Transversal's Duhem issue

Transversal's issue dedicated to Duhem has been released; it's open-access (full issue PDF):

“Dossier Pierre Duhem.” Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, no. 2 (2017). https://www.historiographyofscience.org/index.php/transversal/issue/view/6.

No 2 (2017)

Dossier Pierre Duhem

Pierre Duhem’s Philosophy and History of Science

Full Issue

View or download the full issue

PDF

Table of Contents

From the Editors

Historiography of Science: The Link between History and Philosophy in Understanding Science Mauro L. Condé, Marlon Salomon

PDF 01

Dossiers (Issue-specific topics)

Introduction Fábio Rodrigo Leite, Jean-François Stoffel

PDF 03

Duhem’s Analysis of Newtonian Method and the Logical Priority of Physics over Metaphysics Eduardo Salles de Oliveira Barra, Ricardo Batista dos Santos

PDF 07

The French Roots of Duhem’s early Historiography and Epistemology Stefano Bordoni

PDF 20

Duhem’s Critical Analysis of Mechanicism and his Defense of a Formal Conception of Theoretical Physics José R. N. Chiappin, Cássio Costa Laranjeiras

PDF 36

Anti-Scepticism and Epistemic Humility in Pierre Duhem’s Philosophy of Science Marie Gueguen, Stathis Psillos

PDF 54

Duhem: Images of Science, Historical Continuity, and the First Crisis in Physics Michael Liston

PDF 73

Duhem in Pre-War Italian Philosophy: The Reasons of an Absence Roberto Maiocchi

PDF 85

Was Pierre Duhem an Esprit de finesse? Víctor Manuel Hernández

PDF 93

Was Duhem Justified in not Distinguishing Between Physical and Chemical Atomism? Paul Needham

PDF 108

Bon sens and noûs Roberto Estrada Olguin

PDF 112

Duhem’s Legacy for the Change in the Historiography of Science: An Analysis Based on Kuhn’s Writings Amélia Oliveira

PDF 127

Poincaré and Duhem: Resonances in their First Epistemological Reflections João Príncipe

PDF 140

Dossier - Book Reviews

Pierre Duhem: Between Physics and Metaphysics Dámian Islas Mondragon

PDF 157

The New French Edition of Pierre Duhem’s The Aim and Structure of the Physical Theory Jean-François Stoffel

PDF 160

When Historiography Met Epistemology Jean-François Stoffel

PDF 163

Articles

A Development of the Principle of Virtual Laws and its Conceptual Framework in Mechanics as Fundamental Relationship between Physics and Mathematics Raffaele Pisano

PDF 166

Michael Scot and the Four Rainbows Tony Scott

PDF 204

Galileo and the Medici: Post-Renaissance Patronage or Post-Modern Historiography Michael Segre

PDF 226

Interviews

Interview: Helge Kragh Gustavo Rodrigues Rocha, Helge Kragh

PDF 233

Book Reviews

Galileo as a Critic of the Arts Hallhane Machado

PDF 238

A Contribution to the Newtonian Scholarship: The “Jesuit Edition” of Isaac Newton’s Principia, a research in progress by Paolo Bussotti and Raffaele Pisano Gustavo Rodrigues Rocha

PDF 242

Neo-Pythagoreanism

Here is the exchange between my friend who is interested in Duhem:

this comes from a recent article my "Duhem" Google alert found for me:

Babette Babich, “Heidegger’s Jews: Inclusion/Exclusion and Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 133–56, doi:10.1080/00071773.2016.1139927.

Babich, as fn. #62 says, is a student of Lonergan.

Here's where he discusses Duhem, ending with an interesting observation. I haven't read Duhem's La science allemande in its entirety; just the part I sent you regarding Einstein and the "geometric/'mathematical' mind."

By contrast, especially for those of us up on our Laruelle or our Stiegler or Meillassoux or our Simondon, and even in conjunction with the present theme, thinking of identities and differences, thinking of Heidegger and his Jews in a French context, who reads Pierre Duhem, author of the posthumous German Science?⁵⁰ Have we today – even those of us interested, as I am interested, in the history and philosophy and sociology of science – any political geography of theory in science in connection to or with hermeneutic reflection? In connection to Heidegger, ah, yes, but not with respect to questioning science much less technology? We leave to those in power their game plan, and we do so without remainder. Critical theory has thus managed not to be critical for years.

Where Duhem in 1916 criticizes the German turn of mind as it finds expression in Gustav Kirchoff, a theorist of mathematical physics, we could find Heidegger's words along with Duhem's critique: “We can and will posit [poser] …  Wir können und wollen setzen … ”⁵¹ Note that this stipulative posing is by no means limited to a dogmatic and axiomatic controversy. The mathematician David Hilbert made this the watchword of the so-called Göttingen programme, which project included Husserl.⁵² As Duhem continues to refute Heinrich Hertz's explicitly deductive construction of mechanics,⁵³ the problem is not that the postulate is arbitrary but rather that it is, out of context and history, thereby articulated, “imperiously”: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. [I will it thus, I order it thus; let my will stand in the place of reason.]”⁵⁴ What Duhem ultimately sought, fierce as his gainsaying was, was only the inclusion of specifically French science—this would be the torch later taken up by Bachelard and Canguilhelm and today, if less and less, Serres—finally admitted to the table along with German science: “Scientia germanica ancilla scientiae gallicae.”⁵⁵

In the published version we can read Duhem citing Nietzsche's contemporary and fellow philologist, Hermann Diels: “the German is, here and now, on this earth, the sanctuary in which the principle of order takes refuge.”⁵⁶ Yet it is Duhem's extended citation of Wilhelm Ostwald that is arguably the most disturbing, even using the language of a “great secret” with respect to the German:

Germany wants to organize Europe which, until now, has not been organized. I shall now explain to you the great secret of Germany. We, or perhaps rather the German race, have discovered the factor of organization. Other people still live under the regimes of individualism, when we are under that of organization.⁵⁷

When Duhem asks “[w]as Scholasticism not essentially, as German science is, a work of the mathematical mind”⁵⁸ he can seem to approximate Heidegger's standpoint in his Beiträge with respect to what Heidegger names Machenshaft, where Heidegger writes in GA 95 (Überlegungen VIII, 5) of the Black Notebooks currently under discussion. “One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the persistent skillfulness in calculating, pushing, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded.”⁵⁹ Or else and still more troublingly, when Heidegger writes:

the temporary increase in the power of Jewry has its ground in the fact that the metaphysics of the West, especially in its modern development, served as the point of attachment for the diffusion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative skill, which in this way lodged itself in the “spirit” without ever being able to grasp the concealed domains of decision on its own. The more original and inceptive the coming decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible will they remain to this “race.”⁶⁰

This last is only a prelude to the most infamous of these quotes:

That in the age of machination, race is elevated to the explicit and specially erected “principle” of history (or just of historiology) is not the arbitrary stipulation of “doctrinaires” but a consequence of the power of machination, which must cast down beings, in all their regions, into planned calculation.⁶¹

It can be argued that what Duhem calls “German science” corresponds to what would come to be called “Jewish science”.⁶²

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52 I discuss this with attention to the time that was the first few decades of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science (and mathematics) in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science.

