c method and the -scholastic method d. anthony...

ARTICLE

CARTESIAN METHOD AND THE

ARISTOTELIAN-SCHOLASTIC METHOD

D. Anthony Lariviere

Descartes himself, and to a greater extent his more or less ardentfollowers, such as Arnauld or Malebranche, touted his new method as acorrective to the faults of the traditional one. It is sometimes taken to be afairly obvious matter what that method was; and this is somewhat naive,since it is very difficult in fact to get an accurate picture of themethodological tradition to which Cartesians, as well as other putativereformers, were responding. This is so at least partly because it is only inretrospect that a tradition takes on a coherent form; in the seventeenthcentury Aristotelianism and Scholasticism were not yet dead, althoughthey may have been tottering. To some extent as well, critics of thetradition had an imperfect grasp of it; Descartes, for instance, admitted hisignorance, yet did not think a defect worth much correction. This mayonly have been false modesty on Descartes’s part, since the course of studyat La Fleche was still largely traditional; or it may have been simplerecognition that his private studies following La Fleche had not equippedhim for subtle disputation with university doctors. There is a sense inwhich the move to replace the Latin tradition with an approach couchedin the vernacular was driven by an underappreciation of that tradition,even though it is a modern commonplace that the vernacular movementwas inspired by nobler, liberal motives. In any event, historical criticism isvery often partial and prejudiced. This defect has not been redressed bymodern scholarship, as surprising as that sounds and as extensive as thatscholarship is. At least since Duhem’s attempted rehabilitation of ourconcept of medieval science, concern with both conceptions of and thepractice of science before the early modern period have come out of adebate over the continuity or discontinuity of those conceptions orpractices with modern ones.1 Studies of the Merton school, of RobertGrosseteste and Roger Bacon, of Albertus Magnus, of Nicolas Oresme,have revealed the extent to which these figures have either anticipated laterdevelopments or have been out of step with the currents of their times

1See, for instance, Pierre Duhem Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, edited and

translated by Roger Ariew and Peter Barker.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17(3) 2009: 463–486

British Journal for the History of PhilosophyISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2009 BSHP

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608780902986607

(usually in a positive sense).2 As important as this work is, it does notallow us to determine what normal or typical conceptions and practiceswere, except where scholars have indicated a failure to break free from theruling conceptions of a given age. On the other hand, there are a numberof interesting surveys of the history of science, of broader or narrowerscope, that do attempt to give a picture of the ruling conceptions of thepre-modern age, and do so relatively successfully.3 The defect in theseaccounts is that no coherent picture emerges from them. Instead, there arecurrents and counter-currents: Aristotelianism, Platonism, Galenism andothers, sometimes in the ascendant, sometimes declining. Now, nocomplaint can be made about this result, for it seems that it must betrue that every period is the product of competing and complementaryforces; yet it seems clear that there was a normal or typical methodology,if only because many in the seventeenth century promoted the adoption ofone they claimed was atypical. Further, this claim cannot have beenwholly false, if only because the record of the scientific achievements of theseventeenth century is rather better than that for quite some time previousto the seventeenth century.4

I mention these issues not in order to put hurdles in my own path, but inorder to suggest a, perhaps, ungainly approach to the project of contrastingDescartes’s method with the traditional one, a project which is necessary inorder for us to understand the widespread influence which Descartes had asa philosopher of science. What is needed is a conception of the Latintradition which makes it rational to have preferred a conscious break withthat tradition rather than piecemeal correction of it. It may betray thepoverty of historical scholarship in the seventeenth century that so manyshould have been ignorant of their debts to earlier thinkers and of their realpredecessors in their approach to nature –the modern studies of medievalthinkers mentioned above show that they did have such predecessors.

2These include: Annalise Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science; A. C. Crombie, Robert

Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 and Science, Optics and Music in

Medieval and Early Modern Thought, especially chapter 7: ‘The Significance of Medieval

Discussions of Scientific Method for the Scientific Revolution’; S. C. Easton, Roger Bacon and

His Search for a Universal Science; James A. Weisheipl (ed.) Albertus Magnus and the Sciences;

and N. W. Fisher and S. Unguru, ‘Experimental Science and Mathematics in Roger Bacon’s

Thought’, Traditio, 27 (1971): 358–78.3See, for instance, R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford; A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific

Revolution, 1500–1800; Neal W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method; to name but a few

examples.4By scientific achievement here I mean the record of discovery from our modern perspective,

and not some ahistorical or transhistorical notion of scientific success, which would beg the

question against the views of Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc. I mean only to point out that the

record of predictive or manipulative technological success (i.e. one, modern measure of scientific

success) was rather better in the seventeenth century than had been the case for some time

previously. To some extent this was recognized even in the period, for as Hobbes, for instance,

mentions on a few occasions, William Harvey was the only man he knew of who had succeeded

in gaining acceptance for a new view within his own lifetime.

464 D. ANTHONY LARIVIERE

However, given that ignorance, was it rational for thinkers in theseventeenth century to believe that contemporary approaches offeredsubstantial improvements over the perceived defects of the tradition? Theanswer to this question is: yes, it was. I propose, then, that the tradition bereconstructed through the eyes of its relevant opponents, that the perceiveddefects, as identified by Descartes and others, be our guide. It makes sense toassume that Descartes was attractive to the Cartesians because they sharedhis view of the faults of contemporary approaches. I propose this fullyaware of the gap between seventeenth-century perceptions and real faults orvirtues of methodological thought in the period preceding the seventeenthcentury. The virtue of this approach is the one just mentioned: that it makessense of the bulk of the criticisms directed against the tradition, chieflyAristotle, and it provides a rationale for the acceptance of alternatives to it.

In the Discourse, by way of sketching his personal history, Descartes givessome indication of what led him away from the tradition in which he hadbeen educated (at La Fleche, surely, but possibly also at Leyden):

When I was younger, my philosophical studies had included logic, and mymathematical studies some geometrical analysis and algebra. These three artsor sciences, it seemed, ought to contribute something to my plan. But on

further examination I observed with regard to logic that syllogisms and mostof its other techniques are of less use for learning things than for explaining toothers the things one already knows or even, as in the art of Lully, for speaking

without judgement about matters of which one is ignorant. And although logicdoes contain many excellent and true precepts, these are mixed up with somany others which are harmful or superfluous that it is almost as difficult todistinguish them as it is to carve a Diana or a Minerva from an unhewn block

of marble. As to the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns,they cover only highly abstract matters, which seem to have no use. Moreoverthe former is so closely tied to the examination of figures that it cannot exercise

the intellect without greatly tiring the imagination; and the latter is so confinedto certain rules and symbols that the end result is a confused and obscure artwhich encumbers the mind, rather than a science which cultivates it.5

(CSMI, 119–20)

The reference here to Raymond Lully probably recalls an incidentmentioned in a letter to Beeckmann (29 April 1619):

J’ai rencontre il ya trois jours dans une auberge de Dordrecht un hommesavant avec lequel je me suis entretenu de l’Ars parva de Lulle. Il se vantait de

pouvoir user des regles de cet Art avec un tel succes que, disait-il, il etaitcapable, sur n’importe quel sujet, de discourir pendant une heure; puis, si onlui demandait de parler, une heure encore, sur la meme matiere, de trouver des

5Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, edited and translated by John

Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Reginald Murdoch, 119–20.

