Baroque Cycle of Neal Stephenson
contains a lovely scene portraying a typical meeting of the Royal
Society. A number of curios and weird phenomena are presented to the
audience without any regulated order – one members tells a story of
fying fishes living in some oceans, another describes a neat trick
with a vacuum pump, while third has just developed differential
calculus.
Although such a motley of topics seems
chaotic, it reveals what has truly captivated the hearts of men for
science – it is the extraordinary that interests us. Consideration
of curiosities has for long been a part of science – there is even
a pseudo-Aristotelian book Problems,
which is nothing more than a collection of what the author considered
weird and proposed explanations for these dilemmas. Nowadays weird has been used for
good measure in popularisation of science – for instance, in the
show Mythbusters
dealing with such age-old problems as whether cars truly explode when
driven off cliffs.
Versuch
einer gründlichen Erläuterung der merckwürdigsten Begebenheiten
in der Natur, wodurch man zur innersten Erkenntnis derselben
geführet wird
is a similar collection of curios, written by Ludvig Philip Thümmig,
whom we have already met as an editor of a book of Wolffian essays. Here we finally see some of Thümmig's own work, as he ponders such
scientific problems as why a boy sees everything double, why animals with two bodies combined are sometimes born, why some trees grow from their
leaves and why does gravity work in different grades across the globe
– Thümmig's solution to this question convinced at least his
mentor Wolff, who mentions it in his own book on natural science,
Vernünfftige
Gedancken von den Würckungen der Natur,
which is also the second book I am considering this time.
While
Thümmig's book is a haphazard motley, Wolff does not fail to give us
a work with systematically arranged topics. Here Wolff is once again
just following a far older tradition. The nameless collector of the
works of Aristotle arranged his books on nature in the following
order: first came books on the general principles of natural world,
then followed books on the cosmos in general and the heavens in
particular, after which came books on atmospheric phenomena and
earthly objects, while the story finished with books on living nature.
This formal scheme was so well thought out that even Hegel
essentially followed it in his own philosophy of nature. Thus, it is
no wonder that Wolff himself applied this often used model of natural
science.
In
his natural science or physics Wolff is quite reliant on empirical
information and rarely wonders from presenting the conclusions of the
science of his time. One exception where Wolff's physics comes in
contact with his metaphysics is the description of animal sensation,
where Wolff reminds us of the Leibnizian idea of pre-established harmony: while human bodies go through certain changes in their
sensory organs, their souls have corresponding sensations, although
bodies and souls do not interact with one another.
A
more detailed crossing of physics and metaphysics occurs in the very
beginning of the work, in the description of the physical objects as
complex substances. An important conclusion of this definition is
according to Wolff that all the properties of the complex should be
derived from the properties of its constituents and the
spatiotemporal structure according to which these constituents have
been combined - I have called this the lego-block view of the world. Although seemingly innocent, endorsing this view leads
Wolff to some substantial consequences.
Observations
suggest that there are some peculiar properties that are difficult to
explain through mere spatiotemporal structure of things – for
instance, the characteristic of objects gravitating toward the
nearest big collection of matter or the property of warmth. Now, if these characteristics are not
explainable through the spatiotemporal form of the bodies, it must be
explained through the constituents of them – that is, there must be
types of matter that cause gravitation or warmth.
The
assumption of special matters was not a peculiarity of Wolff, but a
common occurence at the time, and even Hegel commented on this habit
of scientists. One just saw a peculiar phenomenon – certain kinds
of metal attract or repel one another – which was explained by
assuming a new type of matter, in this case magnetic matter. While
the notion of caloric or heat matter and similar properties as matters sound rather quaint, we
should not assume that such reification of properties is non-existent
nowadays. One just has to open a book on particle physics to learn
about photons or particles of electro-magnetism, glueons or the
particles holding the nucleus of atoms together and perhaps even gravitons causing gravitation.
Physicists
may well have good reasons for such reification in these cases, but
taken to its extremes it will lead to the philosophical theory of
tropes – all general properties are actually individual things,
like this redness, this sweetness, this roundness. The individual
things are then just mere conglomerate of these tropes – for
instance, the three tropes of particular sweetness, redness and
roundness combine to form a particular strawberry.
The
setback of trope theories is that it is difficult to see how all
properties could be reified. For instance, do not the tropes
themselves have properties, such as being a trope? Is this then
supposed to be yet another trope? Furthermore, a trope theorist has
difficulties explaining how to account of our thinking about universals.
Redness of this particular strawberry should in trope theory be
completely different from redness of this particular flag – how can
then we describe both of them as red? If we suppose that the two
tropes are connected by being similar in some manner, we face yet
another dilemma – isn't the similarity yet another property?
So
much for the physics of Wolffians. Next time I shall discuss the
first of many atheism controversies to come.
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