53 “Let us agree that this point – which is itself nothing but an algebraic expression, only a world of geometric consonance take to designate an ensemble of n numbers – changes, from one instant to another, by an algebraic formula. From this convention, so perfectly algebraic in nature, so completely arbitrary in appearance, we deduce, with perfect rigor, the consequences that calculation can draw from it, and we say that we are setting forth mechanics.” Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”, p. 93

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., p. 112.

56 Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues”, here p. 122.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., p. 123

59 Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 5, GA 95, p. 97.

60 Heidegger, GA 96, pp. 46 (from Überlegungen XII, 24).

61 Heidegger, Ibid., p. 38.

62 That argument can be made, but for his part, Duhem is talking about “scholasticism”, that is what my old Jesuit teacher, the Canadian Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, author of the conspicuously named Method in Theology (1972) and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), with its famous listings of points to the seemingly nth degree, no mere sic et non, took the mid-twentieth century to an extraordinary pitch well beyond the tradition of generalized empirical method of “transcendental Thomism” inaugurated by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher, Joseph Maréchal. Indeed, Maréchal was probably one of the reasons Lonergan was able to answer my questions regarding the intersection of mysticism and empiricism as well as he did. Maréchal's initial main works included: Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, 5 vols (Bruges-Louvain, 1922–47) and Études sur le psychologie des mystiques, 2 vols (1926, 1937).

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German/Jewish science (my attempt at a compact definition): a fabricated (magical) new “physical” science derived from hypothetical equations—e.g. relativistic dynamics and its geometric implications dictating the replacement of a planar space with a gravitational field by a curved spacetime without gravitational field. The transition from the former to the latter is essentially magical, thanks to the concoction of highly elegant algebraic tools. It would therefore be worth investigating how the actual magic, in the truly occult sense of the term, has impacted “Jewish science” and its use of mathematics (as the intellectual Talmudic culture is riddled with magic practices related to gematric ideas).

Also, as I read a little bit of Duhem’s writings and get a sense of his Ampèrian affinities, I’m wondering whether he was aware of (and, if so, what he thought of) the tensor-based reformulation of electrodynamics (relativistically rewriting Maxwell’s equations to account for the electromagnetic potential in terms of R⁴ using an electromagnetic field tensor and a current tensor). Electrodynamics assuming GR has always bothered me a great deal because it essentially unifies Einsteinian gravitation (its spacetime continuum) and electromagnetism by way of geometry, not physics (as though the physics of E&M was ultimately dependent upon and constrained by the non-physical relativistic dogma of gravitation). 

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Yes, that was fascinating. And the author quoted Duhem's German. Duhem published in French, English, and German, and knew Latin and Greek as well as reading comprehension in Italian! He was a true polymath and polyglot.

"Ampèrian affinities":
Duhem certainly admired Ampère's experimental and theoretical genius, but he disagreed with Ampère's Newtonian inductivism, which held that "phénomènes électrodynamiques" are "uniquement déduite de l’expérience," as Ampère subtitled his famous work. Duhem discusses this in his Théorie physique ch. 6,

• §4 (PDF p. 154): a critique of Newton himself ("Critique de la méthode newtonienne. - Premier exemple : La Mécanique céleste")
• §5 (PDF p. 158): a critique of Ampère ("Critique de la méthode newtonienne (suite ). – Second exemple : L’Électrodynamique").

(Duhem was very good at making everyone on all sides of a debate very uncomfortable. ☺)

Duhem was familiar with Riemann's mathematics. We know this based on a citation he made to a paper by the Italian mathematician Enrico Betti. Duhem's 2nd doctoral dissertation (the accepted one) was, after all, in the mathematics department; his 1st (the rejected one) was in the physics department.

By "tensor-based reformulation of electrodynamics," are you referring to Maxwell's quaternion way of writing things? For example, in his Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism (vol. 2), p. 232-233, where he introduces the displacement current, he wrote the Maxwell-Ampère Law
$$\nabla \times \vec{B} = \mu_{0} \vec{ J} + \mu_{0} \varepsilon_{0} \frac{{\partial \vec{E}}}{\partial t$$as
$$4\pi \mathfrak{C} = V \nabla \mathfrak{H$$
where
$${\mathfrak{C}} = \Re + \dot{\mathfrak{D}}$$i.e., (true current) = (conduction current) + (displacement current);
$\mathfrak{H}$ is the magnetic force;
$V\nabla$ is the vector part of $\nabla$ (i.e., curl).

Regarding "occult" and "gematric [geometric?] ideas" in physics:
    I like Steiner (2009)'s term "Pythagorean analogies," i.e., "analogies inexpressible in any other language but that of pure mathematics" (Karam 2014); he cites Maxwell's displacement current as the first example of a "Pythagorean analogy" in physics.

Here are Duhem's views of quaternions and vector analysis (Théorie physique ch. 4, §6 "L’École anglaise et la Physique mathématique," PDF p. 62-63):

Mais chez les Anglais seuls l’amplitude d’esprit se trouve d’une manière fréquente, habituelle, endémique ; aussi est-ce seulement parmi les hommes de science anglais que les Algèbres symboliques, le calcul des quaternions, la vector-analysis, sont usuels ; la plupart des traités anglais se servent de ces langages complexes et abrégés. Ces langages, les mathématiciens français ou allemands ne les apprennent pas volontiers ; ils n’arrivent jamais à les parler couramment ni surtout à penser directement sous les formes qui les composent ; pour suivre un calcul mené selon la méthode des quaternions ou de la vector-analysis, il leur en faut faire la version en Algèbre classique. Un des mathématiciens français qui avaient le plus profondément étudié les diverses espèces de calculs symboliques, Paul Morin, me disait un jour : « Je ne suis jamais sûr d’un résultat obtenu par la méthode des quaternions avant de l’avoir retrouvé par notre vieille Algèbre cartésienne. »

Also, you would be very interested in the

Notice sur les Titres et Travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem rédigée par lui-même lors de sa candidature à l'Académie des sciences (mai 1913)

While Duhem wrote most of it—summarizing all his scientific, philosophical, and historical researches—, Jordan wrote the biography section, Hadamard wrote the section on the mathematical aspects of Duhem's works, and Darbon (whom you may not have heard of) wrote the section on Duhem's history of physics.

By the way, some considered Duhem "anti-Semitic" because of his stance on the Dreyfus affair, yet he was close friends with the Jew Hadamard, who held a very high opinion of Duhem.

Also, Duhem's influence has been vast, across many fields. For example, the economist Schumpeter, in his preface to Fr. Dempsey, S.J.'s erudite defense of the moderns' understanding of interest and the medievals' arguments against usury, Interest & Usury, mentions how Fr. Dempsey did for economics what Duhem did for physics; they both showed the medievals' contributions to their respective modern disciplines.

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Thanks for this rich piece of Duhemian insights and many references! Quite dense, owing to the vast extent (“across many fields”) of Duhem’s multi-layer thought and writings.

Yes Maxwell’s equations can be reformulated using matrix operators to represent quaternions. But, in field theories, quaternions are broader algebraic tools than tensors and need not include any “relativistic” alteration. Thus “Maxwell’s quaternion way of writing things” is not exactly the same as a tensor-based reformulation of electrodynamics. The tensor version of Maxwell’s equations (deriving E&M from the deformation of R⁴ geometry) describes the relationship between the electromagnetic potential A^µ (which, from the perspective of quaternion operators, would be defined as a quadri-vector potential), the electromagnetic field strength tensor F^µv (when F^µv = ω^µv), and the current tensor j^µ, yielding the “homogenous” form of Maxwell’s equations:

∂_kF_µv + ∂_µF_vk + ∂_vF_kµ = 0.