CARTESIAN AND ARISTOTELIAN-SCHOLASTIC METHODS 465

propos tout a fait differents des precedents, et ainsi pendant vingt heures desuite. Si vous pouvez croire cela, vous le verrez vous-meme. C’etait un vieillardun peu bavard et dont les connaissances, tirees des livres, se trouvaient sur le

bout des levres plus que dans le cerveau.

Mais je lui demandais de me dire, avec plus d’exactitude, si cet Art ne consistaitpas en une sorte de mise en ordre des parties de la dialectique d’o�u son tires les

arguments. Il le reconnut, ajoutant cependant que ni Lulle ni Agrippa n’avaientlivre dans leurs ouvrages certaines clefs necessaires, a son dire, pour ouvrir lessecrets de cet Art. Et, assurement, je le soupconne d’avoir dit cela pour s’attirerl’admiration d’un ignorant plus que pour s’exprimer avec verite.6

I mention this incident in order to point out how Descartes assimilatesLully’s method with the Latin tradition of dialectic, that contemporary termfor ‘syllogisms and most of [logic’s] other techniques’, and in particular theAristotelian programme of the Topics as that programme eventuated inthe various dialectical techniques that survived in the European schools. Thisis not simply an aside; Descartes’s interest in Lully derives from the promiseof that thinker’s approach to provide a method or logic of discovery, some-thing which the Latin notion of ‘dialectic’ promised as well. As such, it iscentral to an appreciation of Descartes’s dissatisfaction with contemporarymethods. For Descartes at least, the alternatives to his method are theAristotelian syllogism, geometrical analysis, algebraic manipulation andthe tradition of dialectic. The first and last of these suffer from the defectseither of vacuousness or circularity, while the other two are incomplete orobscure. The latter defects Descartes believed he had remedied in hisGeometrie, the former in the rules of theDiscourse. It is necessary to examine,at least in outline, the nature of these different methods as they appeared inthe seventeenth century in order to appreciate the disdain they prompted, notalone from Descartes but from many others as well.

Aristotle’s syllogistic logic formed one of seven liberal arts of the medievaluniversity curriculum, and as such had reached its full development wellbefore the beginning of the seventeenth century. Indeed, save for the use ofthe Venn diagram as a proof procedure, the way categorical logic is taughttoday differs little from the way it was taught in the seventeenth century.Since it was a necessary part of university education, manuals and textbookson the syllogism are almost too numerous to detail, even for just the firstfifty years of the seventeenth century, and in any event the differencesbetween them are more often pedagogical than philosophical.7 The

6Rene Descartes, Correspondance, edited by C. Adam and G. Milhaud, 16–17.7Some idea of the scope and variety of these texts can be gotten from Wilhelm Risse’s

Bilbiographica logica vol. 1: 1572–1800. For their place in the later Latin tradition, see P. Reif

‘The Textbook Tradition in Natural Philosophy, 1600 –1650’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30

(1969): 17–32, as well as L. Thorndyke ‘The Cursus Philosophicus before Descartes’, Archive

Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 4 (1951): 16–24, and L. W. B. Brockliss ‘Philosophy

Teaching in France, 1600–1740’, History of Universities, 1 (1981): 131–68.


importance of the syllogistic logic for pre-modern method derives from theidentification of knowledge or science with the demonstrative syllogism.Thus it was thought by many that the theory of the syllogism was anecessary part of the acquisition of any knowledge. Understanding thelimited number of valid syllogistic forms, and the ways the terms in suchsyllogisms could be related, seemed a necessary preparation for the criticalassessment of claims in any field whatsoever. It is not at all clear that thiswas Aristotle’s view, though this was a common interpretation of the placeof the syllogism.8 And it is an interpretation which squares with at leastsome texts, such as the Posterior Analytics (71b17–18), for instance.

In essence, Aristotelian method for acquiring knowledge (scientia, in theLatin tradition) involved the abstraction from sense of the natures of things,and the linking of those natures in a demonstrative syllogism. Knowledge ofthe nature of something previously unknown derived from a demonstratedconnection between natures; and this served the dual purpose of providingan explanation in so far as such natures were the causes of things; thus, forexample, knowing that ‘C is A’ is a consequence of knowing that ‘B is A’and ‘C is B’, and their joint entailment of ‘C is A’. These are premises in ademonstrative syllogism just in case they are either primitive and true orthemselves syllogistically derived from primitives. Further, ‘C is A’ isexplained by the causal relations in the premises: ‘C is A’ in virtue of the factthat B’s being A and C’s being B are causal consequences of their respectiveessential natures. This explanatory function is predicated on the discovery ofthe connection which the middle term of the major and minor premisesprovides. When the middle term is not an essence (i.e. not necessarily butonly accidentally connected with the subject), then we have knowledgewithout explanation; when it is an essence, we have both. Thus, the searchfor the necessary middle term is the linchpin of the method; but while thetheory of the syllogism provides a rule-governed, thus mechanical, thusmethodical approach to the acquisition of knowledge, there is nocorresponding method for acquiring the necessary middle term. Gaukroger,for instance, puts this down to the fact that ‘[i]t’s not just that what, forAristotle, is a method of presentation is mistaken for a method of discovery,but that the method of discovery becomes in some way lost orunrecognizable’.9 The syllogism was to provide the justificatory, thoughnot the explanatory purpose of a science. Whether or not this is true,nevertheless Scholastic thinkers took syllogistic to be amenable tocompletely methodical treatment just so long as some method could beprescribed for the discovery of the required middle term.10 To some at least,

8See, for instance, the discussion of Aristotelian method in Stephen Gaukroger’s Cartesian

Logic, 23ff.9Gaukroger, 24.10This approach is apparent even in Gassendi’s essentially anti-Aristotelian Institutio Logica;

and this shows to some extent how pervasive the conception was.


this method could be provided by the Latin tradition of ‘dialectic’, derivedfrom Aristotle’s Topics. The ‘topics’ or ‘places of argument’ promised toprovide a storehouse of terms to be used in syllogisms in such a way as tosupply the requisite middle term, and it promised to do so in a methodicalway. Thus, there was a possible corrective to what was known even byScholastic thinkers (and not only by seventeenth-century critics) to be adefect in syllogistic construed as method of discovery and explanation. Asthe Aristotelian theory of dialectic is less well known than that of thesyllogism, a short sketch of its fundamental features and of the Latintradition seems necessary here.

