The Galileo Affair - (3) The Death-Bed Publication

The heliocentric theory had a profound and negative impact on the Church. It was condemned by the Church, but Copernicus was careful during his life not to incur its wrath, unlike Galileo after him. For fear of censure, he delayed publication of his findings.

Great-thinkers article on Copernicus

Yeah, the objections to heliocentrism were merely academic, and not at all likely to get Copernicus into any trouble (unless you count the derisive laughs of academics as trouble). That Copernicus guy... what a card. He was so afraid of being laughed at that he chose to publish his work only at the very end of his life. Right?

Sarcastic comment by Doctor Logic

It has become widely believed that Copernicus delayed publication of 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies' until he was near death because he feared the inevitable reprisal from Rome. This conjures a romantic image of the great man on his deathbed, thumbing through the final published copy of his masterpiece before lying back and closing his eyes for the final time, knowing that the dangerous idea contained within it would cause outrage amongst the establishment. Even he could not have suspected that his treatise would begin the struggle between rationality and superstition and awaken Western Civilisation from its slumbers. Or so the legend goes.

Unfortunately the task of the modern historian is to act as the great killjoy, slicing through the mythology and uncovering the more mundane truth; and, the cynic might say, to construct a few hoary myths of his own. Andrew Dickson White’s portrayal of Copernicus in ‘A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom’ was as a man living in fear for his life. When he eventually did publish his thesis, it was in Nuremberg with a grovelling preface inserted by the Lutheran clergyman Andreas Osiander. Thus, Dickson White wrote, ‘the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths’ was ‘forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and crawl’. Copernicus’s death placed him ‘beyond the reach of the conscientious men who would have blotted his reputation and perhaps destroyed his life’. This however, is to project a later development onto a past event and as Jerome J. Langford points out in ‘Galileo, Science, and the Church’ A.D White’s assertion is ‘considered false by most serious scholars today’. As the historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers wrote, in a jointly authored article:

White's picture of unremitting religious hostility to heliocentrism is no longer defensible-if, indeed, it ever was. If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of scientists, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him- Nicole Oresme (a bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa (a cardinal) in the fifteenth-had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir. Indeed, various churchmen, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publish his book, which appeared with a dedication to Pope Paul III. Had Copernicus lived beyond its publication in 1543, it is highly improbable that he would have felt any hostility or suffered any persecution. The church simply had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system. Although a few critics noticed and opposed the Copernican system, organized Catholic opposition did not appear until the seventeenth century.

In time Copernicanism would be considered controversial and heretical for reasons we will look at in a future instalment, but within the lifetime of the great astronomer the atmosphere was greatly different. At the time of his death in 1543 the Catholic Church was in the early stages of the Reformation and had not yet adopted the fortress mentality it would later fall into. Not until 1616 and the actions of Galileo was Copernicus’s book to be suspended until corrected and only after the Galileo affair ended in 1633 would Copernicianism be actually declared heretical.

In fact, as the record shows, high officials in the Catholic Church - such as the Bishop of Culm, Tiedemann Giese - actively encouraged Copernicus to develop his model for both intellectual and practical reasons. A good one being that accurate astronomical models were needed in order to be able to predict the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (Easter). In 1530 Copernicus circulated an outline of his astronomy amongst friends called ‘Commentariolus’. This attracted widespread attention and in 1533 Pope Clement VII requested Johann Widmanstadt to deliver a public lecture on the Copernican theory in the Vatican gardens. The Pope having been favourably impressed (he presented Widmanstadt with a rare Greek manuscript) Nicholas Cardinal Schoenburg wrote to Copernicus urging him to publish the complete details. The letter, which was included in De Revolutionibus reads:

Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you, and also to congratulate our contemporaries among whom you enjoyed such great prestige. For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe; that the eighth heaven remain perpetually motionless and fixed; and that, together with the elements included in its sphere, the moon, situated between the heavens of Mars and Venus, revolves around the sun in the period of a year. I have also learned that you have written an exposition of this whole system of astronomy, and have computed the planetary motions and set them down in tables, to the greatest admiration of all. Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject. Moreover, I have instructed Theodoric of Reden to have everything copied in your quarters at my expense and dispatched to me. If you gratify my desire in this matter, you will see that you are dealing with a man who is zealous for your reputation and eager to do justice to so fine a talent. Farewell.

Rome, 1 November 1536

Having received this letter however, Copernicus still relented to publish. Later on he gave his reasons for his reticence as:

‘the scorn which I had reason to fear on account of the novelty and unconventionality of my opinion, almost induced me to abandon completely the work which I had undertaken’

Without any direct evidence of the earth’s motion, Copernicus was going to find it very hard to convince the sceptics. The academic establishment of the time was conservative and controlled by devoted Aristotelians who were interested in preserving the status quo. As Marie Boas Hall points out in The Scientific Renaissance:

'Copernicus knew that his theory was both novel and strange. He feared lest it should be regarded as absurd as well and he himself, as he put it “hissed off the stage”...Fear of ridicule is not a very noble motive for withholding publication, perhaps, but it can be a real one : Galileo felt something of this half a century later and there seems no reason not to believe Copernicus when he says it influenced him strongly’

Copernicus had been more than willing to circulate his theory in manuscript form. This was his society’s equivalent of submitting a paper to technical specialists. Formal publication however, would expose his ideas to criticism by everyone. As Boas explains:

‘Actual publication of the De Revolutionibus exposed the Copernican system, as its author knew would happen, to comment and criticism by all and sundry – humanists, scholastics, astrologers, mathematicians, crackpots, ecclesiastics – for any educated man in the sixteenth century fancied himself competent to pass judgement on astronomical theories...as a public figure of some not he was vulnerable to public disdain from university professors and his superiors in the church, quite capable of judging astronomical theory. But as he remarked disarmingly in his dedication, the Pope, by his ‘influence and judgement can readily hold the slanderers from biting’

In the event however, the news of Copernicus’s work spread and in 1539 he was visited by a young German professor called Georg Rheticus. Rheticus would become an enthusiastic supporter of the astronomer, and produced a well written summery of his work called ‘First Report’. This having produced interest, Rheticus obtained a manuscript of ‘De Revolutionibus’ and set off in 1541 to obtain its publication. At Leipzig, he secured a professorship and, having become embroiled in a scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of his students, he gave the manuscript to Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian to organise the printing.

Osiander was familiar with Copernicus’s work and had written to him suggesting that to ‘mollify the peripatetics and theologians whose opposition you fear’ he should include some words to suggest the heliocentric theory was a hypothesis. Instead, a suitable preface would placate the scholarly community by empahsising that Copernicus's theory was based on a series of assumptions and hence cannot claim ultimate truth. The aim of this was as Osiander put it:

'In that way, the potential opponents will be lured away from massive criticism to more intensive research; and through newly gained respect and a lack of counter arguments be moved to fairness and ultimately to acceptance...Aristotelians and theologians will be easily placated if they hear that the same motion as perceived can be explained by means of different hypothesis'

Copernicus was unhappy with this since it had always been his aim to show the true structure of the planetary system rather than some mathematical fiction. Kepler, who saw Copenicus's reply to Osiander said that the astronomer had had no intention of complying with his idea and had decided to maintain his own opinion 'even though the science should be damaged'.