∂²A^µ = j^µ ,

where ∂² = ∂₀² - ∂₁²- ∂₂² - ∂₃² = c^-2∂_t² - ∇_x²

“Gematric”, referring (adjectively) to the Jewish gematria and its many occult misuses of mathematics and numbers.

Fascinating quote pertaining to “Duhem’s views of quaternions and vector analysis”! Besides Cauchy and his stress tensor, I cannot think of many French mathematicians and natural philosophers with a taste for the kind of algebraic operations used in quaternion, vector, and tensor analyses.

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Oh, I see. You were referring to relativity theory's tensorial "simplification" of Maxwell's equations. To my knowledge, Duhem never wrote about that (at least not directly, by writing relativity's "'homogenous' form of Maxwell’s equations").

Re: "Duhem’s multi-layer thought and writings":
    Duhem even spoke about Loti, Corneille, Shakespeare, and Dickens in his Théorie physique. Duhem contrasts Corneille with Shakespeare (∵ he considers both as not strictly having an esprit de géométrie) and Loti with Dickens (∵ both are prime examples of an esprit de géométrie). I read Tale of Two Cities because I was curious if Dickens indeed has an "English mind" (esprit de géométrie), and he certainly does; I wasn't that impressed with Tale of Two Cities because it didn't have much of an "Ariadne's thread" (coherent idea/theme) running through it. It was a disconnected smorgasbord of events and myriads of characters. As Hertz said, Maxwell's theory is nothing more than Maxwell's equations. Maxwell did not even derive these equations from a single principle, like an energy law, which was customary to do in E&M in the era between Ampére and Maxwell; thus, Maxwell's theory is an example par excellence of the English/German/geometrical mind, juggling many disconnected ideas around—which Poincaré said, in that quote I sent you awhile back [translated on p. 8 of this], makes French minds ill-at-ease when reading Maxwell for the first time.
    Have you read any Corneille? I know he wrote Le Cid; have you seen/read that? Does it exemplify the French esprit de finesse?

Duhem certainly is not opposed to analogies in physics. Classification is impossible without the ability to form analogies, and Duhem defines physical theory as a classification of experimental laws (not a classification of equations!). Duhem explicitly mentions "analogie" in Physique du croyant p. 146 ff. (on the analogy between cosmology [natural philosophy] and physical theory; Duhem essentially proves Aristotle Physica 191a7-8: "The underlying nature is known by analogy."), which you may have already read. He describes very well what Fr. Wallace, O.P., says is the "teaching that is distinctive of Thomism," i.e., that "analogical middle terms are sufficient for a valid demonstration" (cf. this). This is vital for there to be "mixed sciences" or scientia media, where minor and major premises are taken from distinct fields, like mathematics and physics, with distinct principles of their own. Fr. William A. Wallace, O.P., who pioneered research into Galileo's logical treatises, describes this very well in the best logic-of-science work I've ever read: The Modeling of Nature (if Duhem wrote a logical work, which I wish he did!, it would probably be similar to Fr. Wallace's).

Thus, what I think best describes "German" or "Jewish science" is not that it uses analogy, which all physical theory does, but that it's Neo-Pythagorean, inverting the 1st (physical) and 2nd (mathematical) degrees of abstraction. Duhem, where he mentions Einstein in the La science allemande, makes it clear that one cannot define time from a mathematical equation as Einstein does. The inversion of the first two degrees of abstraction has become so extreme that Max Tegmark, who is a hardcore Pythagorean, even wrote a paper on the "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis," i.e., that the universe is mathematics! Pythagoreans appear to be the first gematrists.

I was pleased to see Steiner (2009) quote Peirce regarding analogies between physical theories (p. 52fn9):

These universal super-laws were, to Peirce's thinking, the key to the formal mathematical analogies we see between laws—such as the inverse square laws in gravity and electricity—analogies that demand explanation (7.509-7.511). But Peirce looked to these super-laws also to explain, not only the mathematical form of laws, but even the specific values of the constants (like the gravitational constant) appearing in them.

This reminds me of what St. Thomas said is impossible in that Super Iob quote I sent you, where he says some things cannot have a natural explanation but are up to the will of God. A "physical" theory being the analogy between two mathematical laws is not a physical theory, but a mathematical one, at best, and a confusing of mathematics with the will of God, at worst.

This reminds me: I need to read the article ["De Analogia secundum Doctrinam Aristotelico-Thomisticam"] by Fr. Ramírez, O.P., that formed the foundation of his multi-volume De Analogia. Fr. Rimírez is the master of analogy, and I'm curious what he has to say about Duhem claim that (p. 147):

…si l'on prononce à cet endroit les mots de preuve par analogie, il convient d'en fixer exactement le sens et de ne point confondre une telle preuve avec une véritable démonstration logique. Une analogie se sent ; elle ne se conclut pas ; elle ne s'impose pas à l'esprit de tout le poids du principe de contradiction. Là où un penseur voit une analogie, un autre, plus vivement frappé par les contrastes des termes à comparer que par leurs ressemblances, peut fort bien voir une opposition ; pour amener celui-ci à changer sa négation en affirmation, celui-là ne saurait user de la force irrésistible du syllogisme…

How is "preuve par analogie" not "une véritable démonstration logique" thet "ne se conclut pas" and "ne s'impose pas à l'esprit de tout le poids du principe de contradiction"?

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The formalism of quaternions was very much Maxwellian in spirit and has actually been extended in Germano-Anglo-American electromagnetic field theory on the basis of the tensor field equations of Einstein. But it is the introduction of the electromagnetic tensor field F_µv, combined with the spin connection vector ω^a_b (the electrodynamics simplification of this amounts to equating F and ω by retranslating the latter into a rotation tensor, ω_µv) that makes up for “relativity theory’s tensorial "simplification" of Maxwell’s equations”, which consists in the merging of electrodynamics with GR I was referring to (and wondering whether Duhem had had any thought on this “tensorization” of E&M, which is all the rage today among pan-relativists).

About tragedians and the difference between “esprit de finesses” and “esprit de géométrie”, Duhem was probably keen on his contrasting assessment of Corneille and Shakespeare on the one hand and Loti Dickens on the other. Corneille, as Molière, also was a comedy writer and therefore, to my view, does exemplify something of “un esprit de finesse”, since finesse was rather characteristic of the kind of spirit 17th century French political/social satires would famously convey through penetrating comedies (hardly the under-the-belt level of our contemporary late wisecracking shows on T.V.).     

Regarding the centrality of analogies to the life of the created intellect, you correctly write: “Classification is impossible without the ability to form analogies”, and logically justify the validity of Duhem’s definition of “physical theory as a classification of experimental laws”, namely by way of analogous abstraction (which is what modeling physical data in the logical formal of a physical theory really amounts to). In a broader (cross-field) sense, I would define analogicity (ἀνα-λογία, meaning quite literally the logic of comparative relation between that which is lower to that which is higher) as a critical way of both intuitively and intellectually seeing the similitude of the invisible (the higher) mirrored in the visible (the lower). Both the Hebrew word for intellectus (בִינָה, “understanding” as the attitude of the intellect seeing in between two things, meaning re-cognizing the like features by which two essentially distinct things can coherently be related) and the Aramaic word for “comparison” (ܒ݁ܡܰܬ݂ܠܶܐ ,מתלא) clearly suggest that an analogy is actually more than simply a ratio-nal proportion (in the arithmetic, Aristotelian sense). In revealed anthropology, it appears (my theory) that the created intellect (whose life is intellectus) is constitutionally analogic (together in inner structure and cognitive motion).