ARISTOTELIAN-SCHOLASTIC METHOD OF DIALECTIC

Perhaps the single most important reason for the tortuous history of‘dialectic’, is that Aristotle gives very little in the way of definition of thisimportant term. In Topics I.1 he says only this:

Now a deduction is any argument in which, certain things being laid down,

something other than these necessarily comes about through them. It is ademonstration, when the premisses from which the deduction starts are trueand primitive, or are such that our knowledge of them has originally come

through premisses which are primitive and true; and it is a dialecticaldeduction, if it reasons from reputable opinions.11

(100a25–30)

He explains the meagreness of this explication later, by saying that ‘it is notour purpose to give a precise definition of any of them [i.e. the species ofdeduction]’ (101a21), but in so far as the Topics is a handbook for dialectic,further clues are offered throughout the text, including a summary in BookVIII. The supposed usefulness of this science, discussed at I.2 is one suchclue. In addition to ‘intellectual training’ and ‘casual encounters’, dialectic isuseful for the ‘philosophical sciences’ in the following way:

because the ability to puzzle on both sides of a subject will make us detect moreeasily the truth and error about the several points that arise. It has a further usein relation to the principles used in the several sciences. For it is impossible to

discuss them at all from the principles proper to the particular science in hand,seeing that the principles are primitive in relation to everything else: it isthrough reputable opinions about them that these have to be discussed, and this

task belongs properly, or most appropriately, to dialectic; for dialectic is aprocess of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries.

(101a35–101b4)

11References to Aristotle are to The Basic Works of Aristotle edited by Richard McKeon, an

English translation in wide use. The parenthetical references are to the standard paragraph/line

numbering system to facilitate indexing with other editions.


Hence, Aristotle envisions dialectic as a kind of meta-science, that enablescriticism of the special sciences by appeal to reputable opinion (endoxa). Itspractice has the consequence of creating in its practitioners increasedintellectual and persuasive ability, but this is not necessarily to be confusedwith its essence. Because it is methodical, intellectual ability is increased, andbecause it makes use of endoxa, persuasive ability is increased, but the thingitself can, as Aristotle admits above, be considered independently of these.

Further clues as to the essence of dialectic occur at I.10 and 11, whereAristotle gives definitions of ‘dialectical proposition’ and ‘dialecticalproblem’. The former ‘consists in asking something that is reputable to allmen or to most men or to the wise . . . provided that it is not paradoxical’(104a9–11), and includes ‘views which are like those which are reputable;also propositions which contradict the contraries of opinions that are takento be reputable, and also opinions that are in accordance with therecognized arts’ (104a13–15). The latter

is a subject of inquiry that contributes either to choice and avoidance, or totruth and knowledge, and does that either by itself, or as a help to the solutionof some other such problem; [and it is] something on which either people hold

no opinion either way, or most people hold a contrary opinion to the wise, orthe wise to most people, or each of them among themselves.

(104b1–5)

The matter, then, of dialectic is reputable opinion (endoxa), defined broadly,and the starting point of dialectical inquiry is an absence of convergence ofopinion on any matter. What all of this implies is a completely generalmethod for inquiry, which in effect promises to reduce to a manageable levelfundamental and seemingly intractable problems (as the examples thatAristotle gives throughout seem to show). This promise is supposedlyfulfilled in the bulk of the Topics (Bks II–VII); and the commonplace rules(topoi), which comprise that bulk, can be considered the core of the method.Since it is not my aim here to detail the subtleties of Aristotelian dialectic, Ido not want to be drawn into the debate over the nature of the topoi,especially as the only express definition of them appears in the Rhetoric(1403a18–19), and a considerable difference of opinion exists over how thispassage is to be interpreted. Rather, I take it for granted that somesignificant agreement exists about the nature of the commonplaces.Thionville considers them ‘des verites premieres admises par tout le monde,confirmees par la conscience et le sens commun . . . des axiomes probables,c’est-a-dire, des lieux’.12 Pater thinks of a commoplace as:

12E. Thionville, De la Theorie des Lieux Communs dans les Topiques d’Aristote et des Principales

Modifications Qu’Elle a Subies Jusqu’a nos Jours (1855): 35.


une regle, car elle dit ce qu’il faut faire. Elle est une regle qui indique a celui quifait usage du lieu l’objet vers lequel il doit diriger son attention. La deuxiemepartie du lieu . . . dit ce qui est; elle est donc une loi. Plus precisement, elle est

une loi logique ou une loi axiologique.13

These commentators agree that a commonplace is a rule or a law whichlegitimizes moves in a dialectical inquiry. If this view is correct, then it iseasy enough to see how dialectic could be construed as a kind of science,consisting in a body of rules or laws which apply in a wide variety ofcircumstances, a mathesis universalis.

The trouble with such a view, however, is that it does not square very wellwith the view of dialectic that is presented in Bk VIII of the Topics. ThereAristotle says he will discuss ‘the problems of arrangement and method inputting questions’ (155a37–9). The rules or strategies detailed here appear tobe methods for success in argument, not in the logical but the rhetoricalsense. The art or science implied by such rules seems more akin to rhetoricthan to logic; and its aim seems to be, not truth or even probability, but towin a competition. Still, Aristotle is not unequivocal about this, and what hesays in Bk VII could be construed as delineating a notion of dialectic thathas application in both formal and informal contexts. At VIII.5, forinstance, some such view seems to be his aim:

Inasmuch as no rules are laid down for those who argue for the sake oftraining and of examination – for the aim of those engaged in teaching or

learning is quite different from that of those engaged in competition; as is thelatter from that of those who discuss things together in the spirit of inquiry, fora learner should always state what he thinks (for no one tries to teach what is

false); whereas in a competition the business of the questioner is to appear byall means to produce an effect upon the other, while that of the answerer is toappear unaffected by him; on the other hand, in dialectical meetings in thespirit not of competition but of an examination and inquiry, there are as yet no

articulated rules about what the answerer should aim at, and what kind ofthings he should and should not grant, for the correct or incorrect defence ofhis position.

(159aa25–8)

Here, Aristotle implies that there are such things as dialectical training andexamination, and dialectical competition, as well as the dialectical inquiryreferred to in Bk I. And it is not clear whether any one of these is to bethought of as more properly dialectical than the other two. This is especiallytrue when the advice given in what follows the above passage seemsaltogether the same as that given for ‘competition’. For instance:

13W. A. D. Pater ‘La fonction du lieu et de l’instrument dans les Topiques’, in Aristotle on

Dialectic: The Topics, edited by G. E. L. Owen, 165.


