Descartes aimed for an objective science, not the science of the scholastics. And that meant, especially, the deletion of final cause from science: “The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in Physics.”
“Cause” is reduced to efficient cause. Purposes and ends might be nice for morals and literature. But they are not scientific, not knowledge strictly speaking.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