In the event however Osiander did publish a unsigned preface suggesting the heliocentric theory was a hypothesis for computation. Rheticus was furious at this and tried to publish a corrected version without success. Bishop Giese was also outraged, describing the preface as a 'fraud' and writing to Rheticus with the aim of having the preface denounced to the Senate of Nuremberg.

In the event however, Osiander's motives were far from malicious. Osiander was following the custom of the Middle ages which was to propound new theories as hypotheses whose truth remained to be tested in the public forum; this reflected a tradition of instrumentalism that had been applied to astronomy since the time of Ptolemy. He was also making an honest attempt to disarm the defenders of the Aristotelian position and at most he was guilty of an error of judgement. In the event, the label 'hypothesis' applied to the heliocentric theory did open a way for the wide dissemination of its main principles and prepared the ground for the acceptance of the new cosmology.

The printing was completed in 1543 shortly before Copernicus’s death . Of the 4 to 500 copies which were printed, that of Rheticus survives. On the flyleaf is a poem in Greek which reads:

Stranger : What is this book?
Philosopher : A new one, with all kinds of good things in it.
Stranger : Oh Zeus!, how great a wonder do I see! The earth whirls everywhere in aethereal space
Philosopher : But do not merely wonder, nor condemn such a good thing As the ignorant do before they understand But examine and ponder all these things

By the time Galileo turned to astronomy in a serious way, the political situation had changed and the ignorant would have their day.


The Galileo Affair - (2) The Cosmic Promotion
The Galileo Affair - (1) The Problem with Heliocentrism

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Some thoughts on Toby Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science

Why did modern science arise in western Europe and nowhere else? If you ever meet a historian of science, for goodness sake, don’t ask them that question. It implies that the West enjoyed some sort of superiority compared to ancient Greece, imperial China or the Islamic Caliphate. In academia today, cultural relativism isn’t edgy postmodern theory, it’s part of the furniture. So no one likes to be reminded that, whereas many civilisations have had scientific cultures, none of them came close to the achievement of western science.

It wasn’t always forbidden to ask the question. In the late-nineteenth century, there were two broad theories of scientific development. One, associated with the positivism of Frenchman Auguste Comte, emphasised reason as the font of modern science. Westerners were supposedly more rational than other races, so it was hardly surprising that they developed science first. This idea was turbocharged by social Darwinism, which seemed to provide a scientific veneer for theories of western mental superiority. At much the same time, the conflict between science and religion was popularised by the American Andrew Dickson White. White suggested that religion had long held science back and the cause of scientific advance was simply the removal of this impediment.

From the mid-twentieth century, as the history of science began to form its own sub-discipline, scholars got to work undermining these grand theories. The myth of western rationality went first. Historians found that when they studied individual scientists, they were usually behaving in a way that wasn’t rational at all. Sir Isaac Newton, the icon of the scientific revolution, turned out to be obsessed with alchemy and biblical chronology. Johannes Kepler developed his model of the solar system by asking, how would God have done it? Scientific pioneers were obsessed with priority disputes and spent as much time burnishing their public image as they did on science. Philosophers of science, like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, unpicked the underlying process of scientific discovery and found it didn’t seem to be logical at all.

The conflict between science and religion took a bit longer to fall apart. This was partly because within academia being rude about Christianity is a good deal more acceptable than lauding western rationality. But gradually, historians realised that the likes of Newton and Kepler were even more devout than their contemporaries. And they discovered most of the examples of religion holding back science, such as banning lightening rods or insisting that the earth is flat, were fantasy. Despite spirited attempts by the new atheists to revive it, the conflict between science and religion is wholly defunct among historians of science.

Nowadays, respectable scholars don’t ask why science arose in the West. For instance, Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009) doesn’t engage with the point at all and ignores the concept of the scientific revolution for good measure. In the place of historians, sociologists have attempted to fill the void. This has not always been a great success. For example, the sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, has been justifiably criticised for his simplistic books on the Christian roots of western civilisation. In contrast, Toby Huff, whose The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (2017), has now reached its third edition, deserves more serious attention. I read the first edition almost twenty years ago. It was one of the books that alerted me to the importance of science in the medieval world and the unique status of universities as centres of learning. But when I started my PhD, I found academics were less than impressed. For instance, Sir Geoffrey Lloyd was quite dismissive when I asked him about the book and my PhD supervisor assured me that Huff had no idea what he was talking about. Since then, Huff’s reputation has improved to the extent that Fara includes Huff as a key source in the annotated bibliography of Science: A Four Thousand Year History. I featured him in the further reading section of God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (2009).

Reading the third edition of The Rise of Early Modern Science provides a good opportunity to take stock of Huff’s answer to the question ‘why did modern science arise in the west?’ His answer is 'institutions'. He believes that science arose in the West because it had the institutions, primarily universities, in which a scientific culture could develop. Huff calls the comparison of the West with other cultures “comparative civilisational sociology of science” whereby he examines how the institutions in China, Islam and Europe developed and flourished.

Huff is an old school sociologist, so his touchstone is Max Weber, who wrote in 1904 that the belief in scientific truth is “a product of definite cultures”. The scientific ethos was defined by another sociologist, Robert K. Merton, in the 1940s in terms of the four norms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism. Huff suggests these norms became embedded in western science alone because the university existed in the West and not elsewhere.

The importance of institutions has become a commonplace among historians in recent years. Daron Acemoglu and James  Robinson used them to explain Why Nations Fail and Dan Hannan thought they were central to How We Invented Freedom. Huff got there long before. Like Acemoglu and Robinson, he knows that institutions have deep historical roots in the culture from which they spring and thus can rarely be successfully transplanted into new soil (a fact that is relevant to the European Unions’s failure to assimilate the UK). And Huff identifies law as a key facet of culture that explains how institutions develop. The European university is a case in point. It owes its origins to a confluence of Roman and Canon law that allowed the creation of a walled garden for scholarship and education. Universities provided lassitude and a semblance of intellectual freedom in which medieval science could flower. Huff contrasts the madrassa, which he says was bound by Islamic law and enjoyed far less flexibility than western universities. The syllabus was constrained by the concerns of the Imams. As far as Huff is concerned, this restricted the study of astronomy and anatomy in the Islamic world. In China, education was entirely geared towards the needs of the imperial civil service, which was a self-perpetuating elite determined to preserve its influence over the emperor. The civil service was an institution that provided no space for science to thrive.

Huff is surely right to note that institutions develop from the implementation of laws, while laws themselves tend to be have religious or political roots. However, his explanation of why science arose in the west is incomplete. He seems to assume that once the necessary institution is in place, science will spring into existence of its own accord. Today’s science is so successful that it is hard to imagine why any civilisation would not develop it given half a chance. The trouble is there is nothing inevitable about modern science. It doesn’t accord with human nature and simply providing scholars with a safe space isn’t enough. Let intellectuals do as they please and you are more likely to end up with astrology and gender studies than physics and chemistry. In another book, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution, Huff tried to solve the problem by postulating a cultural artefact called ‘curiosity’. Using the reception of the telescope as a case study, he argued that the West was curious and so investigated the implications of the new discoveries telescopes revealed. Not so China and the Islamic world. Unfortunately, Huff begs the question of what ‘curiosity’ is and why the West has it. His explanation that western society is relatively open to foreign influences seems like a symptom rather than a cause of ‘curiosity’.