Now every question asked is bound to be either reputable or implausible orneither, and is also bound to be either relevant to the argument or irrelevant; ifthen it seems to be true and is irrelevant, the answerer should grant it and

remark that it seems to be true; if it does not seem to be true and is irrelevant,he should grant it but add a comment that it does not seem to be true, in orderto avoid the appearance of being a simpleton.

(159b38–160a2)

It is difficult to see how such advice could be construed as in keeping at allwith ‘the spirit of inquiry’. It seems we have two choices: either to concludethat Aristotle had diverging notions of dialectic, which the Topics showsthat he did not entirely reconcile, or that the Topics does not so muchdescribe the method as detail procedures or exercises which would put onein the way of acquiring it, which would explain the variety of contextsAristotle thinks dialectic is appropriate to. Paul Moraux gives aninterpretation which supports the latter view. The picture that emerges isthis one:

Entre la soif de la victoire a tout prix et la noble recherche en commun de laverite se situe la discussion telle que nous l’avons decrite: elle veut etreessentiellement une gymnastique intellectuelle, et vise aussi parfois a denoncerla pretendue science du partenaire; ce qui compte pour elle, ce n’est ni le

progres vers la decouverte de la verite, mais l’acquisition d’une dynamisparticuliere, l’aptitude de raisonner et a discuter.14

The virtue of this interpretation is that it makes consistent the whole of theTopics, integrating the ‘agonistic’ as well as the ‘scientific’ elements; and itenables one to maintain the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric: theaim of the one is persuade, the other to train or learn. This seems to methe neatest interpretation, but, again, I do not want to be drawn into alengthy debate over its correctness. For the purposes of this history, it isenough to note that Aristotle’s text lends itself to diverging views – onethat sees it as an attempt to develop a general method for inquiry andanother as an art akin to rhetoric, which codifies appropriate practices fordisputation. Both of these views turn out to be significant ones in thehistory of dialectic.

The most significant Greek sources for the history of Aristotelian dialecticafter Aristotle are Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias. Of the firstof these we know very little, and most of that is derived from the second. Weknow that Theophrastus wrote on the topics, and that his work, accordingto Diogenes Laertius, involved a theory of dialectic (Diogenes Laertius, BkV, ch. 2). Thionville, for one, considers that Theophrastus added or deleted

14P. Moraux, ‘La joute dialectique d’apres le huitieme livre des Topiques’, in Aristotle on

Dialectic, op. cit., 288–9.


very little from Aristotle: ‘Il n’altera pas la pensee de son maıtre; il lacommenta plutot, et la mit en lumiere.’15 Alexander apparently criticizedTheophrastus for oversimplifying dialectic in attempting to clarify it; butfrom all accounts, these two did little seriously to modify the theoryinherited from Aristotle.

The same cannot be said for Cicero, however. In a letter which purportsto give a summary of the Aristotelian topics, Cicero gives something whicheveryone admits bears little resemblance to the Topics of Aristotle.16 AsMinio-Paluello puts it: ‘his own treatise with the same title bears hardly anyrelation to Aristotle’s work, although it purports to be an account of itscontents, based on memory.’17 Not everyone agrees on the reason for thisdivergence. Thionville, for instance, argues that the shortness of time inwhich the work was composed (one week, if Cicero is to be believed), andthat it was done from memory, is sufficient to account for the differences:‘dans une telle precipitation, il n’est pas etonnant qu’il ait souvent melee sessouvenirs’.18 Elonore Stump, on the other hand, gives a persuasiveargument to the effect that the relevant passage from Cicero should beread as saying that the work is not a summary of Aristotle’s Topics, but anexposition of Aristotelian topics.19 These are not contradictory views. And ifwe imagine that the tradition of dialectic continued unabated after Aristotle,in the same way that Aristotle himself seems to have inherited the art andnot invented it, then perhaps Cicero accurately recorded what was thoughtto be the gist of Aristotle’s method. In any event, it was not. Dialectic isconstrued by Cicero as ‘a twin of logic’, as Stump puts it; and both logic anddialectic are taken to be ‘branches of the art of Discourse (ars disserendi)’.20

This art of discourse is thought of as the genus of which dialectic (thought ofas the art of finding arguments [inventio]) and logic (the art of judging them[iudicum]) are the species. Thus, dialectic is not thought of as the meta-science of Bk I of the Topics. On the other hand, the ‘gamesmanship’ aspectof dialectic that comes out in Bk VIII is present, in that dialectic is thoughtof as a particular art of Discourse. In addition, Cicero translates ‘topoi’ by atleast two Latin expressions which replace the Greek in Europe: ‘argumentisedem’ and ‘argumentorum notas tradidit’. These translations are nothaphazard, since Cicero thinks of the commonplaces as headings underwhich arguments can be classed rather than as rules or laws or strategies for

15Thionville, op. cit., 94.16Thionville, for instance, charitably says: ‘Son livre nous offre bien des traces de confusion

entre plusiers doctrines, quelquefois etrangeres au Stagirite’. Ibid.17L. Minio-Paluello, ‘The Text of Aristotle’s Topics and Elenchi: The Latin Tradition’, in

Opuscula: The Latin Aristotle, edited by L. Minio-Paluello, 300.18Thionville, op. cit., 94.19Elonore Stump, ‘Dialectic and Boethius’s De topicis differentiis’, in Boethius: De topicis

differentiis, 20–4.20Ibid., 23.


inquiry.21 The consequences of this change are enormous; the core of themethod is stripped away. As Thionville asks, ‘comment tirer de la lesmateriaux d’une discussion ou d’une argumentation oratoire?’22 Ciceroessentially inverts the Aristotelian method by making the classification ofarguments into the end rather than the beginning of dialectic. This wouldnot have nearly the consequence it turned out to have were it not forCicero’s reputation as writer, orator and thinker.

That reputation, at least so far as the history of dialectic is concerned, wassolidified by perhaps the most influential figure in the transmission of thenotion of dialectic to the West: Boethius.23 Not only did Boethius translatePorphyry’s Isagoge, but he wrote Latin commentaries on this work andAristotle’s Topics (now lost); his two original works, De topicis differentiisand In Ciceronis Topica (more than a mere commentary) were to become thestandard works on the subject in Europe until the middle of the sixteeenthcentury.24 Stump says that Boethius was for a long time the direct, perhapsthe sole source for the study of dialectic, and his work remained animportant indirect source even when it was superseded by later treatments ofthe subject.25 Minio-Paluello says much the same thing, and gives Boethius’swork and the belief that Cicero had indeed summarized Aristotle as reasonswhy the Aristotelian texts were for so long ignored. He makes this furtherclaim:

Cassiodorus gave currency for a long time to the view that Cicero had in facttranslated Aristotle, and the popularity of his handbook may explain the

eclipse of Aristotle’s Top. until the beginning of the twelfth century to theadvantage of Cicero’s Topica and Boethius’ two works connected with it, viz.the commentary and the De Differentiis Topica. For a long time not even

Boethius’ actual translation could compete with the easier Latin works.26

Boethius can therefore be considered the definitive break with the Greektradition; from this time forward ‘dialectic’ is that art codified by Cicero andBoethius. When the Aristotelian texts are consulted, it will be through theselenses; and Boethius, like Cicero, treats dialectic as a species of arsdisserendi.