I did notice Duhem’s mention of analogy in Physique du croyant.  The distinction he makes (referring to your final question) between “preuve par analogie” and “une véritable démonstration logique” does not imply that the first is less intellectually powerful and epistemologically meaningful than the second. In fact, a mere logical demonstration, however valid, may not have the same epistemological value as a proof by analogy, even though the latter’s proof value is technically more limited than a syllogistic demonstration. What this means is that analogical knowledge is not reducible to logical validity. Thus a little like he did in La science allemande—first lesson (Les Sciences de Raisonnement)—when distinguishing between axioms and theorems (which the following sentence on p. 6 summarizes like an aphorism: “Les principes se sentent, les propositions se concluent…”), Duhem is essentially right to say on p. 147 of Physique du croyant: “Une analogie se sent ; elle ne se conclut pas…”      

The confusion of degrees of abstraction you talk about is indeed critical! My sense is that it is typically indulged in because there is actually more to numbers and their multifaceted relations and properties than their simply being abstract entities bereft of positive existence outside the mind (entia rationis).¹ However, no one really knows how much more, and what the true nature of this “more” is. That is the reason why mathematical physics can really lead to ontological problems (as the nature of the 2nd degree of abstraction is so evasive), but without possibly providing a solution. If you remember, it was the sense of my comparative (analogical) “syllogism” used here to extend Gödel’s incompleteness results from mathematics to all-encompassing Neo-Pythagorean physical theories whose ultimate Galilean assumption is that “the universe is mathematics.”

“Duhem, where he mentions Einstein in the La science allemande, makes it clear that one cannot define time from a mathematical equation as Einstein does.”

Yes, and it is very significant that Newton did not include “time” in his descriptive “universal super-law” of gravitation, while Einstein did. The Neo-Pythagorean thinking undergirding GR and its inclusion of the time dimension times the square root of - 1 was never meant to account for empirical results (contrary to the regular claims appealing to the “countless corroborations” of the curved geometry of Einsteinian gravitational field). GR was intended to provide a mathematical way out of the contradiction between the instantaneous Newtonian gravitational field and the new principles couched in the Einsteinian formulas pertaining to spacetime in SR (implying action at a distance).

I read Fr. Ramírez’s The authority of St. Thomas, not his De Analogia.

Capitalism is Usury-ism.

Read the following from Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J.'s Ethics and the National Economy.

Fr. Pesch was the first Catholic to write a comprehensive history of economics, and his student was the anti-usury expert Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J., author of Interest & Usury, which the famous economist Schumpeter prefaced, mentioning that Duhem's historical researches in physics are akin to Fr. Dempsey's in economics.

"Communism has failed, and now that Capitalism has shown us in the intervening years that it is even more ruthless than the communists imagined, we need an alternative to both Marx and the Manchester School. Heinrich Pesch is that alternative, and Rupert Ederer [the translator] is his prophet.”

—E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.
Editor, Culture Wars; author, The Slaughter of the Cities

Fr. Pesch, S.J., wrote: "Capitalism is the dominion over the national economy by the acquisitive interests of those who own capital."

p. 85-6:

    Usury is not exclusively a monetary phenomenon having to do with money-lending. A disparity between what is offered and what is given in return, resulting in excessive gain, can arise anywhere in the exchange process, and especially in business transactions.
    Usury in a business transaction is the contractual appropriation of obvious surplus value in the process of buying and selling. The damage is done by the contract itself where performance and remuneration are juxtaposed. …

and, in the chapter "Capitalism & Socialism" (p. 159):

Capitalists are usurers in the broadest sense of the word. We understand usury in the same sense as Franz Schaub does, as any contractual expropriation of what is clearly surplus value. So, in our time, we use the word capitalism to mean a social system where usury operates with more or less complete freedom. The concept, capitalism, signifies a quest for gain that is totally uninhibited. Capitalism, therefore, means economic dominion by capitalists…

Pesch is also a Thomist, mentioning St. Thomas frequently in this work.

Hilaire Belloc, although some of his writings are Liberal, describes usury well in his chapter on usury in Economics for Helen; cf. Fr. Slater's description of usury in his A Manual of Moral Theology for English-Speaking Countries p. 321. Belloc and Fr. Slater eloquently explain that usury leads to economic disparities and imbalances. Belloc essentially expounds on St. Thomas's definition of usury as selling what does not exist. Although Belloc's description of usury was interesting, it seems Calvinist. Calvin was the first to say that interest can be charged on productive loans. Catholics before Calvin considered any "buying and selling of time" usurious.

Physique de croyant

French original of Pierre Duhem's 2-part Annales de philosophie chrétienne (a scholastic/apologetical periodical ed. at the time by R P Laberthonnière) 77th Year, 4th series , Vol 1 (Oct & Nov 1905) pp. 44 & 133 article:

Physique de croyant (part 1, part 2)

(English translation)

Chaos: The Film

Chaos: The Film

Hadamard's Pamphlets contains the paper "Les surfaces à courbures opposées et leurs lignes géodésiques" (p. 71; cf. Jaki's Uneasy Genius p. 350fn113), a classic in chaos theory that inspired "Duhem's bull" (e.g., in his Aim & Structure of Physical Theory p. 139 ff.). "Duhem's bull" is mentioned in part 5 of this Chaos: The Film.

Pierre Duhem & Thomas Kuhn

esprit de géométrie & esprit de finesse

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by Roger Ariew. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004:

    Some draw consequences well from a few principles, and this is rightness of thinking.
    Others draw well the consequences of things involving many principles. For example, the former understand well the effects of water, which involve few principles; but these consequences are so subtle that only acute right thinking can get to them. And, in spite of that, these people might not be great geometers, because geometry comprises a great number of principles, and a mind may be of such a nature as to be able to penetrate easily to the bottom of a few principles without in the least being able to penetrate those things involving many principles.
    There are therefore two kinds of minds: the one, penetrating rapidly and deeply the consequences of principles, is the intuitive mind [esprit de finesse]; the other, grasping a great number of principles without confusing them, is the geometric mind [esprit de géométrie]. The first has strength and rightness of mind, the second breadth of mind. Now, one can exist without the other; the mind can be strong and narrow, and also broad and weak.