Many of the criticisms of Huff’s project have been based on the mistakes he inevitably makes in ranging so widely. Even though it has reached its third edition, a few of these persist in The Rise of Early Modern Science. For example, a list of Greek texts translated into Arabic includes writings on mathematics by Pythagoras and sun-centred theory by Aristarchus, despite the fact that neither of these are extant in any language. In the case of Pythagoras’s maths, it probably never existed at all. But Huff has successfully seen off his critics on more substantial questions, most notably on the prohibition of human dissection in the Islamic world and the uniqueness of western universities.
Sadly, as is so common with academic books nowadays, Cambridge University Press apparently decided not to employ the services of an editor for this third edition, leaving too much repetition and infelicitous phrasing in the final book. But overall, Huff’s sociological look at the big unanswered question in the history of science is a successful example of interdisciplinary work. That it does not provide a complete solution should not detract from its value.

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Lightning Rods and the Church

One of the many stories of the great myth of the conflict between science and religion is that the Christians tried to prevent the use of lightning rods. Whenever I asked for a reference, all I ever got is Andrew Dickson White (extract here) so I knew that there was something fishy going on. However, all serious histories were silent on the subject. I nosed around to see if there was any academic work on the question and dug up an article by IB Cohen called "Popular Prejudice against the Introduction of lightning Rods" (Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 253, pp. 393 - 440, 1952). It is rather revealing.

White is correct to say that ringing bells was a popular way to scaring off lightning from church towers. But the it was also known to be dangerous and the Church disliked the practice because it was deemed superstitious (as long ago as the seventeenth century, Cardinal Bellarmine condemned it).

The real problems that caused late adoption were two-fold. Firstly, the working of the rod was not fully understood. It had to be grounded to work, otherwise it just attracted lightning. Abbe Nollet, a French scientist and rival of Franklin, wrote a critique based on this and other misunderstandings that did have some effect on the rods use. But Cohen states that "his objections were grounded in scientific concerns."

Second, ordinary people were not convinced by scientists saying that attracting lightning and sending it into the ground was harmless. After all, lightning was scary stuff and scientists were as arrogant about popular concerns then as they are today. But, Cohen states "slowness in adopting the new invention did not proceed from ecclesiastical ban or dogma." but from local concern about whether the rod worked. In fact, even Pope Benedict XIV had been a supporter of the use of rods. St Mark's in Venice had one as early as 1766. As Cohen summarises: "Even though the ringing of church bells during lightning storms continued in Catholic Countries long after the invention of the lightning rod, it was by no means the case that the Church as an institution was opposed to the new invention."

Another myth bites the dust.

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The list of harmful books I posted a couple of weeks ago generated some heated debate but no suggestions. Certainly, I don't think we can say that no books are harmful or dangerous even if we don't actually want to ban them. I'm going to duck out of that argument and suggest a few books that have been harmful to the proper understanding of the history of science and religion. As this is my own subject, I feel better qualified to come up with some books than in the more general debate.

1. Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The best man at my wedding likes to tease me that I'm the only person who has actually read this from cover to cover. I doubt that's the case because it is riveting stuff. It is also almost completely wrong. So many anti-Christian myths began here. Christian's destroying the library of Alexandria, Eusebius's dishonesty, Christianity causing the 'Dark Ages' etc. etc. Gibbon has a lot to answer for. The combination of his enormous erudition, beautiful style, biting wit and enlightenment agenda are a potent combination.
2. Auguste Comte - Cours de Philosophie Positive. You know the story of this book already. Mankind started off fearing nature so worshipped it. Then we invented a multitude of gods which were eventually whittled down to just one. Now, we are assured, rationalism and science have replaced even that god in providing answers to our questions about nature. This leads inevitably to atheism, the final goal of religious progress. Utter tosh but so appealing to atheists as it makes them think that everything was leading to them and the rest of us are stuck somewhere in history.
3. Andrew Dickson White - The Warfare of Science and Theology. This book perfected the great myth that religion and science are in conflict. White is actually careful to aim his fire at dogmatic theology but succeeds in tarring all Christianity with his considerable brush. Most of the 'facts' in this massive work are now known to be fantasy but are still believed by many if not most people. Enjoying a new lease of life on the internet and an object lesson on how to mislead with footnotes.
4. Sir James Fraser - The Golden Bough. A considerable effort to boil all religion down to some sociological archetypes. I haven't read all of this because it is so unfeasibly enormous. Volume after volume of completely misunderstood case studies of religious belief and practice all twisted into Fraser's grand scheme. The style is again wonderful (and wonderfully politically incorrect) which leads many to believe it, including by best man!
5. Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Until about 1990 every North American history student read this book. Now they have all grown up they continue to carry it around so that the scientific revolution, another great historical myth, is the single best known event in the history of science. Meanwhile, Kuhn's next paradigm shift is eagerly awaited by every crackpot on the planet.

So, there you have it. Five books that no history student should be allowed to read ;).

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Some Comments on Neurophilosophy

I was just re-reading some sections of Neurophilosohy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain by Patricia Smith Churchland, in which she advocates eliminative materialism. This is the view that our common ways of thinking about or conceptualizing our cognitive processes -- including "beliefs", "reasoning," and even "thinking" and "conceptualizing" -- are radically mistaken and so must be entirely replaced with neurophysiological processes and terms. The old wine, which they call "folk psychology" to put it on a par with folk religion, cannot fit in the new wineskins of neurological science, and so should be discarded. I encountered some interesting statements at the end of chapter 9 of Neurophilosophy, and so reproduce it here in red font with my comments interspersed. It's kind of like a fisking from days of yore, except I don't intend any disrespect for my subject.

The prospect of transforming folk psychology as we know and love it has prompted objections, some of which I have already covered, but others of which I must consider separately here. One popular objection is that eliminative materialism is self-refuting. In order to state his position, the argument goes, the eliminativist must believe what he says, but what he says is "There really are no such states as beliefs." However, if there are no beliefs, then the eliminativist cannot believe what he says. Or if he believes what he says, then there really are beliefs. The eliminativist can expect to be taken seriously only if his claim cannot, and he thereby refutes himself.

This argument has had multiple expression through the years. C. S. Lewis's Argument from Reason; J. R. Lucas's Gödelian Argument against strong AI; Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism; etc.

What the eliminativist is fumbling to say is that folk psychology is seriously inadequate as a theory.

As we'll see shortly, claiming that folk psychology is a theory is the linchpin to the eliminativist project; you remove that and the whole structure collapses. For now I'll just point out that it's highly contentious to suggest that folk psychology constitutes a theory. Theories explain data. What the eliminativist calls folk psychology is the data itself: beliefs, concepts, chains of reasoning, etc. We directly experience these things, they are simply given. Any theory, therefore, must explain them. A theory which denied their existence, as eliminativism does, would be completely inadequate. Worse than that, it couldn't even get off the ground, since the data it would purport to explain would be much less secure as data than what the eliminativist denies. In fact, the data it seeks to explain could very well be derived from what the eliminativist denies.