21For a fuller discussion of this, see Thionville, op. cit., 94–6, and Elonore Stump’s introduction

to her translation of Beothius’s In Ciceronis Topica.22Thionville, op. cit., 95.23For a fuller discussion of the place of Boethius in the European logical tradition, see Jonathan

Barnes ‘Boethius and the Study of Logic’ and Osmund Lewry, ‘Boethian Logic in the Medieval

West’, both in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, edited by Margaret Gibson, 73–89 and

90–134, respectively.24For a fuller discussion of Boethius’s role, see Elonore Stump’s introductions to both De topicis

differentiis and In Ciceronis topica, op. cit.25Stump, ‘Dialectic’, op. cit., 24.26Minio-Paluello, op. cit., 300.


The divide between the Latin and Greek traditions is widened by this fact:

We have found no evidence to suggest that either of the two Aristotelian works[i.e. Topics and De sophisticis elenchis] was read in Latin between the time ofBoethius’ death and approximately AD 1115–30 when Abailard read andquoted El.[enchis] . . . Adam of Balsham made use of Top.[ica] and El.[enchis]

for his Ars Disserendi, and the oldest surviving manuscript of Top.,[ica] cod.Oxford Trin. Coll. 47, was written in England.27

Thus, more than six hundred years were to go by before the Aristoteliantexts themselves were able to challenge the slant on them given by Ciceroand Boethius. It is my suggestion that they were never able to do so with realsuccess; the road was already too well travelled for anyone easily to moveout of the rut.

All of this is not to say, however, that Boethius entirely miscast thedialectic of the Topics. Compared to Cicero’s little treatise, the Dedifferentiis topicis is a far more detailed work, and one that goes someway towards preserving the methodological significance of the common-places. Rather, the significant changes come about through Boethius’sattempt to reconcile the Aristotelian and Ciceronian views on dialectic. Inthe first instance, Boethius divides ‘topics’ into ‘maximal propositions’and ‘differentiae’. The first are ‘truths known per se, or self-evidenttruths. They are not proved by any other propositions, and knowledge ofthem is not derived knowledge, drawn from other known propositions;they are . . . more known than any other propositions’.28 They function inargumentation

as guarantors of validity or soundness. In Boethius’s predicative arguments

based on indefinite propositions, they are general premises essential to thevalidity of the argument; in hypothetical arguments, they validate the passagefrom antecedent to consequent in the conditional – that is, they verify the

conditional premise.29

In other words, maximal propositions function much as do Aristotle’s topoi,at least if we construe the commonplace rules as Thionville and Pater do.Their methodological role is given in this way:

A maximal proposition helps in finding arguments because it is the principlethat gives the argument its force; it is the generalization on which the rest of

the argument depends. Once one has the appropriate maximal proposition for

27Ibid.28Stump, De topicis differentiis., 181.29Ibid., 187.


a dialectical question, it is not hard to construct the argument or the generaloutline of the argument for that question.30

An example might make this point clearer. Suppose the dialectical questionat issue is ‘Did the pre-Columbian natives have bread?’ (not a veryinteresting dialectical question, granted, but it will serve.) The inquiryeventuates in an assertion, either affirmative or negative; suppose we choosethe negative ‘The pre-Columbian natives did not have bread’. A premise inan argument which would lead validly to this conclusion might be ‘The pre-Columbian natives lacked flour’. What is missing, however, is some reasonfor believing that it is more than just likely that because pre-Columbiannatives lacked flour, they could not make bread. The proposition ‘Where thematter is lacking, what is made from the matter is also lacking’ is just such areason; it shows how the premise supports the conclusion and it is itself(arguably) a self-evident truth, i.e. it is a maximal proposition in Boethius’ssense. The resulting argument would be:

1. The pre-Columbian natives lacked flour.2. Where the matter is lacking, what is made from the matter is also

lacking.

Therefore,

3. The pre-Columbian natives had no bread.

With a stock of propositions such as (2), we are in a position to providerational support for a great variety of ‘dialectical questions’ on any numberof matters. Further, so long as the stock of such propositions is relativelylimited, the skill of using maximal propositions in this way could beacquired with a modicum of study. Since the maximal propositions arebased essentially on the ten Aristotelian categories, the stock is limited injust the way that is required for them to serve as a method. By the method ofdivision, a Porphyrian tree can be constructed for each of the ten categories,using the predicables as the principle of division.

This is only part of the Boethian method. The differentiae originate as thedifferentia of particular maximal propositions; and since on Boethius’scount there are only twenty-eight such differentiae, they promise thereduction of the dialectical method to manageable proportions. Differentiaeare supposed to suggest the sorts of term that link subject and predicate inthe conclusion of a particular syllogism. As Stump puts it:

The Differentiae . . . aid in finding arguments because they aid in findingintermediate terms. Sometimes the intermediate provided is simply an

30Ibid., 189.


expression that can be joined in some way to each of the two terms in theconclusion; sometimes it is a middle term for a demonstrative Aristoteliansyllogism. In either case, a Differentia does not specify the particular

intermediate term to be used in an argument, but rather it gives the genusof intermediate appropriate to that argument, suggesting the sort ofintermediate that could join the two terms of the conclusion.31

To use the earlier example once again, the requisite differentia would pointus in the direction of providing the appopriate maximal proposition:

1. The pre-Columbian natives lacked flour2. Flour is the matter (or material cause) of bread.3. Where the matter is lacking, what is made from the matter is lacking.