Geometry/Intuition
Difference between the geometric and the intuitive mind

    In the one, principles are obvious, but removed from ordinary use, so that we find it difficult to turn our head in that direction, for lack of habit. But if it was turned that way ever so little, we would see the principles fully and would need to have a wholly defective mind to reason wrongly about such principles so obvious that it is almost impossible for them to notice.
    But with the intuitive mind, principles are in common use and before everybody's eyes. You have only to look, and no effort is necessary; it is only a question of good sight. But it must be good, because the principles are so subtle and numerous that it is almost impossible but that some escape notice. Now the omission of one principle leads to error. Thus you must have very clear sight to see all the principles, as well as an accurate mind to avoid reasoning falsely from known principles.
    All geometers would then be intuitive if they had clear sight, for they do not reason wrongly from principles known to them. And intuitive minds would be geometric if they could bend their thinking to the principles of geometry to which they are unaccustomed.
    The reason, then, that some intuitive minds are not geometric is that they simply cannot turn their attention to the principles of geometry. But the reason that geometers are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of geometry, and not reasoning until they have clearly seen and handled their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition, where the principles do not allow such handling. The principles are scarcely seen; they are felt rather than seen; there is endless difficulty in making them felt by those who do not themselves apprehend them. These principles are so delicate and numerous that a delicate and clear sense is needed to apprehend them, and to judge rightly and correctly according to this feeling, without most often being able to demonstrate them in order as in geometry; because the principles are not known to us in this way and because it would be an endless task to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at a glance, and not by a process of reasoning, at least up to a point. And thus it is rare for geometers to be intuitive and for intuitive people to be geometers, because geometers want to treat matters of intuition geometrically and make themselves ridiculous, wanting to begin by definitions and then by principles, which is not the way to proceed in this kind of reasoning. Not that the mind does not do this, but it does so tacitly, naturally, and without art, for its expression surpasses all men, and only a few can apprehend it.
    Intuitive minds, on the contrary, being thus accustomed to judge at a single glance, when presented with propositions of which they understand nothing and the paths to which consist of such sterile definitions and principles, which they are not accustomed to see in such detail, are so surprised that they are repelled and disheartened.
    But false minds are never either intuitive or geometrical.
    Geometers who are only geometers, then, have rightness of mind, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and principles; otherwise they are wrong and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear.
    And intuitive minds that are only intuitive cannot have the patience to reach the first principles of speculative and imaginative things, which they have never seen in the world and which are altogether out of the common.

Kevin O'Brien impersonates Dom Stanley Jaki. ☺

“Kevin O'Brien as Father Stanley Jaki”
by Kevin O'Brien.

The Portsmouth Institute (RI) asked Kevin O'Brien to impersonate Father Jaki, during their 2012 (June 22-24) Conference on Modern Science, Ancient Faith. Kevin prepared his talk reading a lot of books of Father Jaki, and looking at the talks of him in the Internet. The result is truly impressive. The text which Kevin used as a basis for his talk is mostly made of quotes from various books of Father Jaki. It is available here. Kevin O'Brien, founder and directore of Theater of the Word Inc., recently started a new project named Grunky. The term Grunky comes from Chesterton: "A word I invented at the age of five to express my religious sentiments". About Kevin O'Brien activity, in his own words: "My wife and I run two theatrical companies, Upstage Productions, in which we perform comedy murder mysteries around the country—that's how we make our money; and The Theater of the Word Incorporated, in which we travel the country evangelizing through drama—that's how we lose our money."

New York Times obituary:

April 12, 2009

The Rev. Stanley L. Jaki, Physicist and Theologian, Dies at 84

By BRUCE WEBER

The Rev. Stanley L. Jaki, a physicist and theologian whose prolific writings parsed the histories of science and religion and the intertwining of faith and reason, died on Tuesday in Madrid, where he had traveled from Rome after delivering a lecture. He was 84 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

The cause was complications after a heart attack, said Holly Wojcik, a spokeswoman for Seton Hall University, where Father Jaki, a Benedictine priest, was a professor of physics.
Father Jaki (pronounced YAH-kee) held doctoral degrees in physics and theology. A relentless scholar, he wrote more than 40 books, including studies of the religious thinking of G. K. Chesterton, the works of the French physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem and the life of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian who famously converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.

He is probably best known, however, for works like “The Relevance of Physics” (1966) and “Science and Creation” (1974), in which he argued that the scientific enterprise did not become viable and self-sustaining until its incarnation in Christian medieval Europe, and that the advancement of science was indebted to the Christian understanding of creation.
In later works Father Jaki explored the boundary between science and religion; he believed the two were compatible and mutually reinforcing, and in 1987 he received the Templeton Prize, the annual award given for advancing the quest to understand God.

“I believe there is a basic misunderstanding which has existed for hundreds of years and will continue to persist about the ‘creationist problem,’ ” he said in an interview with The New York Times after receiving the prize, “because in intellectual life we do not solve such dilemmas to the satisfaction of everybody.”

Stanley Ladislas Jaki was born in Gyor, Hungary, on Aug. 17, 1924. He attended local schools run by the Benedictines and joined the order in 1942, living in the Archabbey of Pannonhalma, which had been established in the 10th century, during World War II. He was ordained in 1948.

In 1950, he received a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Institute of San Anselmo, Rome, and came to the United States, where he taught at a seminary in Pennsylvania. When complications after a tonsillectomy deprived him of his voice — he would not regain it for a number of years — he gave up teaching and enrolled in Fordham University’s graduate program in physics, where he studied with the Nobel laureate Victor F. Hess, the discoverer of cosmic rays. He received a doctorate in 1957.

He joined the faculty of Seton Hall in 1965 and was made distinguished university professor in 1975. Father Jaki was a visiting professor at universities all over the world and delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

He is survived by two brothers, both Benedictine priests, the Rev. Zeno Jaki and the Rev. Theodose Jaki, who live at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma.

Ariew on Duhem

Pierre Duhem on Philosophers Pretending to Know about Physics

Pierre Duhem gave an "intervention" during the philosopher Père Bulliot's presentation at the Third International Scientific Congress of Catholics in Bruxelles (1894). It caused quite a stir, but it's excellent advice:

Only the principles of the different positive sciences are of interest to philosophers; but, in order to know these principles, it is not enough to read a book of popularization, not even the first chapters of a treatise written by a competent scientist. One does not comprehend the meaning and bearing of the principles on which a science rests except when one has studied that science for years, applied in a thousand ways those principles to particular cases, and mastered in depth the technique of what the Germans call the materials of science.

For example, the obvious sense of Euclid's [parallel] postulate is accessible to a child who studies the first book of geometry. But in order to understand the exact sense of that postulate, to grasp the reasons which give it a special place among the truths of geometry, to see clearly what would become of geometry if that postulate were to be abandoned, one must have a complete mathematical training which requires years of work.

If therefore we want to handle with competence and fruitfully the questions which are of the domain common to metaphysics and to positive science, let us begin with studying the latter for ten, for fifteen years; let us study it, first of all, in itself and for itself, without seeking to put it in harmony with such and such philosophical assertion; then, as we have mastered its principles, applied it in a thousand ways, we can search for its metaphysical meaning which will not fail to accord with true philosophy.

Anyone who would find exaggerated a similar labor must not forget that every hasty, scientifically incorrect solution of one of the problems relating to the common frontiers of science and philosophy, would result in the greatest prejudice against our cause. The philosophers must imitate the patience of scientists. Once a problem is posed, scientists devote centuries, if necessary, to solving it. They accept only a precise and rigorous solution.

At any rate, the schools we are combatting give us example. The positivist school, the critical school, publish numerous works on the philosophy of science. These works carry the names of the greatest names of European science. We cannot triumph over these schools except by opposing them with researches done by people who, too, are masters of the positive sciences.

(source: Jaki, Stanley L. Uneasy Genius the Life and Work of Pierre Duhem. Boston: The Hague, 1984, pp. 113-4.)