Now within the confines of that very theoretical framework we are bound to describe the eliminativist as believing there are no beliefs; however, this is not because folk psychology is bound to be true, but only because we are confined within the framework the eliminativist wishes to criticize and no alternative framework is available. If the eliminativist is correct in his criticisms,

But how could he be correct in his criticisms if they are expressed in a system that is entirely corrupt? If folk psychology falls, then the specific elements of folk psychology that were used in the formulation of eliminative materialism will fall with it. Isn't this obvious?

and if the old framework is revised and replaced, then by using the new vocabulary the eliminativist's criticisms could be restated with greater sophistication and with no danger of pragmatic contradiction. (For example, the new eliminativist might declare, "I gronkify beliefs," where gronkification is a neuropsychological state defined within the mature new theory.)

This is pretty speculative on her part, but leaving that aside, translation from one system to another can only be done if both are coherent. If one of them is not, then translation would be impossible, there being either nothing to translate from or nothing to translate to. Since the eliminativist's claim is that the old system is entirely corrupt, to talk about translating it into another superior system is simply incoherent.

Churchland suggests we can have a placeholder ("gronkify") to stand for what we usually term "belief." This, allegedly, avoids the problem of saying she believes there are no beliefs without having to go through all the rigamarole of showing exactly what is happening when we say "belief." But "placeholder" is a concept within the system she's denying. I can only make sense of what she's saying if I presuppose the basic validity of folk psychology. This is true regardless of what you think the fundamental unit is: the word, the phrase, the sentence, the concept, whatever. I only know that any unit is valid if the underlying system is valid; and the eliminativist uses these units -- thus presupposes their validity -- in order to deny their validity. This is self-defeating.

The eliminativist may argue that while they're denying that there are beliefs, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., they're not denying that something is happening; only that the way we conceive or perceive what's happening is completely invalid. This reminds me of Cratylus who eventually became so convinced that language could not communicate information that he renounced it entirely and stopped speaking. However, when people got in his face and screamed at him, he would wiggle his finger, as if to say, "Something's happening." Yet the eliminative materialist is even less rational than this, since they want to communicate their claim to others, after denying the possibility of communication. It's as if Cratylus wrote books to communicate why he rejected the possibility of communicating.

In response, an eliminativist might provide a parallel, such as how what used to be thought was demonic possession is now recognized as mental illness. The description "demonic possession" was wholly incorrect, but it did pick out an actual feature of the world. Ignoring everything else about this (if it picks out an actual feature, how can it be wholly incorrect?), the problem is that it treats "belief" as if it were an interpretation of what is actually going on. This assumes, again, that folk psychology is a theory. But belief is part of the data; it is not an interpretation of something else, it's the ground level.

At any rate, the eliminativist's claim is not one of translation but of elimination; hence the name. If someone were an eliminativist about language and argued that all languages are completely invalid and must be rejected in favor of a potential future language that we might produce someday, how could he tell this to anyone? Any attempt to describe it could only be done in the very languages he said were wholly corrupt and invalid. Again: if the languages are completely invalid, then those parts of the languages used to express his claims are invalid. In other words, by making this claim about language, the person makes it impossible to tell someone who uses those languages about his theories.

Even so, I think we can just barely comprehend the claim that our language is untrustworthy and a future language will replace it because a) we know there are other languages, and so have a context in which we can put this claim; and b) while any expression of this language-eliminativism would be self-defeating, since it would be in language, it's not immediately evident that we can't think about it. Language and thought have a close and complex relationship, but there are plenty of philosophers who argue that language does not completely circumscribe our thought; we can think beyond the box of whatever language we speak (supposedly). But with the eliminative materialist this option is not available: he can't even think about, contemplate, or get any idea of what eliminative materialism means because he can only do so within the old framework that he pretends to reject.

It would be foolish to suppose folk psychology must be true because at this stage of science to criticize it implies using it. All this shows is that folk psychology is the only theory available now.

If the only available language were completely corrupt, and if people could only think in language, then they could never formulate a new and better language, because they would have no way of doing so. Any attempt could only get underway by presupposing the validity of the language in which they think and speak.

By way of analogy, consider a biologist in the early nineteenth century who wishes to criticize vitalist theory as misconceived. He suggests that there is no such thing as vital spirit and that other accounts must be found to distinguish living things from nonliving things. Consider the following fanciful defense of vitalism:

The anti-vitalist says that there is no such thing as vital spirit. This claim is self-refuting; the speaker can be expected to be taken seriously only if his claim cannot. For if the claim is true, then the speaker does not have vital spirit and must be dead. His claim is meaningful only if it is false. (Patricia S. Churchland 1981d)

The vitalist makes exactly the same mistake here as is made in the foray against the eliminativist.

The reference is to Churchland's short article "Is Determinism Self-Refuting?" in Mind 90 (new series, 1981), a response to Karl Popper's version of the argument that determinism is self-defeating (Popper responded in a short article of his own with the same title in Mind 92, 1983). Churchland's counter-argument that such arguments beg the question has been repeated many times in the literature. Basically, the claim is that the vitalist implicitly presupposes that vitalism is a necessary condition of asserting anything, and then applies this presupposition of vitalism to the anti-vitalist position, discovering unsurprisingly that it renders it self-defeating. Thus he begs the question: he presupposes the truth of his position in order to argue against a contrary position. Essentially, the vitalist ignores the very claim that the anti-vitalist is making, and applies a standard that the anti-vitalist would obviously reject. All the anti-vitalist has to do is deny the implicit presupposition that vitalism is a necessary condition of assertion.

There are several things one could say in response to this, but I'll just focus on three: first, the anti-eliminativist argument and the anti-vitalist argument do not seem parallel. The vitalist is not claiming to directly perceive vital spirits, he perceives that he is alive and posits a vital spirit as an explanation of this datum. The anti-vitalist does not deny the datum, only the interpretation. The eliminativist, however, is claiming that beliefs, concepts, ideas, thoughts, chains of reasoning, etc., are all bogus. Since we directly perceive beliefs, ideas, thoughts, et al., he is therefore not challenging an interpretation but denying the given data. The parallel would be (as Lynne Rudder Baker argued in Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism) an anti-vitalist who denied that he is alive. So, contrary to Churchland's claim here, these arguments do not commit "exactly the same mistake."

Now I think the eliminativist would respond by pointing to Quine and arguing that the distinction between data and theory has been shown to be artificial. I would respond that while the border country may be difficult to define clearly, to suggest that there simply is no raw data -- ever -- is absurd. We do directly experience some things, and if your worldview cannot account for that, your worldview is deficient. The point of worldviews, after all, is to account for varying facts. If the only way you can make your worldview work is to deny the most basic and universal facts, it doesn't merely fail: it's unworthy of being taken seriously by anyone.