Therefore,

4. The pre-Columbian natives had no bread.

What was required when the dialectical inquiry began was a connectionbetween the pre-Columbian natives’ and ‘having no bread’. The maximalproposition (3) provides a self-evident reason why the premise should beconnected to the conclusion; and the differentia ‘material cause’ helpsgenerate the proposition (2) which connects the term ‘pre-Columbiannatives’ in the premise, via the maximal proposition, to the term ‘bread’ inthe conclusion. As the genus of the intermediate (i.e. ‘flour’) of the aboveargument, the differentia ‘material cause’ suggests the sort of term that couldserve as an intermediate.32

It is the differentiae that constitute the really novel part of Boethius’sapproach, and proved influential in the long run. However, they are farmore like headings or classes of argument than rules or strategies (here theCiceronian influence seems particularly clear). Further, missing fromBoethius’s account is any real distinction between dialectical anddemonstrative argument. As Stump notes, the differentiae can beindifferently applied to dialectical or demonstrative arguments. No mentionis made of the distinction between one and the other on the basis of endoxa;and the possibility of making a general science out of the method Boethiusdescribes seems unlikely. Missing also are the five predicables, the basis forAristotle’s topoi. Stump speculates that

It is as if Boethius’s predecessors had taken Aristotle’s Topics as a boxful ofblueprints or recipes for arguments, rather than as an art teaching the nature

31Ibid., 199.32See Stump, ‘Differentia and the Porphyrian Tree’ in Boethius: De topicis differentiis, 237–47,

and ‘Differentia’, 248–61 of the same volume.


of predicables, and had been dismayed at the great number of blueprints. tofacilitate remembering the Topics, they gathered them together into groupsacross the grain of the predicables; some Topics are about conjugates, some

about contraries, and so on.33

This would explain much. It would explain why the differentiae have thecharacter they do, and why the Aristotelian topics should have lost so muchof their methodological character in transmission to the West. It would alsoexplain why dialectic should less and less have been considered the generalscience of inquiry that Aristotle thought it was. Given that the aim of theBoethian topics seems to be to facilitate the memorization of argumenttypes, rather than the acquisition of a dynamis, and that memory wastypically thought of (at least from Cicero onwards) as a part of rhetoric, it iseasy enough to see how the Greek/Aristotelian sense of ‘dialectic’ shouldhave been gradually transformed. The process would have been furthercomplicated, if Minio-Paluello is correct, by the fact that little attention waspaid even to the slanted text of Boethius, let alone the original. Given thatBoethius’ works were themselves supplanted in the Middle Ages by Peter ofSpain’s logical works, including one on the topics, an ever wider divide iscreated between the original Aristotelian and the later Latin/oratoricalconception of dialectic. Indeed, if Thionville is correct and Peter of Spain‘ne cherche meme pas a expliquer comment on a pu passer des propositionsprincipales a leurs differences’,34 then even the ad hoc method ofBoethius would have been haphazardly transmitted. When the Aristoteliantexts themselves began to reassert themselves in the twelfth century, a weightof tradition would have prevented their easy assimilation. Thionville sumsup the situation in the Middle Ages best in the following pithy history:

Ainsi le veritable sense de la theorie des topoi demeura peu connu au moyen-

age. Le chaos regnait dans cette partie des ecoles. On lisait concurremment deslivres qui ne pouvaient s’accorder: Aristote, Boece, et Ciceron. Or toutl’enseignement des scolastiques consistait dans cette lecture des textes et dans

leur commentaire: on n’allait pas jusqu’a la critique et a la discussion despensees. Aussi devait’on finir necessairement ou par negliger une doctrine quene presentait que confusion, ou par prendre parti pour un des auteurs qu’onavait entre les mains, en abandonnant completement les autres. Or c’est

Aristote que parait avoir ete le plus generalement neglige.35

It may be that Thionville is a trifle too hard on the education of the MiddleAges; after all, we often tend to forget that the vast majority of universitystudents at the time were the same age as today’s middle school students;

33Stump, De topicis, 202.34Thionville, op. cit., 112.35Ibid., 113.


but the general point is, I think, accurate. The result was a disjointed,fragmented tradition of dialectic and the topics, now tending towardsrhetoric, now towards demonstration, at times unclear as to the usefulnessof dialectic at all. Problems were of course long recognized; but during thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were to come to a head.

The figure around whom much of the debate raged was Rudolf Agricola.Thoroughly anti-Scholastic in spirit, and thus by extension anti-Aristote-lian, Agricola laid all of the problems with medieval conceptions of dialecticand logic at Aristotle’s door. Agricola accuses Aristotle of having writtenabout matters that have no utility (i.e. the topics), of having beendeliberately obscure, of introducing a division of questions that have norelation to practice (i.e. the predicables), and of promising a method whichthose who follow him are unable to practice.36 On the other hand, whateveris useful in Scholastic dialectic is, according to Agricola, the fruit of theefforts of Cicero and Boethius. Thus, Agricola comes down firmly of the sideof the Latin interpretation of dialectic. He entrenches the idea that dialectic(or logic, he thinks of these as identical) is divided into invention andarrangement. His reconstruction of invention is on orthodox Boethian lines.From the differentiae, one is to produce a set of propositions, one for eachof the seats of argument for each of the two terms in the conclusion of asyllogism. These propositions are then compared one with another. Anydialectical problem is thus resolved in the following way:

Quand les lieux de l’attribut convient a un des lieux du sujet, c’est une raisonpour affirmer la chose; quand il ne convient a aucun lieu du sujet, c’est une

raison pour la nier. Si tous les lieux se conviennent, la question seracompletement resolue; si tous se repoussent, la negative sera prouvee de meme.Si tels lieux se conviennent, et que d’autres s’exluent, il faudra peser alors lesdeux sortes de raisons, et se decider pour les plus fortes ou pour les plus

nombreuses.37

Agricola tries to re-invent a method out of a tradition that had reducedthe Aristotelian commonplace rules to a small number of headings. Theobvious problem with such a method is that it is practically impossible tofollow. Any statement would require the production of at least fifty-sixpropositions (following Boethius’s twenty-eight differentiae); and thecomparison of each against the other, in the worst-case scenario, wouldentail 784 separate comparisons.38 Granted, Agricola does not envision theworst-case scenario, and his examples are resolved in far fewer steps, butthe theoretical problem remains. In so far as Agricola’s reconstruction of

36Cf. Thionville, 114–15.37Thionville, 117.38It should be clear that Lull’s wheels were meant to make just such a method a practical

possibility.


dialectic turned out to be extremely popular, and in so far as it is a tediousand mechanical method of dubious application, the stage was set, not for afurther reform of dialectic, but its utter and complete rejection. Still, forsome time yet, the general aim of Agricola’s reform was to rule the learnedimagination. Despite Agricola’s conflation of dialectic and logic, his textmixes in a rhetorical element, with the result that the Ciceronian dialecticcomes to be considered the model.39 The difficulties of drawing out of theScholastic topics a method of invention, despite Agricola’s almostHerculean efforts to construct one, tended to advance the cause ofarrangement (iudicum) over invention (inventio). Therefore, the Scholasticremainder of Aristotelian dialectic, residing in the theory of invention, wasgradually revealed as sterile, and the dialectic which engendered it wasimpugned, either by its association with rhetoric or by the mere difficultyof its application.

