will be the question we will tackle for our following learning of modern philosophy. In general, Descartes’s thought is rigorous, methodic, systematic and creative, indeed a rare talent of philosophy, the learning of which can almost be guaranteed to bring a transformation of our own thought.

Galileo Galilei: I Wish You Become a Scientist like Him

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Audio: Galileo, by Dr. Bin Song
Video: Galileo, By Dr. Bin Song.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!

Among all modern scientists who have helped to initiate and somewhat complete the Modern Scientific Revolution since the ingenious work of Copernicus, I like Galileo the most. He wrote his ground-breaking scientific works in the form of Socratic dialogue and using a fairly accessible, vernacular language, viz., Italian, in his time, which was to imitate Plato’s prototypical genre of philosophical writing. While presenting his trailblazing new science, Galileo also seriously thought about so many topics significant for the development of philosophy in general, among which God, humans, and nature are by no means trivial mentions. Most importantly, compared with Descartes and other continental philosophers in the early Modern period, Galileo was down-to-earth and always tried to embed his rigorous reasoning within experiments, observations, and hence, made sure that such reasoning does not fly too high away from humans’ common sense. If I have to express what I expect science majors at the college to become after they graduate, I wish they would be like Galileo, a gentle, well-rounded, and wise scientific soul.

Seen from the perspective of Galileo’s entire career, he had to accomplish three tasks in order to continue the scientific revolution started by Copernicus. He had to deal with two authorities which swayed a great power in the scholarly world of Galileo’s time: the authority of the Christian Bible, and the authority of Aristotle. After this, he surely needed to present his new scientific discovery in the most accessible and professional way.

His way to address the authority of the Bible on scientific matters is best represented by one letter to Castelli, which he wrote in 1613. He views that the Bible and the new science take charge of different things. Regarding salvation and other articles of Faith, the Bible has its absolute authority; however, since God the creator endows human beings with sense and reason, for Galileo, there is no reason not to use them, and therefore, the new science has its irreplaceable authority regarding the study of nature. If verses in the Bible seem to contradict what the new science discovers, we should seek “wise interpretations” of these verses so as to make the biblical truth compatible with scientific ones. In this letter, the refutation of Galileo against scholars’ use of the Joshua 10:12-13 to discredit Copernicus is a fun to read, since according to Galileo, Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy makes more sense of the biblical verse which implies God’s command to stop the movement of the sun, and hence, this is also a great example on how a scientist can provide a “wise interpretation” of the Bible so as to square the authority of new science with the one of religious establishment.

The second authority Galileo needs to address is Aristotle, who, as we discussed before, held an absolute authority among scholastic scholars regarding the study of nature. In the “Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems” (1632), Galileo discusses the authority of Aristotle in this way: only blind people need a guide when they walk in flat and open region; however, for anyone “who has eyes in his head and in his mind should use them as guide.” In other words, sense and reason are the genuine guide for humans to pursue science; even if Aristotle was still alive in Galileo’s time, Galileo believed that Aristotle would admit many of his mistakes in his original scientific writings in light of new evidences and demonstrations. Therefore, Galileo concludes that it is due to the lack of courage that scholars in his days stubbornly held on to the old authority of Aristotle in order to refuse new approaches of the study of nature.

Through Galileo’s writings on the two authorities, we find origins of many significant ideas of modern philosophy, such as John Locke’s separation of church and state and Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the courageous use of human reason in public. I once explained that the reason for us to study modern scientific revolution is to find origins of these ideas we initially discussed in the first section of the course on the Enlightenment. I hope you understand why this is so now.

Finally, the most important part of Galileo’s work is surely to present his new discoveries using the new scientific methodology. In this regard, I select an excerpt of Galileo’s “Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences” for your reading, and from here, we can discern such a classical use of scientific method that scientists have consistently employed it since the time of Galileo and as a consequence, such an application also caused so many profound transformations in human society.

The thinking procedure of Galileo’s work, which he called “a new science of motion,” can be summarized as follows:

Firstly (pp.334), to define the overall nature of the work. Galileo says that why such a science is new in comparison to old ones is because it cares about the exact mathematical measures and proportions that an accelerated motion indicates.

Secondly (pp. 335-336), to propose a new hypothesis about an unknown matter (viz., the uniformly accelerated motion) from the knowledge scientists already have (viz., the uniform motion). In other words, since we already know in the case of the uniform motion that space traveled by an object is proportionate to time, we can hypothesize in the uniformly accelerated motion that the increase of velocity of such an object is proportionate to time as well. As indicated in other scientific endeavors, proposing new hypotheses on unknown matters according to known ones involve genuine creativity of human thought on the basis of lots of guesses and trials. In this regard, there is really no strict method to follow, although we can discern a pattern of human thought to say a new hypothesis is proposed according to what is already known. However, this is just a pattern of thought, and how this pattern is manifested in varying cases really depends upon unpredictable human creativities, among which Galileo’s one is by no means negligible.

Thirdly (pp. 337-339), to resolve conceptual difficulties implied by the hypothesis. In this case, the difficulty is about how to envision the infinitesimal increase of speed at the initial moment of a uniformly accelerated motion.

Fourthly (pp.339-340), to disregard distracting questions which are normally more complex than the ones a newly proposed hypothesis is intended to address. So, Galileo argued with his friends that before we study the cause of a free-falling object, we need to describe the mathematical traits of its uniformly accelerated motion at first. This also speaks to a constant nature of scientific reasoning: we need to put things in order so that before tackling more difficult questions, let’s tackle easier ones at first.

Fifthly, (pp.340-342) to refute competitive hypotheses on the same matter. In this case, the alternative hypothesis that the increase of speed of a uniformly accelerated motion is proportionate to space, rather than to time, would lead to absurd consequences, and therefore, it got a quick refutation from Galileo before he argued the validity of the newly proposed one.

Sixthly, (pp. 345-346) the velocity of a freely-falling object cannot be directly measured in Galileo’s time. Therefore, in order to verify the truth of the hypothesis, Galileo deduces, using mathematical means, verifiable consequences from the hypothesis, and then, he designed experiments to check whether the observed result complies with thus predicted consequences. Here, one deduced consequence of the proposed hypothesis is expressed in Theorem 1, and Proposition 1, which says: “The time in which any space is traversed by a body starting from rest and uniformly accelerated is equal to the time in which that same space would be traversed by the same body moving at a uniform speed whose value is one-half the highest and final speed reached during the previous uniformly accelerated motion.” Here, all major magnitudes such as the equal time and the length of space can be measured in an experiment, and therefore, if this deduced consequence can be verified by the observation in a designed experiment, the proposed hypothesis would be verified to a certain extent.

In general, the scientific methodology proposed by Galileo on the new science of motion is termed by later historians as one of “hypothesis-deduction” which is featured by mathematical reasoning and experimental observation.

So, my students and readers, this is how Galileo discovered his new science, and this is also the method which scientists, in spite of not necessarily agreeing with Galileo’s concrete discoveries, have never abandoned in the scientific human endeavor of studying nature ever since. Are you familiar with this method? To what extent are you still using this method in your own work?