Eliminativists see folk psychology as being on a par with geocentrism, and their radical-new-conception-that-consists-almost-entirely-of-placeholders as on a par with heliocentrism. But their position is much more extreme than this. A sidereal-eliminativist would deny that the stars exist; more basically, would deny that there are lights in the sky. If people pointed up to the night sky and said, "But I see lights right there," our sidereal-eliminativist would respond, "No, you don't. Once we complete a full stellar theory, we will see that these lights do not exist. It seems strange, but trust me: I'm a philosopher."

Second, question-begging is only a fallacy within the framework of the folk psychology that the eliminativist is claiming to reject. If the whole framework is bogus, why would this particular element be valid? In order for this objection to take hold, the eliminativist has to grant to his opponent the validity of folk psychology; but this obviates his entire claim, that folk psychology is not valid.

Third, it seems to me that Churchland's counter-argument would apply to any claim that something is self-defeating. For example, suppose I scream at the top of my lungs, "I ALWAYS SPEAK SOFTLY!" Someone tells me that my claim is self-defeating, since I did not say it softly. I then respond, "That begs the question. My whole claim, after all, is that I always speak softly. You're ignoring what I'm actually saying and applying a standard to my statement that I reject, namely, the standard that I don't always speak softly. I simply reject that claim, as my statement should make clear." Isn't it obvious that such a response doesn't work? Isn't it obvious that my claim is self-defeating? The person who tells me my claim is self-defeating is not assuming that my asserted claim is false, he's taking it as an actual statement, applying what it says to itself, and then pointing out that it undercuts its own presentation. That's how any claim that something is self-defeating works.

What this shows is that the anti-eliminativist's argument that eliminativism is self-defeating is logically prior to the eliminativist's counter-argument that the anti-eliminativist is begging the question. In order to say that the eliminativist's claim is self-defeating, he has to take what the eliminativist says, apply it to the eliminativist's claim itself, and then show that, if we assume the eliminativist's claims are true or valid or whatever, then the eliminativist's claims are not true or valid or whatever. The counter-response (that he is assuming the eliminativist's claim is false by applying standards to it that it denies) ignores the fact the eliminativist is presupposing the standards he claims to reject. That's the point: his position could only be valid if he hasn't really rejected the framework he says he has rejected. It's built upon the foundation of what he's dismissed as bogus.

He misidentifies the unique availability of a theory with the truth of the theory. I suspect that any grand-scale criticism of a deeply entrenched, broadly encompassing theory will seem to have a self-refuting flavor so long as no replacement theory is available.

Even if there were an available replacement theory, the grand-scale criticism could never be stated within the theory being criticized, since it would necessarily presuppose the categories of the theory being rejected as fallacious.

The reason is this: the available theory specifies not only what counts as an explanation but also the explananda themselves. That is, the phenomena that need explaining are specified in the vocabulary of the available theory (for example, the turning of the crystal spheres, the possession by demons, the transfer of caloric, the nature of consciousness).

Again, we are told that the explananda are not given but are "in the vocabulary of the available theory." That is, they are interpretations, part of an overarching theory which can therefore be dismissed. But if they're actually raw data, the ground level, that needs to be explained, eliminative materialism falls to the ground, since it doesn't explain them; it explains them away.

To tender sweeping criticisms of the entire old theory while still within its framework will therefore typically sound odd. But odd or not, such criticism nonetheless serves an essential role in steering a theory into readiness for revision.

Look, odd claims can be true. Reality is odd. But my conception of what it means to be "odd" is a part of the folk psychology framework that Churchland says she rejects. Outside of that, I can't make any sense of what she's saying; and that's the crux of the issue. If I'm in the throes of a false universal system, I can never get out of it to a better system, because any reason or ground for getting out of it would form a part of the system that I want to reject. Any chain of argument away from it would only be valid within that system; and once that system is rejected, the argument no longer holds, and I no longer have a reason for leaving the system. Moreover, this applies to everyone, including Patricia Churchland. How could evidence, reason, and argument have persuaded her to abandon folk psychology if evidence, reason, and argument are only valid within the confines of folk psychology? She's borrowing folk psychology's tools and mortar in order to construct an edifice that denies the existence of its own foundation and materiel.

Finally, it may be objected that the sentential paradigm will survive, whatever the theoretical revolutions and however thorough our understanding of the brain, because it is useful and natural and forms the nexus of our moral conceptions concerning responsibility, praise, and blame. By way of reply, it should first be mentioned that the issue now concerns a prediction about what will in fact be the social outcome of a theoretical revolution, and my inclination is to back off from making predictions about such matters.

I read this, and then my wife called from the other room, "What's so funny?" because, yes, I was laughing out loud. Churchland doesn't make predictions about such matters? Seriously? I don't mean any disrespect to her, but her whole position is a radical, gratuitous prediction of what science might discover someday, given a very particular (and implausible) set of preconditions. Eliminative materialism assumes a naïve scientific realism and extends into the future (i.e. predicts) what it might lead to. The fact that it would lead us to reject any kind of scientific realism is a small price to pay for ... what exactly? Truth? Logical consistency? Reason? These are all a part of the system she says she rejects.

Nevertheless, it may be useful to consider that objections cut from the same cloth were made on behalf of the geocentric theory of the universe and the creationist theory of man's origins. These theories were defended on grounds that they were useful and natural and were crucial elements in Christian doctrine. If the geocentric theory was wrong, if the creationist story was wrong, then crucial sections of the Bible could not be literally true and man's conception of himself and his place in the universe would be changed.

There's a partial truth here, but as usual, it's being distorted. The geocentric theory of the universe was a crucial element in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic astronomy -- that is, the science of the day -- and Christians looked for passages in the Bible to accommodate it, such as "The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved" (1 Chronicles 16:30; Psalm 93:1; 96:10; cf. Psalm 104:5). But, I'm sorry, these aren't "crucial sections of the Bible"; no doctrine is dependent on them, no theology is called into question by recognizing that their perspective is the surface of the earth rather than somewhere out in space looking down at the earth. As for the geocentric model in general, the center of the universe was considered the least prestigious, the least honorable, location therein; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Anyone who has studied ancient and medieval cosmology knows this. I wrote about this recently here, and you can read an excellent essay on it by Dennis Danielson, a literary historian, here.

The doctrine of creation, however, is crucial, and modern scientific discoveries have ruled out certain interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2. However, Churchland has erred if she thinks those interpretations exhaust traditional Christian thought on the issue. Historically, Christians have often understood the creation narratives metaphorically. Origen, one of the most important Church Fathers from the second and third centuries, went so far as to ridicule people who thought they referred to actual events (De Principiis 4:1:16). The point being that Christian doctrine has always left plenty of room for such interpretations, and modern scientific discoveries don't touch them. Regarding evolution in particular, I would just point out that many Church Fathers and medieval theologians (such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Bonaventure, etc.) held the doctrine of rationes seminales according to which God created everything in "seed" form which then developed accordingly. Since such views were widely accepted within Christianity a millennium and a half before Darwin, I just don't see much difficulty here.