A last effort to remedy these defects, but still in keeping with Agricola,was attempted by Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramee). The descent fromAgricola to Ramus is relatively clear: Johannes Sturm, a disciple ofAgricola, was a lecturer at the University of Paris when Ramus was astudent there; and Ramus cited Sturm as his inspiration for the study oflogic.40 Ramus attempted clearly to delineate the different parts of the arsdisserendi: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic or Logic. The latter wasconstrued as ‘the art of disputing well’, and it is a single science: ‘Aristotlewished to make two logics, one for science, and the other for opinion; inwhich (saving the honour of so great a master) he has very greatly erred.’41

From this it is obvious that Ramus does not recognize any special rules for‘articles of knowledge’ which are ‘contingent and matters of opinion’, a viewthat is implicit in many Scholastic texts, but is here explicit. The samesimplification is apparent in his reform of the logical vocabulary: the partsof logic are called indifferently ‘categories’, ‘topics’, ‘principles’, ‘reasons’,‘proofs’ or ‘arguments’; and Ramus thinks that the latter two are to bepreferred.42 Thus, the whole subject matter of Aristotle’s dialectic seems byRamus’s time to have entirely disappeared, or at the very least to have beenconfused with elements from both the Analytics and Metaphysics. Thetheory of invention he advocates is essentially an Agricolan one, onlysimplified now to ten headings, which he seems to have constructed out ofthe the ten Aristotelian categories.43 Their use, however, remains that oneadvocated by Agricola: the creation and comparison of propositionsconcerning subject and predicate terms in a conclusion. For dialectic, then,Ramus seems only to have completed the assimilation of dialectic to logic,

39Thionville, 118.40Cf. W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, 159.41P. Ramus, Dialectique, quoted in Howell, op. cit., 154.42Howell, 155.43Ibid., 155–7.


and to have eliminated those features of the Aristotelian programme whichwere not assimilable. The result is a treatise of slight proportions. The firstEnglish translation, for instance, runs to only eighty-four pages in octavo.44

By promising to simplify and harmonize the Scholastic logical tradition,Ramus’s Dialectique., like the works of the early Latin commentators,garnered a popularity that had more to do with a reluctance to tackle thedifficult Aristotelian texts than with any real advance. And its popularitywas unparalleled: Ramus’s Dialectique went through two-hundred andsixty-two editions, counting Latin and English editions as well as French, inthe hundred years after its first publication in 1555.45 What was taken to beits promise is, I believe, a most telling point about what dialectic was takento be by Ramus’s time. In the introduction to the 1574 English translation,MacIlmaine gives a summary of which texts Ramus is a replacement for oran advancement over:

thou shalt understand that there is nothing appartayning to dialectike eytherin Aristotles xvij. booke [sic] of logike, in his eight bookes of Phisike, or in his

xiiij. bookes of Philosophie, in Cicero his bookes of Oratorie, or in Quintilian(A.iiij.) in the which there is almost nothing that dothe not eyther appartayneto the invention of argumentes or disposition of the same, but thou shaldfynde it declared.46

Thus, eighty-four octavo pages pretend to summarize all that is importantfor dialectic, not only in the whole of the Organon, but the Physics andMetaphysics as well! This can only mean that, on the Ramistic account,there was very little in such texts that had to do with dialectic at all; and thismore than anything else shows the sea change that had occured in theconcept of dialectic. Further, besides Aristotle, only Cicero and Quintilianare mentioned, and only with regard to their works on oratory or rhetoric.Missing are Boethius and such Scholastics as Peter of Spain. Thus also isdialectic identified with disputation, not inquiry.

This enormous change from Aristotle’s Topics to Ramus’s Dialectique,always under the rubric of dialectic, can be accounted for, excludingradical misunderstanding, by changes in elements in the original theory.There is no remnant in the Latin tradition of the Greek notion of endoxa.The matter of Aristotelian dialectic, reputable opinion, is replaced by mereopinion, with the result that the epistemological warrant that endoxa aresupposed to provide have no counterpart in the Latin tradition. There is,therefore, no room for a distinction between the art of the Topics and thescience of the Prior and Posterior Analytics. The changes wrought upon

44P. Ramus, The Logike of the Moste Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr, Newly translated

and in divers places corrected, after the mynde of the Author, translated by Roland MacIlmaine.45Cf..Risse, op. cit.46Ramus, op. cit., 7–8.


the topoi, if not by Cicero and Boethius, then at least by the time of Ciceroand adopted by Boethius, such that what are originally rules or laws orstrategies have become headings in a system of classification (thoughretaining the language of a method), engender attempts to recapture theoriginal method which, at best, are consonant with either Scholasticdisputation or forensic oratory, but never the kind of inquiry whichAristotle envisions. By extension, the kind of inquiry which Descartes andhis successors envision cannot be supported by such means either. Finally,the Latin tradition tended to equate the arts of argumentation in rhetoricand dialectic. Attempts such as Ramus’s to divorce the two leave littleroom for dialectic construed as a companion to logic; either dialectic islogic, and the Scholastics have only succeeded in obscuring that fact, ordialectic, if separate, is a sophistical art of giving to mere opinion theflavour of scientific demonstration. No other options seem open. Thus it isthat, many years later and after the complete victory of the moderns overthe ancients, Kant can write:

However various were the significations in which the ancients used ‘dialectic’as the title for a science or art, we can safely conclude from their actualemployment of it that with them it was never anything else than the logic of

illusion. It was a sophistical art of giving to ignorance, and indeed tointentional sophistries, the appearance of truth, by the device of imitating themethodical thoroughness which logic prescribes, and of using its ‘topic’ to

conceal the emptiness of its pretensions.47

CARTESIAN METHOD AS A CORRECTIVE TO THE TRADITION

This is the backdrop against which to evaluate the historical take onDescartes’s methodological innovations. From the modern point of view,the defects of the methods of the Latin tradition, all in the end fallingunder the rubric ‘dialectic’, are obvious. At least, they are obvious ifdialectic is construed as an analogue to a modern explanatory method. Itis not clear that it should be looked at this way; and it is not clear thatcontemporary thinkers clearly appreciated the difference between thedemands of justification and explanation.48 Still, even where thisdistinction is not clearly made out, it is apparent that dialectic can atbest provide a nominal understanding of the natural world. The ‘topics’, asstorehouses of middle terms organized on the model of Aristotle’scategories, can provide the necessary link in a demonstrative syllogism;

47Immaneul Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, 99.48Space does not permit a discussion of this important matter. Suffice it to say that the change in

meaning from the latin ‘scientia’ to the English ‘science’ (and its cognates), involves at least in

part a shift in emphasis from the purely epistemological task of justifying something as a

‘scientific’ truth and the cognitive task of making some state of affairs intelligible.


and therefore can provide a justification for some claim that C is A.Yet there is no method for filling up these storehouses or places ofargument other than from traditional descriptions of the world around us.Only if one accepts that the traditional story of the world (its ontology butalso its taxonomy) is both correct and complete can the task oforganization and classification required by dialectic seem anything otherthan mere verbal manipulation. It is precisely on the issues of correctness(i.e. what things there are in the world) and completeness (i.e. that theseare all the things that there are in the world) that the New Science firstchallenged the tradition. Dialectic can provide, however maladroitly, away to organize a given body of knowledge into a coherent whole – it thusprovides, as Sargeant was to argue late in the seventeenth century, a‘method to science’ (read: a method to scientia) – but it cannot increase thestock of knowledge, it cannot enlargen the original natural history.However tempting it is to ridicule Raymond Lully’s project – the creationof new, vacuous propositions from a finite stock of metaphysically suspectterms – this project was taken seriously, and it could have been so takenonly if the descriptive, classificatory part of the project was thought to becomplete. So long as only piecemeal change was proposed, additions to thestock of propositions prompted by doubt about particular claims, theweight of the tradition itself could always serve as a counter to positive,incremental change. Well-intentioned reform of the tradition itself, such asthat of Agricola and Ramus, did not therefore go far enough, and didlittle to correct the fundamental defects. What Descartes proposed was notreform but eradication of the tradition.

