Abstract
Writing to his sister Anne Viscountess Conway in May 1658, John Finch, a former student of Henry More at Christ’s College Cambridge, made the following observation: “As to Descartes my Dear I would with all my heart that I could thinke his Philosophy as true as coherent; but coherency is no argument, for he must be a man of mean parts, that forgets himself so far as to make one deduction contradict another...” (Malloch 1917, p. 13). Most of us would agree that Finch, like the young More, was somewhat sanguine about the degree of coherency in Descartes’ metaphysics and natural philosophy, but the intriguing point about his remark is the assumption that internal coherence in a philosophical system is a matter of vigilance in its construction, of being continually alert to impending logical solecism. Finch was assuming that it is possible for a philosophical system to be wholly coherent. Whether or not he was right is an engaging meta-philosophical problem that cannot detain us here, yet our historical experience suggests that he was being unduly naĩve.
In addition to its initial presentation at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, shorter versions of this paper were given, during November 1982, in the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, and as the Woodward Lecture, Department of History of Science, Yale University. I wish to record my thanks to the participants at the Blacksburg Congress, to Daniel Garber and his Princeton colleagues, and to Martin Klein and his colleagues at Yale, for their comments and criticisms. I take this opportunity to record a special tribute to the late Derek de Solla Price, who was among Professor Klein’s colleagues on that occasion, for his advice and encouragement, and for the continuing inspiration to be derived from his writings.
I am particularly indebted to the Research and Scholarships Committee, Academic Council, The Queen’s University of Belfast, for the financial support that enabled me to carry out a major part of the research involved in the preparation of the present paper.
Thanks are also due to my departmental colleague Robert E. Hall for several fruitful discussions on the themes of Section 3, and for enabling me to read Mellini’s 1585 Discorso by proxy; to Maren Dunsby, Department of German, Queen’s University of Belfast, who facilitated a painless comprehension of some material in German; and to my colleague Adrian Mallon for helpful information on the perpetuum mobile question in the Academie des Sciences.
Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
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Gabbey, A. (1985). The Mechanical Philosophy and its Problems: Mechanical Explanations, Impenetrability, and Perpetual Motion. In: Pitt, J.C. (eds) Change and Progress in Modern Science. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6525-6_2
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