Teleology by Jeffrey K. McDonough

Author:Jeffrey K. McDonough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Not Dead Yet

Teleology and the “Scientific Revolution”

Jeffrey K. McDonough

6.1. Introduction

In 1897, James Ross Clemens became seriously ill. He didn’t die. Not then at least. Nonetheless, rumors swarmed throughout London that his cousin, Samuel Clemens, had passed away. Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain—was bemused, famously quipping that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. To be sure, something had happened, perhaps something important, but nothing as definitive as what was rumored.

It has similarly been thought that the concept of teleology met its fate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise of early modern science. Francis Bacon famously derided the use of final causes in physics as being akin to vestal virgins dedicated to God and accomplishing nothing.1 It is easy to see in Bacon’s quip the suggestion that natural philosophers in the early modern period came to see appeals to final causes as unhelpful or simply not explanatory. René Descartes implied that the pursuit of final causes in physics is presumptuous and promised to forgo them in his own investigations of the physical world.2 It is easy to see in his remarks a slightly different concern—the thought that even if there are final causes in the world, we have no reliable, scientific way of investigating them. Finally, Baruch Spinoza boldly denied that God acts for the sake of ends and suggested that final causes are nothing more than “human fictions” that “turn the order of nature completely upside down.”3 It is easy to imagine that Spinoza’s first denial marks a decisive break between a medieval worldview infused with divine purposes and an early modern worldview that became increasingly naturalistic. It is easy to imagine that Spinoza’s second denial signals a deep skepticism about the very coherence of final causation and foreshadows a general shift from a focus on final causation in the medieval period to a focus on efficient causation in the early modern era.

Scholars of early modern philosophy have—not unreasonably—devoted much effort to exploring attacks (or apparent attacks) on teleology at the dawn of modern science.4 It remains a stubborn fact, however, that most natural philosophers in the early modern period remained deeply committed to teleology. Because they are numerous rather than few, it is impossible to relate their story here in the same detail that has been afforded to their more skeptical-sounding counterparts. The three sections that follow will, however, attempt to correct, at least in a small measure, the persistent impression that teleology was simply undermined by the so-called scientific revolution. It will do so by looking at three areas in which teleology was upheld and developed by three pioneers of early modern science. The next section will show how teleological reasoning is woven into the very fabric of William Harvey’s revolutionary work in biology. Section 6.3 will take up Robert Boyle’s explicit and systematic defense of teleology and especially his effort to reconcile the methods and commitments of the new science with a deep-seated commitment to divine teleology. Finally, section 6.4 will explore Pierre Maupertuis’s bold attempt to find a place for teleology in the heart of modern, mathematical physics.

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