St. Robert Bellarmine

Today is the feast day of St. Robert Bellarmine, famously involved in the "Galileo affair:"

In his Système du monde, Duhem suggests that in one respect, at least, Bellarmine had shown himself a better scientist than Galileo by disallowing the possibility of a “strict proof” of the earth’ motion, on the grounds that an astronomical theory merely “saves the appearances” without necessarily revealing what “really happens.”

Duhem said in ΣΩZEIN TA ΦAINOMENA: Essai sur la notion de théorie physique de Platon à Galilée

that logic was on the side of Osiander, Bellarmine, and Urban VIII, and not on the side of Kepler and Galileo; that the former had understood the exact import of the experimental method; and that, in this regard, the latter were mistaken

Review of Hannam's God's Philosophers

Igal Galili is an excellent physics education researcher who believes the history and philosophy of science (HPS) must be incorporated into physics education—something Duhem advocated, too, in his Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. See, e.g., Galili & Hazan (2001).
Last year Galili wrote an excellent review of James Hannam's book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science:

Book Review
James Hannam: God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science?

Duhem's Scientific Work Translated into English

Paul Needham has just produced the first full-length translation of one of Pierre Duhem's scientific works*: Commentary on the Principles of Thermodynamics by Pierre Duhem. From its preface:

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (1861–1916) held the chair of physics (changed to chair of theoretical physics in 1895) at Bordeaux from 1894 to his death. He established a reputation in both the history and philosophy of science as well as in science (physics and physical chemistry). His pioneering work in medieval science opened up the area as a new discipline in the history of science, and his La théorie physique (Duhem 1906) is a classic in the philosophy of science which is still read and discussed today. Although his work in these two fields is now well represented in English with a number of translations that have appeared in recent decades (Duhem 1892b, 1903, 1902, 1905–1906, 1906, 1908, 1915, 1985, 1996), there is little of his scientific work available in English. The original manuscript of Duhem (1898) was translated by J. E. Trevor, one of the editors of The Journal of Physical Chemistry, for its first issue. But his work almost invariably appeared in French. The present volume contains translations of some of his important early work in thermodynamics, which I hope will contribute to a more balanced picture in English of the breadth of Duhem’s publications and provide a further source of insight into his thought.

(*There is a textbook by Duhem translated into English called Thermodynamics and chemistry: A non-mathematical treatise for chemists and students of chemistry; but since it is a textbook, it is not a purely scientific contribution.)

The Wikipedia entry on Duhem has the most complete collection of links to online historical, scientific, and philosophical works of Duhem that I know of. Check them out! It makes me want to learn French.

Historical Method in Physics

The following email exchange with a professor in the State of Israel who studies physics education makes me really wonder if there is something flawed with the way physics is taught today (cf. "Why No 'New Einstein'?"). Out of all disciplines with PhDs, graduate students are obtaining fewer and fewer PhDs in physics than in any other field and more and more in psychology. There must be a reason for this. I wrote:

Dr. Galili,

I was glad to see that you do research following the admonition of Pierre Duhem in your "HISTORY OF PHYSICS AS A TOOL FOR TEACHING:"

The legitimate, sure and fruitful method of preparing a student to receive a physical hypothesis is the historical method. To retrace the transformations through which the empirical matter accrued while the theoretical form was first sketched; to describe the long collaboration by means of which common sense and deductive logic analyzed this matter and modeled that form until one was exactly adapted to the other: that is the best way, surely even the only way, to give to those studying physics a correct and clear view of the very complex and living organization of this science.

(And apparently Mach's "textbooks in mechanics and optics that adopted this approach remain to be valuable and interesting teaching resources.")

Your studies seem to focus on physics in secondary education. Has the historical method been applied in undergraduate and graduate physics programs? Do you do research on this?

I am a graduate physics student, and graduate-level physics seems mostly taught to a certain type of learner, i.e., to one who "learns by doing," who learns solely by solving written problems. I am from the United States, and this seems to be the predominant method most of the physics departments employ in training their students. Are there graduate programs—besides those HPS departments—that do things differently, who maybe even implement the historical method?

Thank you

(The quote is from Duhem's Aim and Structure of Physical Theory pg. 268.) He responded:

Thank you for your message and interest to my work.
The subject you write about actually presents a sensitive discourse in physics teaching. Nothing is harder than to cause a conceptual change to physics educators,and researchers especially. Currently, the prevailing mode of teaching adopts profession oriented pragmatic approach which is very instrumentalist although widely uses the rhetoric of conceptual understanding. Within this understanding problem solving and modeling occupy the central role. I hold a different perspective oriented to physics education (different from physics as a profession). Such education aims at learning physics as a special culture people create in making sense of nature and natural phenomenon.
Not to cause people much negative emotions and resistance, I prefer to investigate secondary school students. However, I am convinced that my materials are applicable and perhaps even more effective for university students who deal with these the same subjects. They all need good conceptual bases in the physics they learn. Complex formalism does not replace understanding fundamentals. Such is, for example the issue of weight definition. Although included in middle school physics curriculum, it presents a great controversy in university physics textbooks of physics.
Best regards,
igal

Where did this "profession oriented pragmatic approach which is very instrumentalist although widely uses the rhetoric of conceptual understanding" originate? Perhaps the pragmatism originates from the progressive education movement of John Dewey (cf. these articles by Fr. Hardon, S.J., on Dewey: Part 1, 2, and 3)? Duhem's philosophy of science is considered instrumentalist, yet he would agree that "modeling," which he criticized the English physicists like Maxwell for advocating as physical explanations, should not "occupy the central role." And "the rhetoric of conceptual understanding?" Rhetoric? Would all physicists agree what they do is rhetoric? Feynman might have, because he said he won the Nobel prize for "sweeping [e.g., inconsistencies] under the rug." Perhaps all the psychology PhDs will finally get it across to physicists what it actually means to know and to understand, assuming an epistemology grounded on sound philosophy,

Current Methodologies of Physics & Astronomy

Regarding the correct division and method of the sciences, this lecture, given at the American Astronomical Society (AAS)'s January 2008 meeting in Austin, Texas, highlights the current state of the methodologies in two branches of physical science (specif. scientia media), astronomy and physics.

[Duhem] seems to regard [the non-falsifiability theses, which "is that 'if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, not only is the questioned proposition put into doubt, but also the whole theoretical scaffolding used by the physicist' (Duhem 185),"] as an obvious corollary of another thesis, which could be called the non-separability thesis, that the physicist can never submit an isolated hypothesis to experimental test: “To seek to separate each of the hypotheses of theoretical physics from the other assumptions upon which this science rests, in order to subject it in isolation to the control of observation, is to pursue a chimera” (Duhem 199-200).

—Roger Ariew, "Pierre Duhem"

Modern scientists do indeed consider issues pertaining to this, else their science's arguments risk being circular.

Science and Modernism

Because modern science has proven very effective at explaining the physical world, some have succumbed to the error of Modernism, which is not only harmful to religion but also actually harmful to the development of a true science which can more accurately explain nature.

The cognitional theoretical basis of Modernism is agnosticism, according to which human rational cognition is limited to the world of experience. Religion, according to this theory, develops from the principle of vital immanence (immanentism) that is, from the need for God which dwells in the human soul. The truths of religion are, according to the general progress of culture, caught up in a constant substantial development (evolutionism).

