nicknicknicknick reviewed Heretics! by Steven M. Nadler
Review of 'Heretics!' on Goodreads
4 stars
1) “Rome, 1600 - The 17th century did not start out well for philosophy. Giordano Bruno had been teaching that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and that the stars were suns with planets orbiting them. His theological and political views were also highly unorthodox. He was declared a heretic by the Roman Inquisition and sentenced to death. On February 17, 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake.”
2) “With the mechanical philosophy, Descartes would explain everything in the terrestrial and celestial realms in terms familiar from everyday experience.
‘All you need are matter and motion, little particles moving other particles. Even our own bodies are just like machines.’
Descartes recognized, however, that he was skipping an important philosophical step.
‘Is science even possible? How can I know that I can know if I don’t know what it …
1) “Rome, 1600 - The 17th century did not start out well for philosophy. Giordano Bruno had been teaching that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and that the stars were suns with planets orbiting them. His theological and political views were also highly unorthodox. He was declared a heretic by the Roman Inquisition and sentenced to death. On February 17, 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake.”
2) “With the mechanical philosophy, Descartes would explain everything in the terrestrial and celestial realms in terms familiar from everyday experience.
‘All you need are matter and motion, little particles moving other particles. Even our own bodies are just like machines.’
Descartes recognized, however, that he was skipping an important philosophical step.
‘Is science even possible? How can I know that I can know if I don’t know what it is to know?’
‘I think you’ve had enough to drink.’”
3) “In the 1660s, Spinoza supported himself by lens-grinding and worked on his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics. His ideas on God, morality, and religion were extremely radical — and, in the eyes of contemporaries, highly disturbing. According to Spinoza, there is no such thing as a transcendent, providential God — the supernatural agent of the Abrahamic religions. God is Nature.
‘God or nature, it’s the same thing — the one infinite and necessarily existing substance. Everything else is ‘in’ God or nature as a ‘mode’ or property.”
4) “[Newton’s] preferred stance was agnosticism.
‘How the attractions of gravity, magnetism, and electricity may be performed, I do not know.'
He did not want to engage in ‘hypothesizing’ about hidden causes.
‘Hypotheses non fingo.’
Newton was reluctant to offer an explanation of why bodies attract each other by postulating some unverifiable causal mechanism.
‘Let Descartes and Leibniz play that game. I have better things to do.’
‘What? You don’t like my vortices?’
‘No, I don’t. There is no empirical evidence to support such metaphysical speculations. Whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis, and such speculations, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, have no place in experimental philosophy.’”