The Meditations and Principles argued for the necessity of systematicand methodical doubt at least once in the lifetime of any rational inquirer.Many have focused on the emancipatory effect of following this advice,where possible, but equally as important are its methodologicalconsequences. One obvious block to methodological reform before theseventeenth century was the sheer magnitude of the task; it would havebeen daunting, even were it considered, to face the prospect of re-describing and re-classifying the world de novo. Even were this prospect tobe faced, without a systematic approach, no hope for success could havebeen rationally entertained. However, the procedure of doubt allowed atthe very least a systematic review of the classificatory schema of the world,and that on new, apparently ontologically neutral grounds. Much has beenmade over the years of the ‘epistemological turn’ which Descartes’srecommendations involved; and this observation is important for under-standing subsequent history of philosophy. Even for the seventeenthcentury alone, the ‘way of ideas’ (to use Reid’s phrase) promised a way ofseparating the wheat from the chaff in the tradition, a way of arriving atan appropriate classificatory schema of the world that did not presume inadvance its constituents. Of course, Descartes in the end reinstitutedsome of the fundamental traditional categories – substance, mode,


accident – but it would have been surprising if every aspect of the traditionhad been swept away, even by so radical a programme as the hyperbolicdoubt. While retaining some of the categories, Descartes reduced theirnumber to only two – mind and body – which if not a complete departurewas nevertheless a radical simplification. Therefore, the opening metho-dological gambit of the Discourse answered to several perceived problemswith the tradition: an obstructive deference to authority which madedifficult the separation of the well-founded from the ill-founded, apreference for classification over discovery, an unwieldy and overlycomplicated system which few mastered and fewer still used with anyeffectiveness. These were not only Descartes’s complaints; many otherscomplained in a similar vein, but few attacked the Gordian knot with sucha bold stroke; and the recommended procedure for unravelling it entailedless study than determination, i.e. was more a function of will than ofunderstanding.

It is important to note, however, that the justificatory schema embodiedby the tradition – that science is a body of propositions arrived atdeductively from antecedentely known-to-be-true propositions – was notup for grabs. Descartes’s notion of science is as deductive as its traditionalpredecessor. The first rule of the Discourse was to accept nothing astrue which could not be clearly recognized to be so (or, as in the laterworks, which was not clearly and distinctly perceived); and aside fromintuition, which is not necessarily anti-Aristotelian, deduction is the meansto arrive at a clear and distinct perception. Indeed, the model in theDiscourse is geometrical or mathematical demonstration: systematicdeduction from primitively true propositions. It will be no surprise,therefore, that Descartes will have many defenders who are otherwisethoroughly traditional or who attempt to wed the traditional methodologyto the new, Cartesian world-picture. One prominent strain of Cartesian-ism, then, is the development of the method as an improvement or reformof the traditional one. Representative of this strain are L’art de penser ofArnauld and Nicole, and the Cartesian compendia of Pierre-Sylvain Regisand Antoine Le Grand.

For many others, however, Descartes was to be emulated not becausehis method provided a workable corrective to the tradition, but because itprovided a means for extending and improving our knowledge. As wasmentioned previously, the tradition was thought to be faulty at least inpart because it provided no non-vacuous way to extend our knowledge.The dialectical method could systematize known truths, could provide away to embody them in a coherent system, and, as new truths werediscovered, accommodate them. It could, in addition, provide thewherewithal for critical analysis of candidate truths. It could not, exceptaccidentally, lead anyone to discovery, and though many could agree that‘attending to nature’ was necessary, this in itself was no systematic advice.The third and fourth rules of the Discourse, however, and their


eventuation in the appended essays and Parts III and IV of the Principlesshowed how one could systematically extend one’s knowledge into anydomain. The mathematical model Descartes proposed for treating ofphysical problems in a completely general way, and the mechanicalassumptions necessary for taking that model to be applicable to physicalproblems of whatever ilk, answered to a widespread complaint with thetradition. This complaint doubtless began with practitioners of the newscience and with ‘technicians’ who aspired to philosophy, in so far as thetradition clearly offered them nothing and did not form part of theiractivities of discovery. However, it came also from those who were not inthe front lines, so to speak, and who resented the resistance to newdiscoveries when those discoveries did not conform to the canons of theaccepted tradition. What Cartesianism provided them with was asystematic alternative, without which opposition to the tradition couldonly appear isolated and anarchic. There is therefore another strain ofCartesianism which involved the articulation and extension of themathematical/mechanical method. Representative of this strain are JacquesRohault’s Traite de la physique, Nicolas Malebranche’s Recherche de laverite (and also the popular works of such persons as Bernard le Bovier deFontenelle and Claude Gadroys).

Although these divergent strains of Cartesianism are apparent in theperiod 1650–1690, they do not exist independently. The Cartesianmathematical/mechanical model is clearly in the minds of those whoarticulate a ‘traditional’ conception of the Cartesian method; and thedeductive model of justification and explanation clearly is in the back of theminds of those whose concern is with the articulation of the Cartesianmechanical philosophy. What we find are tendencies rather than clearlydemarcated allegiances. As such, both are necessary for the seventeenth-century move from authoritarian Scholastic method to the robust empiricalmethod of Newton. As the notions of justification and of explanation,conflated in the Scholastic tradition but separable in Cartesianism, becomemore obviously distinct, the requirements of the one can clearly be seen to bedifferent from those of the other. For Descartes, to be sure, justification isexplanation, just as it had been for his predecessors; but in the ever moreapparent gap between the deductions in his metaphysics and those in hisphysics which, he claimed, were consequences of his metaphysics, thepossibility of separating off the justificatory enterprise of the metaphysicsfrom the explanatory one of the physics will eventually be actualized.Further, the apparent fecundity of Descartes’ mathematical method willcome to be seen to be shackled by the mechanical assumptions which he tookto be required for its explanatory generality. Both moves are necessary if weare to understand Cartesianism as a productive episode in both the historyand the philosophy of science.

Lakehead University


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