—Dr. Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma pgs. 16-17

It appears that Modernism is only the subject of religion, the dogmas of which some may think the progress of modern science threatens. Yet it relates to science, too, since even though it is true that knowledge begins in the senses—i.e., from experience—it does not end there; rather, it ends in the intellect, the human's soul, in which exists the universal knowledge that science discovers. Agnosticism nihilistically states that it is futile "to know the reality corresponding to our ultimate scientific, philosophic, and religious ideas." (Shanahan 1908); one therefore cannot be agnostic and interpret quantum mechanics, for example, except possibly with the instrumentalist interpretation. Immanentism basically says that God and religion are manifestations of man, not realities apart from man and given to him by God, respectively; and evolutionism says man's nature changes. Although science has failed to prove any of these propositions, some assume them—consciously or not—in order to remove God from science and consequently also to ignore the study of God or theology, which is the noblest science of which the "Other sciences [e.g., the natural sciences] are called the handmaidens." (Summa Theologica Iª q. 1 a. 5 s. c.).

Before discussing how Modernism leads to pathological science, let us first give some historical context and see how Modernism affected the French Catholic physicist of the "Gibbs-Duhem Equation," Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), who, interestingly, thought that all fields of physics are reducible to thermodynamics.

2. Fideism or Rational Obedience

In the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of 1907, two years after Duhem's 'Physics of a Believer', the official position was made clear in the name of Pope Pius X. Of the dangerous aspects of the heresy it called "modernism" identified by the encyclical two concern me here, what it called the "agnosticism" of the modernists, and the separation of science and faith. The first for example was dangerous because of the damage it did to natural theology:

human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. [...] Given these premises, all will readily perceive what becomes of Natural Theology, of the motives of credibility, of external revelation.

The second was under suspicion of fideism:

Having reached this point [...] we have sufficient material in hand to enable us to see the relations which Modernists establish between faith and science. [I]n the first place it is to be held that the object of the one is quite extraneous to and separate from the object of the other. For faith occupies itself solely with something which science declares to be unknowable for it. Hence each has a separate field assigned to it: science is entirely concerned with the reality of phenomena, into which faith does not enter at all; faith on the contrary concerns itself with the divine reality which is entirely unknown to science.

Pascendi goes on to suggest that the modernists really meant to subject faith to science but were afraid to say so, and was even to find pantheistic implications in the position. It can be assumed that one target of this passage was Alfred Loisy's attempt to separate the results of the critical analysis of Scripture from the dogmatic claims of the Catholic Church, and that another was the memory of late mediaeval and Renaissance theories of double truth, truth in philosophy separate from truth in faith; but the concern of the first passage to preserve the integrity of natural theology shows the importance of wider considerations. Duhem is not one of those identified as targets of the encyclical. Whether his work was even known to those who drafted it must be a matter of speculation. But quite apart from his explicit disapproval of the enterprise, it is hard to envisage the kind of natural theology that could be accommodated to Duhem's account of the aim and structure of physical theory.
The issue was basic, the subject even of dogmatic definition, by the First Vatican Council of 1870-71, the Council that, in non-Catholic circles at least, is more famous for the definition of Papal infallibility. That Council, using the double negatives usual in such definitions, had declared anathema anyone who should deny that the knowledge of God was accessible to human reason. Though what that meant is not easily determined, most of the bishops present must have meant to say that the knowledge of God was accessible to human demonstration, not of course that knowledge of Him contained in the creeds and dogmatic formulations of the Church, but the knowledge that there is a good God who created all things: the rest belonged to Revelation, not reason.
But whatever the bishops thought they were doing thus making the demonstrability of God's existence a matter of faith, the general strategy is clear enough: to offer the faithful what are technically known as motives of credibility, reasons that would make it rational to accept the Catholic faith and ecclesiastical authority. The faithful could be assured that, God's existence being demonstrable by reason, it was rational to accept the dogmatic formulations of the faith concerning Him offered by the church, and rational also to accept the authority of the Church that propagated this faith, rational to support the Church as it defended its temporal power against the new kings of a reunited Italy, and rational also to defend the Church in its resistance to the Prussian rulers of Germany and republican rulers of France. At the same time, of course, it turned Catholics into a disaffected element in all three states, a disaffected element the authorities had to disarm at the price of their own survival.
So it emerges that by propagating a system of physics that undermines natural theology Duhem has rendered himself suspect of the heresy (for that is the effect of the Council's decree) of fideism, the belief that the faith rests on faith and nothing else, and that conclusion was explicitly drawn by F. Mentré, one of those who wrote on Duhem's work after his death. In his eyes, Duhem's views were of no use on religion because of this fideist taint, connected with what he identified as its Pascalian sources, the subject of the next chapter. Furthermore, the counterpart of fideism is philosophical scepticism, the doubt about the reliability of knowledge of any kind, about its ultimate guarantees. Thus in 1893 Eugène Vicaire detected it Duhem's views "the poison of scepticism" and was appalled that such views should appear in a Catholic journal, the Revue des Questions Scientifiques, in which Duhem's early articles appeared.

3. The Revival of Scholasticism

But the consequences go even further, and it is here that neo-Scholasticism falls to be considered. There is no point in asserting the demonstrability of God's existence, or of anything else for that matter, unless there is available a philosophical system to do it in, just as to demonstrate God's non-existence a philosophical system, such as that provided by the various brands of positivism, was equally necessary. In 1878 the Encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII hit the nail on the head by citing St. Paul in favour of its view that 'false philosophy' was the source of the modern apostasy. The 'true philosophy' offered in its place was a revived Scholastic philosophy, the philosophy associated by the encyclical indiscriminately with Thomas Aquinas and the latter's thirteenth-century Franciscan contemporary Bonaventure, but in practice looking more to Aquinas as interpreted by such sixteenth-century commentators as Cajetan and Suarez.
The groundwork for the encyclical had been laid over the previous half-century. At least since the sixteenth century, there had always been a tendency towards Scholasticism in Catholic philosophy and theology, and corresponding difficulties with 'modern' philosophies. For example, an episode better known that some because of the attention Leibniz paid it, is the persecution of the followers of Descartes in the 1670s and 1680s because of the difficulties their philosophy created for the Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation defined by the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, the doctrine that at the words of consecration the substance of the bread and wine are transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, leaving only the so-called accidents of colour, taste, and texture unchanged. Despite the intentions of the Fathers of the Council of Trent, this doctrine can hardly be understood outside the philosophy of substance and accident in which it is stated, still less if matter is defined, as it was by Descartes, as essentially, in substance that is, the space it occupies—and nobody suggested that that changed at the words of consecration!
Just as at the end of the nineteenth century Duhem was to turn the philosophy of positivism against the anti-religious conclusions of the positivists, so, in the early nineteenth century a serious of attempts was made, all of them resulting in condemnations for their authors, to adapt philosophies of non-Catholic origin, such as those of Kant and Schelling, for the purposes of Catholic apologetic. As interpreted by many, the problem seems to have lain in perceived violations of the balance between faith and reason demanded of Catholic orthodoxy: reason was to offer motives of credibility, to prepare the ground for faith by making credible the acceptance of a faith such as that revealed in the Scriptures and the decisions of the Councils of the Church, but not to go further. A group of Rome-based Jesuits, of whom the most prominent were Matteo Liberatore and Joseph Kleutgen, argued that only a scholastic philosophy, looking to that of Thomas Aquinas, would do, and they convinced Gioacchino Pecci, the future Pope Leo XIII, of the merits of their case.
In the Pope's mind the main object of the scholastic revival was theological, but there were at least two others: a revaluation of the thought of the Middle Ages, and of the Church's rôle in it, and indeed a re-affirmation of its value in the face of widespread denigration; and the thought that a revived Scholasticism, judiciously interpreted, might be found of use in questions of modern philosophy and science, despite prevalent expectations to the contrary. In short, by this action the Pope intended to re-affirm, against all the apparent odds, what he saw as the Church's heritage, and from that would no doubt flow improved morale among the troops confronted by a hostile world and, even, greater respect for the Church among those who did not belong to it.
The encyclical thus led to a theological programme to re-examine and restate Aquinas's 'five ways' for proving God's existence, to a historical programme to recover the mediaeval materials on which scholastic thought to contemporary questions, whether social, ethical, or scientific. These different programmes were not of course independent: the scholasticism available to the Pope had been mediated by the work of commentators at least two centuries distant from Aquinas's own time, so that a genuine revival of his thought had to go back past these to the sources, to find out what Aquinas had actually said; Aquinas's work was also apparently embedded in an obsolete natural philosophy, of generally Aristotelian character, so that if his theology was recoverable, it had in some way to be reconciled with later scientific ideas; and any application to contemporary questions had to depend on answers to the prior question of what the philosophy was that was to be applied.
The later progress of scholarship was in due course to call into question most of the answers initially given, but it is these initial answers that concern Duhem: the work of Aquinas was supposed to consist principally in the reconciliation of Christianity with Aristotle, and in the mid-twentieth century Dom David Knowles, a historian with a low opinion of the scholars of the century following Aquinas, was still presenting Aquinas's supposedly successful achievement of this goal as the crowning intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages. It was this Aristotelianism of Aquinas, and of scholastic philosophy as it was generally understood, that was perceived to be the main stumbling block in the way of a Scholastic revival, and it will be a main problem for the remainder of this essay. To the extent that Duhem was involved in neo-Scholasticism, if he was so involved, that involvement can be expected to show itself in Aristotelian themes in his work, and by a sympathetic treatment of mediaeval Aristotelianism, as well as by associations with journals with generally neo-Scholastic policies.