At any rate, I think Churchland's reference to these issues reveals something more about her presuppositions and motivations, and those of eliminative materialists in general. She's not just assuming a naïve scientific realism, she's presupposing the conflict thesis, the view that science and religion (or at least science and Christianity) are at war, and science is winning. She's extending into the future (predicting) what the end result of this war will be. The biggest problem with this is that the conflict thesis is almost completely rejected by historians of science. It is a wildly inaccurate view of how science and Christianity have interacted in history. So not only is her position self-defeating, not only is it implausible in the extreme, it's actually based on a discarded theory about the historical interaction between science and Christianity.

The new physics and the new biology each did, in some degree, undermine the power of the Christian church and naturalize man's understanding of himself and the universe.

Well, again, I think there's a partial truth here. The rejection of geocentrism did certainly undermine the power of the Catholic church to some extent. I would reiterate, though, that it failed to undermine any serious doctrinal issue. Traditionally, Christians had accommodated Ptolemy's geocentric model into their hamartiology or doctrine of sin: what was sinful was heavy and fell towards the center; what was light was holy and moved up into the heavens. This is also why they thought the earth didn't move and the heavens did: what was heavy/sinful didn't move and what was light/holy did. When the heliocentric system was presented it was seen as upgrading the earth to the status of a heavenly object and as downgrading the sun (in many ways the source of life, so it could have been perceived as an affront) to the center. Now if this link between geocentrism and the Christian doctrine of sin was thought to be an inextricable link, even mistakenly so, rather than borne out of an attempt to accommodate the science of the day, heliocentrism could have been perceived as contradicting something important to man's self-conception. But as far as I can tell this was not the case. I could certainly be wrong, but what I've read about this focused on the idea that heliocentrism challenged the Catholic church's authority by questioning something it had made a pronouncement on; not to mention the fact that the staunch defenses of geocentrism were made by the scientists on scientific grounds rather than theologians on theological grounds.

But perhaps that was not a bad thing. At a minimum it is worth considering whether transformations in our moral conceptions to adhere more closely to the discovered facts of brain function might be no bad thing as well. Whether this is so will be a complex matter about which I feel ignorant, but it is certainly not a closed matter. It is at least conceivable that our moral and legal institutions will be seen by future generations to be as backward, superstitious, and primitive as we now see the Christian church's doctrine of past centuries concerning the moral significance of disease and the moral property of anesthesia, immunization, and contraception (White 1896).

Yes, she's actually referencing Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a work so thoroughly rejected by historians of science that anyone should be embarassed to base any argument on it at all. It has repeatedly been shown to be nothing more than a work of propaganda. "The moral property of anesthesia" refers to the claim that using anesthesia to relieve the pains of childbirth nullified the curse of Eve which was God's punishment on humanity because of the Fall, and therefore set man up against God. Except no such objection was raised; Andrew Dickson White just made it up. Similarly, the moral significance of disease and immunization refers to the claim that Pope Leo XII condemned vaccinations because disease was a righteous punishment from God. Of course, Leo never said or wrote any such thing, nor has any other pope, it's a complete fabrication.

The only claim Churchland refers to that has any validity is contraception, since some Christians reject birth control. However, only the Catholic church does this; Protestant and Orthodox churches generally do not. And the Catholic church's stance is not some knee-jerk reaction, it is a well thought-out position, as exemplified by the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. This doesn't mean we have to agree with it (I don't), but we should at least be thoughtful about it.

Once again we see that the eliminative materialist program is motivated by a demonstrably false theory of the historical relationship between science and Christianity. That Churchland would be so uncritical about Andrew Dickson White, that she would have such blind faith in a discarded theory about the history of science, while simultaneously being hyper-critical of the most basic and obvious things about ourselves and the world, shows that she and her fellow eliminativists are not applying the same standards to their own position that they apply to those they dislike. And how could they? The standards they apply to other positions are basically to completely reject them, turn away, and never look back. It doesn't really matter what the truth is, they'll try to make reality conform to their theory rather than the other way around. Except "truth," "reality," "theory," and everything else are just parts of the washed-up theory of folk psychology. They only have to accept them when they want to.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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God's Philosophers - A Review

You have put a builder [Archimedes] before Aristotle who was no less knowledgable in these arts!...After Archimedes, you have put Euclid as if the light after the lantern!'

Julius Caeser Scalinger

In the 16th century, the humanist writer Julius Caesar Scaliger published what would later be described as ‘the most vitriolic book review in the annals of literature’, a tirade against Jerome Cardan’s ‘On Subtlety’. It was over 900 pages in total - twice the length of the book it was reviewing - and it attacked Cardan vehemently for almost every aspect of the book. When Scaliger received no reply from Cardin he managed to convince himself that his efforts had caused his literary opponent to die of shame and decided to write him a glowing epitaph. According to the obituary, the late Cardan had been ‘a consummate master of the humane letter’, ‘a great man indeed’ gushed Scalinger. One can only imagine his horror when he found out Cardan was still alive and well and doubtless wondering why his opponant had so quickly changed his tune. This is just one of many entertaining anecdotes in the pages of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers which I chuckled over as I read through it. Hence I will not be giving the author the Scaliger treatment, not least because it’s also one of the best narrative histories I have read in a long time.

God’s Philosophers begins with the famous quote by Issac Newton, that his achievements had only been possible because he was ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (in keeping with the tone of the book, we learn that it was actually Bernard of Chartres who said this first in the 12th century). In contrast the Humanists of the ‘Renaissance’ era felt they were squatting on the shoulders of intellectual midgets; a menagerie of long winded medieval ‘logic choppers’ and ‘wordmongers’ who wrote in ‘barbaric’ Latin and had failed to properly understand the writings of the ancients. This scorn of their forebears began the longstanding myth that the Medieval period constituted an age of darkness and ignorance, a narrative which was adopted wholeheartedly in Enlightenment France and disseminated in the late 19th Century by the infamous Andrew Dickson White. This impression of the Middle Ages remains alive and well today despite having been almost overwhelmingly discredited in the academic community. For example, leading historian of science Edward Grant laments that ‘the medieval period in Western Europe has been much underestimated and maligned, almost as if fate had chosen it as history’s scapegoat’. Another historian, David Lindberg bemoans the fact that ‘the ignorance and degradation of the Middle Ages has become a kind of article of faith among the general public, achieving the status of invulnerability merely by virtue of endless repetition’. Hannam’s objective has been to reverse this trend by bringing the fruits of modern scholarship in the history of science to a wider audience and demonstrating that the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages contributed directly to the achievements of modern science.

In the popular imagination, the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 500 to the arrival of the millennium in the year 1000 is a superb candidate for a Dark Age. Yet Hannam shows – by reference to the changes which took place in his home village of Otham - that significant technological progress took place. Much of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome was cut off from Western Europe, but from the ruin of the Empire there gradually arose a society sustained by improved agricultural techniques and powered by advances in machinery; the horse collar, three field crop rotation and the widespread use of water and tidal mills would ensure that Europe could support more people than ever before.

