PHILOSOPHICAL OVERVIEW OF THE SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENT

turn metaphysics into science. He demonstrated that in its actual stage metaphysics displays the ´mere groping in the dark¨⁵⁷ characteristics of a non-secure science.

Generally, the ´concerns of Reason´ that had acquired ¨the secure pace of a science¨⁵⁸ are logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences. Then he goes on to illustrate this how mathematics after being turned into an established and indubitably secure science by the Greeks set the stage for the empirical sciences to achieve the status of a secure science. A field of thought gains the secure pace of science when it passes from the stage of aimless observations to active interrogation of its subject material through conscious experimentation. It is this revolution in mode of thought that gave such figures like Francis Bacon, Galileo Torricelli and Stahl the prominence in the big picture of the modern science. The reason was because of their key discoveries that enabled the empirical sciences to move on from the groping stage to the secure pace of mature science. They also inspired others to follow the right track of achieving genuine science.

August Comte´s Positive Philosophy (1853) is another pioneer attempt to discuss how true scientific enterprise emerges. It argues that the history of each science could be divided into three successive stages. Each branch of knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.⁵⁹ In this overall developmental process the theological and the metaphysical have a function of their own, which is more or less to usher in the positive stage, to which every science should aspire. This evolutionary development is governed by an accumulation process whereby mere augmentation of a thing or things produces a change of quality, of characteristics and conversely this qualitative change produces a quantitative one. Therefore each successive stage or sub-stage in the evolution of the human mind necessarily grew out of the preceding one, and this depicts the function of the principle of lawfulness.

57 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D Meiklejohn (New York: Dover, 2003) p.

xxiv . The first and second editions were published as German as Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1781 and 1787 respectively.

58Ibid., pp. xix, 15. In page 15, he refers to such science as a ´science whose roots remain indestructible.´

59 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau (New York:

Calvin Blanchard, 1855[1853]), pp. 25-26

Consequently, Comte describes the 17^th-century Revolution in Science as marking the onset of the positive stage of science.

Whereas, Auguste Comte had argued that the ´principle of lawfulness´ (the description of phenomena) governs the whole of thought, the French chemist and philosopher of science, Emile Meyerson suggests that this was not the whole of thought. He argues that Comte ¨rigorously condemned all attempts to know anything beyond the law¨.⁶⁰ But it is anomalous to assume that if the law explains phenomenon it is useless to go beyond it.

This is because in the attempt to understand a phenomenon we do not just apply the

´principle of lawfulness´ but the ´principle of causality. Hence, it is in that portion of science devoted to explanation that we ought to see the principle of causuality play a most conspicuous part.⁶¹ Science, he says, attempts equally to explain phenomena. This explanation consists in the identification of antecedent and consequent. His empirical study of scientific theories thus proposes two innate principles of reason. The first principle of reason leads us to expect the regularity of natural events. We expect to find that the relationship between conditions and property behaviour in nature remains constant. He wrote that,

Our acts are performed in view of an end which we foresee; but this foresight would be entirely impossible if we did not have the absolute conviction that nature is well ordered, that certain antecedents determine and will always determine certain consequences.⁶²

The second innate principle leads us to expect identities between the antecedent and consequent of a change, and this underlies the success of scientific laws. Thus, he wrote that mechanistic or atomic theories would always be accepted because the human mind is always satisfied when it recognises them as valid, or as having even a chance of appearing as such.⁶³ Therefore the principles of reason are factual rather than normative.

60Émile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans. Kate Loewenberg (New York: Dover, 1962). The original version in French was published in 1908 as Identité et réalité. (Paris: F. Alcan), I quote from the reprinted version published by the Muirhead Library of Philosophy (Routledge: London, 2002) p.48

61Ibid.

62Ibid., p. 19 63Ibid., p. 91

This implies that the acceptance by the seventeenth-century scientists of the theories of the mechanical philosophy is a clear illustration of the timeless psychological processes that transcended any particular historical context.

The principal aim of this work is not to do a study of scientific inductions, what the above illustrations intent to achieve is just to showcase the context under which initial study on the advancement of science was based. However, the illustrations of mathematics as completed science in the works of Kant and Comte, coupled with the influence of Comte´s positivism, generated increased interest on the part of philosophers in mathematics and of mathematicians in philosophy.

The French Idealist philosopher, Léon Brunschvicg, in Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (The Stages in the Philosophy of Mathematics), sets out the principal stages of philosophical reflection on mathematics. What fundamentally concerns him here is the problem of truth. He writes in the preface that he aims to resolve this problem by ´a meditation on the discipline which has employed the greatest scrupulousness and subtlety in its search for the truth´.⁶⁴ Towards the end of his work, he reiterates that mathematics represents one of the most powerful and lasting achievements of the human genius. It reveals to us the capacities of the human intellect, and should be as much a foundation for our knowledge of the mind as it is for the natural sciences. Therefore, ´the activity of the mind has been free and productive only since the epoch when mathematics brought to mankind the true standard of truth´.⁶⁵ This particular epoch was the period between sixteenth-seventeenth-century when such figures like Galileo and Kepler orchestrated the mathematization of nature which became the defining feature of the early modern science. Such historical defining role of mathematics in the emergence of the early modern science was later to be given another perspective by a one-time student of Brunschvicg who had earlier listened to his lectures at Sorbonne. This student was Alexander Koyré and his conception of the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century was confined basically on the works of Galileo and Descartes, who developed the mathematical foundation of the early modern science.

64Léon Brunschvicg. Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, revised ed. (Paris: Blanchard, 1972) p.

xi. First published in 1912 65Ibid., p. 577

1.4.2 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE SCIENTIFIC IDEAS IN EARLY