The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology
The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology CRAIG MArtIN* 1 . the divide between the prominence of final causes inA ristotelian natural phi- losophy and the rejection or severe limitation of final causation as an acceptable explanation of the natural world by figures such as Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza during the seventeenth century has been considered a distinguishing mark between pre-modern and modern science.1 Admittedly, proponents of the mechanical and corpuscular philosophies of the seventeenth century were not necessarily stark opponents of teleology. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle endorsed teleology, Leibniz embraced entelechies, and they creep into Descartes’s natural philoso- phy, despite his adamant attempts to eliminate them.2 Nonetheless, critiques of ends in natural philosophy resonated throughout seventeenth-century natural philosophy and beyond. Enlightenment figures such as Jean le Rond D’Alembert ridiculed the use of teleology to explain the natural world.3 Dennis Des Chene, 1F. Bacon, De augmentis scientiis, in Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London: Longman, 1857), 1:571; R. Descartes, Principia philosophiae I.28, in Œuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tan- nery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), 8-1:15; B. Spinoza, Appendix to Ethics I, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. and ed. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 439. For the importance of the rejection of final causes in the historiography of the Scientific Revolution, see Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 7–8; Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 28–30. For an overview of the Scientific Revo- lution and scholastic views of teleology see Monte Ransome Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23–30.
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