As intellectual culture was rekindled in the West on the wave of a population explosion and increased stability, a great translation movement emerged which would bring the fruits of Classical learning to Europe through the works of Arab natural philosophers. Before this Medieval intellectuals, such as William of Conches, Adelard of Bath and ‘the mathematical Pope’, Gerbert of Aurilliac, had to make do on scraps from the ill fated Boethius and a few other authors. As the translated texts arrived from Spain and the Mediterranean, they were greedily absorbed into the medieval university; a type of legally autonomous corporation which could foster higher learning and carve out privileges from both secular rulers and the Church. The volatile and pugnacious Peter Abelard had championed logic in his teaching; and, due to a series of calamities and quarrels, he ended up being nocturnally castrated, sentenced to perpetual silence and confined to a monastery. Upon his death, his ideas quickly dominated Christian scholarship. Natural philosophy would also gain an exalted status in the curriculum as the ‘handmaiden’ of theology; a guide to better preaching and a tool to combat the growing problem of heresy.

Yet the philosophy of the ancients was not straightforwardly compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Hannam is strong at outlining these issues and the subsequent efforts of Albert the Great and the more famous Thomas Aquinas to assimilate the new learning into a suitable framework. This came with the publication of the Summa Theologiae which was ‘such a successful amalgamation of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine that some Catholics have since failed to distinguish between the two’. Yet it was the conservative backlash represented by the condemnations of 1277 which would delineate the boundaries between natural philosophy and theology and explore non Aristotelian physical and cosmological alternatives.

By this time, an international intelligentsia of scholars had emerged using the common language of Latin. They were able to enjoy considerable freedom under the cultural unity and political fragmentation of the period. This section of God’s Philosophers was perhaps the most enlightening, not least because so many of these figures remain undeservedly unknown or misunderstood. A chapter is devoted to demonstrating the syllabus of the medieval university through the life of Richard of Wallingford, a figure who perfected the mechanical clock and ‘left a mechanical legacy without equal’. Peter the Pilgrim became the first to realise that magnets have polarity (a critical insight for medieval navigation). Following in the footsteps of Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon promulgated a strong rhetoric of experiment and provided a powerful synthesis of optical theory. However, as Hannam shows, he has been mis-portrayed as a modern thinker. The principle motivation for his promotion of the sciences appears to have been his belief that the apocalypse was imminent and that the Jews and Arabs would have to be quickly converted to the true faith before the anti-Christ and his minions showed up (one can compare this to the present day belief of Richard Dawkins that the natural sciences must be used to convert everyone to atheism before the Christian fundamentalists and the Islamists bring on the apocalypse).

In the Fourteenth Century, a series of remarkable individuals emerged who would propel Medieval natural philosophy beyond the achievements of the ancients, combining mathematics and physics in ways that had not been achieved before. The setting for these scholars were the quadrangles of Merton College. Thomas Bradwardine, later Archbishop of Canterbury, tried to establish a formula to properly describe Aristotle’s laws of motion with the first use of a logarithm. Ultimately Aristotle’s laws of motion were completely wrong, but Bradwardine had made an important step forward. Both he and the talented mathematician Richard Swineshead adopted thought experiments and tried to think through the mathematics. William Heytesbury is credited with the first use of the mean speed theorem (though neither he nor his contemporaries had any idea of its immense significance).

Yet it would be Paris, not Oxford which would see ‘the apogee of Medieval Science’ as the ideas of the Merton calculators crossed the channel. It was the rector of the University of Paris, John Buridan, who rejected Aristotelian ideas concerning violent motion. In its place he formulated the concept of impetus and used it to describe how the planets keep moving in their orbits. He also came close to the modern principle of inertia. Perhaps inspired by Bradwardine, Buridan also compared the universe to a giant clock or ‘world machine’ which the creator had wound up, a forerunner of the later mechanical philosophy. One of the issues considered by Buridan was the possible rotation of the earth. This was an idea taken further by his pupil, the brilliant Nicole Oresme who refuted most of the objections to a moving earth, but in the end went with the common sense approach contained in Aristotle and the Bible. His other major achievement was to prove the mean speed theorem in graphical form. This work would spread throughout Europe before the Black Death swept in and decimated the intellectual culture of Europe.

The fifteenth century saw Europe begin to regain it’s poise and the arrival of Nicholas of Cusa, a Cardinal who saw clearly the need for effective measurement in natural philosophy and whose cosmological speculations seem remarkably pertinent. It also saw the emergence of the humanist movement and their efforts to reintroduce ancient Greek into Europe; although as Hannam shows, they were also ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ seeking to ‘recapture an imaginary past’ who destroyed vast numbers of manuscripts and discarded many of the advances made in the Medieval period. Luckily the onset of printing ensured that the natural philosophy would reach the next generation of scholars, even as it was being systematically eliminated from the universities.

God’s Philosophers concludes with a broader sweep through the 16th century to show how Copernicus, Galileo and others used the achievements of the Middle Ages in their work. The term Renaissance after all, was coined partly to contrast the ‘rebirth’ of culture with medieval ‘stagnation’; although as Hannam points out, the Renaissance was ‘as much an age of faith as the Middle Ages and, if anything, more superstitious and violent’. Magical thinking became widespread and astrology and alchemy loomed large in the thought of figures like Jerome Cardan, John Dee and Paracelsus, or to give his full name, Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. In the case of Cardan, this led to an ill-advised attempt to draw up a horoscope of Christ. Their efforts led to advances in algeba, astronomy and new ideas of medicine which challenged the Galenic tradition. Human dissection emerged in the Medieval period (Hannam shows the Church never banned it, in stark contrast to the taboos in effect in much of classical antiquity). Vesalius attempted to perfect the work of Galen with his ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’ but laid the groundwork for his overthrow. It would be William Harvey who would demonstrate the circulation of the blood and seriously weaken the Galenic edifice. The reader of God’s philosophers may well, as I did, breathe a sigh of relief that things in medicine have moved on. Medical instruction manuals of the period advice doctors to always say that the patient is sick, since if he recovers ‘you will be praised more for your skill’ and if he dies ‘his friends will testify that you had given him up’ (although with NHS cut backs on the way, perhaps this might be revived).

Elsewhere the towering figures of Ptolemy and Aristotle were being severely questioned. Both Peurbach and Regiomontanus had realised that Ptolomy’s astronomical system, with its complex geometry and clumsy equant had serious problems, yet it gave undeniably precise predictions. It would be the Polish clergyman Nicholas Copernicus who would defy expert opinion and propose a heliocentric universe. His motivation for placing the sun at the centre of the universe may have sprung from occult theories about the sun, but his arguments for the rotation of the earth come straight from John Buridan and find their echoes in Nicholas of Cusa. Unsurprisingly, Copernicus was a product of the intellectual culture of the time, although he has so often been portrayed as a lone genius defying all that had gone before.

Another figure often depicted as marking a break from the past is Galileo Galilei, yet as Hannam points out ‘Discourses on the New Sciences’ represents ‘the culmination of four centuries of work by medieval mathematicians and natural philosophers’. In his discussion of free fall, Galileo seems to be familiar with the work of the Merton Calculators and reproduces the conclusions of Oresme and William of Heytesbury. His discussion of Projectile Motion builds on the conclusions of Buridan, Tartaglia and Cardan. His observations on falling objects repeat those made a thousand years earlier by the Byzantine scholar John Philoponus and more recently by Simon Stevin. Galileo’s triumph was to produce an erudite synthesis of what had gone before and provide powerful experimental demonstrations. Similarly his contemporary Johannes Kepler was able to build upon the European Medieval tradition and solve two of the greatest problems of the Middle Ages, the movement of the planets and the explanation of vision.

Modern science emerged as the triumph of three civilizations; Greek, Arab and Latin Christian, yet the last of these is so often left out of the narrative. God’s Philosophers restores the credit the medieval period deserves and has forced me to revise my belief that there was something which could justly be called a ‘scientific revolution’ in the Early Modern period. Hannam’s book persuasively argues for continuities and shows how the achievements of Keplar, Copernicus, Galileo and others were deeply rooted in the intellectual culture which had preceded them. The Middle Ages displayed none of the ‘general decay and degeneracy’ and ‘complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences' which Condorcet and Voltaire unjustly derided it for, rather it prepared the ground for the intellectual successes which would follow.

Yet despite the stirring narrative outlined in God’s Philosophers some will doubtless maintain there was a dark age in Western Europe from 500AD to around 1250 when not very much happened in the intellectual culture of the West. The best course of action in response to this would be to cast the blighters adrift in the ruins of a collapsed civilisation with bloodthirsty barbarian raiders all around them and only a copy of Bill Brysons 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' with which to rebuild society. Then perhaps we will hear no more loose talk about ‘poor benighted Medievals’.

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Giordano Bruno - Martyr for Science and Reason

But the new truth could not be concealed; it could neither be
laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was entrapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the new truth lived on.

Andrew Dickson White

It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

Giordano Bruno

A couple of days ago I had the misfortune of watching a channel 4 documentary entitled ‘God and the Scientists’, which was largely a garbled version of the 19th century ‘conflict thesis. The show, which was presented by Colin Blakemore, regurgitated the myth that Giordano Bruno was burned because of his support of the Copernican model. The truth is he really was a heretic in the traditional sense and was burned for his religious beliefs after a long drawn out trial in 1600. It was unfortunate that the Copernican model had been promoted by Bruno as a component of his worldview as it tainted the theory as heretical.

Bruno was a follower of a movement called Hermetism, which was a cult that based its beliefs on documents which were thought to have originated in Egypt at the time of Moses. These writings were linked with the teaching of the Egyptian God Thoth, the God of learning and had arrived in Italy from Macedonia in the 1460s. To followers of this cult, Thoth was known as Hermes Trismegitus, or Hermes the thrice great. The Egyptians worshipped the sun and it is possible Nicolaus Copernicus himself was influenced by Hermetism to put the sun at the centre of the universe. For instance, he wrote in De revolutionibus that:

At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. [Hermes] the Thrice Greatest labels it a visible god, and Sophocles' Electra, the all-seeing.

The scriptures of Hermetism were later found not to have originated from ancient Egypt at all (it was discovered in 1614 that they were written long after the arrival of the Christian era), but to believers in the fifteenth century, they were thought to predate the birth of Christ. Subscribers to Hermeticism included such high profile figures as Phillip II of Spain, and the writings were generally tolerated by the Catholic Church. Bruno’s ‘dangerous idea’ was to take the view that the Egyptian religion was the true faith and that the church should return to these old ways; which they were none too pleased about.

As it transpired, Bruno had something of a talent for stirring up trouble. He joined the Dominican order in 1565 but was expelled in 1576 for defending the Arian heresy and possessing a heavily annotated copy of Erasmus’s works. Having joined the Calvinists in Geneva, Bruno published an attack on the work of Antoine de la Faye, a distinguished professor. This did not go down well and he was arrested and forced to leave for Paris. In France he enjoyed the patronage of some powerful admirers, winning fame for his theological lectures and his amazing feats of memory, which were based on his elaborate system of mnemonics.

Following this he moved to England and became acquainted with arch enemies of the church such as Philip Sidney and John Dee. Having managed to make so many enemies in England that he was forced to take refuge in the French embassy, he left for Paris and then, finding the situation there had deteriorated, he moved to Germany. Despite a run in with the Lutherans, he was able to produce several Latin works on magic and the composition of signs, images and ideas. At the Frankfurt book fair he ran into Giovanni Mocenigo who had heard of his feats of memory and told him to apply for the professorship of mathematics at Padua. Unfortunately, having applied for this post, he lost out to a certain Galileo Galilei. Mocenigo invited him to Venice to act as an in-house memory tutor, but sadly Bruno’s personality proved too difficult. Mocenigo was not only unhappy with Bruno’s teaching; he also decided to denounce him to the Venetian inquisition. After being handed over to the Roman inquisition and a long imprisonment, Bruno was finally condemned on then specific charges of Arianism and for carrying out occult practices. As the work of Frances Yates in the 1970s showed, far from being a martyr for science, Bruno was a martyr for magic. The full list of charges were as follows:

Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers. Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation. Holding erroneous opinions about Christ. Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass. Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity. Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes. Dealing in magics and divination. Denying the Virginity of Mary.

Bruno's fate was tragic and especially harsh by modern standard. To some extent he brought it upon himself since he was given every opportunity to recant, which was one reason why he was held for nearly a decade before being condemned. During his earlier life, his wanderings appear to have had less to do with his being hounded by the Inquisition as it did with his own extremely difficult personality. While Bruno was successful at finding powerful patrons to shelter him, he invariably did something to alienate and outrage them, usually fairly quickly after entering their service. He had an outstanding talent for repeatedly failing to act in his own best interests and continually managing to wriggle out of favourable circumstances.

There is no evidence that his support for Copernicanism featured in the trial at all, but Bruno was a keen advocate of the sun centred universe because it fitted so well with the Egyptian view of the world. He also enthusiastically espoused Thomas Digges’s idea that the universe is filled with an infinite array of stars; each one like the sun and that there must be life elsewhere in the universe. The theme of his 'On the Infinite Universe and Worlds' is not Copernicanism, of which he had a rather flawed technical understanding, but pantheism, a theme also developed in his 'On Shadows of Ideas', and which would come to influence Baruch Spinoza. It was his personal cosmology which informed his espousal of Copernicus, not the other way around. Bruno and his trial made a big splash at the time and all his ideas were tarred with the same brush. It is possible if it hadn’t been for Bruno, Copernicanism would not have made such a splash with the authorities and Galileo might not have been persecuted.

How to get burned by the Inquisition
(a handy checklist)

1) Live during the Reformation period when hysteria about reformers and heretics is at its height.

2) Read some ancient Egyptian mysticism and try to pass it off as the true religion. Put forward some controversial ideas, for example that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.

3) Move countries and ingratiate yourself with a range of rich benefactors, including arch enemies of the Catholic Church.

4) Piss them all off and get chased out of a succession of countries by denouncing your opponents in print and getting into trivial arguments.

5) Move back to Italy where the Inquisition can actually get at you

6) Annoy your employer so much he hands you in to the authorities

7) Refuse to recant in full. Keep this up for 7 years.

8) Success!. Prepare to be hailed as a ‘Martyr for Science and Reason’ in an historically sub-literate Channel 4 Documentary series.

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