4. Duhem the Scholastic?

Given the obstacles to scholasticism mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is understandable that different would-be scholastics adopted different strategies to meet them. The Roman seminaries, for example, apparently maintained an integral Thomism with few compromises towards modern science, but this was hardly a serious option for a practising mathematical physicist interested in having his work taken seriously by his contemporaries. Another obvious possibility would have been to reject the whole thing root and branch, either outright, or in the manner of the Italian Agostino Gemmelli, who in 1904-05 proposed a Scholasticism that included modern thought. I believe that something like this was Duhem's final position, but it was, as will be seen, decisively rejected by Pope Pius X in his Encyclical Pascendi of 1907, and something will be said below about how Duhem got there: it is by no means obvious that outright rejection was his position when he wrote them, and his earlier reactions to Blondel seem to point the other way.
An obvious intermediate position was to try to adapt scholastic natural philosophy to make it conform to the discoveries of modern science, the position that seems to have suited the eirenic temperament of Désiré Mercier, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Malines, and his group at Louvain. This was the programme behind the Société Scientifique de Bruxelles, which Duhem seems to have joined as a lecturer at Lille, and he seems to have appreciated its attitudes and approaches enough to attempt to recruit Paul Tannery into its membership. Apart from its Annales, which published his Les Théories Électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell, its principal organ was the Revue des Questions Scientifiques, a heavyweight quarterly carrying in depth discussions of the scientific questions of the day, but intended for an educated lay audience. it was not afraid of carrying long multipart articles, and of these Duhem became a major contributor: it seems to have been his preferred place of publication for general philosophical and historical pieces throughout the 1890s. This was the journal that carried his 'Réflexions' of 1892, Vicair's critique, and Duhem's replies. One of the latter, not considered so far in this essay, seems as good a place as any to begin a consideration of Duhem's possible relation to neo-Scholasticism.
'Physique et Métaphysique' of 1893 was the first of Duhem's replies to Vicaire. It addressed the suggestion, made by more than one of Duhem's readers, that his rigourous separation of physics from metaphysics was no more than a cover for denigration of the latter: the metaphysician was free to get on with it in his corner while the Duhemian physicist got on with it in his without interference, the implication being the positivist one that physics was the only real knowledge to be had. Duhem insisted that this was not his intention. On the contrary, metaphysics was for him a genuine form of knowledge, indeed "more excellent" than physics, but separated from physics by having different objects and being governed by different methods. The Scholastic expertise with which he set out his views seems to have impressed not a few of his readers enough to make them wonder whether he had a scholastic mentor, for in the normal course of events this was not the sort of expertise a physicist could be expected to have. Be that as it may, Duhem was claiming to be classifying independent and legitimate science, not distinguishing sense from nonsense in the manner of earlier and later positivists.
Repeated in Duhem's later writings, this move has been the main source for the view that Duhem's prime philosophical inspiration was neo-Scholastic. But initially plausible as this interpretation may seem, it becomes less so when Duhem is compared with a genuine neo-Scholastic like Jacques Maritain, who did indeed distinguish his sciences, but only so that thereafter he could unite them, assign each of them its place in the overall system of the sciences, and say which sciences could and could not establish what on the foundations of which others. The basis for Maritain's scheme, as of numberless others of like provenance, is the view that some sciences can be subordinated, or sub-alternated, to others in the Aristotelian scheme of things. A science is conceived of as a deductive system of syllogisms, deduced from one or more definitions of the essences that are the subject matter of that science, and remaining within its genus or natural kind, and it is supposed that the conclusions of one science can serve as principles for another, as when the sciences of equilibria and music take their principles, as subaltern science, from the superior sciences of arithmetic and geometry. Famously, this scheme ran into difficulties with the applied mathematical sciences, such as astronomy in ancient times and terrestrial physics in modern: if Aristotle was right, natural philosophy should have been subordinate to 'physics', or, in Duhem's terminology, 'metaphysics', but the mathematical science of nature soon left Aristotelian metaphysics far behind, a point that will be considered further below.
I mention now two aspects of such schemes: they were only achieved at the price of distorting Aristotle, for whom mixed sciences would have meant mixing genera, something his methodological principles forbade; and their rationalistic atmosphere, not to say hubris, is remote indeed from a scientific world in which, as in the physics of Duhem, mathematical formulae are devised to meet the problems thrown up by experiment, not those suggested or deduced from a priori theory. The reconstruction of Aristotle that would reconcile his views to modern science would have to be pretty radical, radical both at the level of method and of content.
Nevertheless, there seems to have been one aspect of Aristotle's system that Duhem found somewhat promising: its freedom from a priori selection of the primary qualities by which, in the manner of the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, all secondary qualities had to be explained. For him, what qualities were primary and what secondary ought to be a purely pragmatic matter, decided by the progress of theory and experiment as successive theories succeeded in classifying wider and wider collections of data. Where, though, he differed from Aristotle is that his physics was to be a mathematical science; it was to classify qualities, not explain them, and do so by replacing their measured intensities by symbols subject to mathematical manipulation; it was to be mathematical science whose form no metaphysical system could decide a priori: that form too was to emerge from the progress of physics, as successive theoretical classifications of the mathematical intensities of qualities, and the implied classifications of the qualities these represented, hopefully converged on the natural classification that was the goal of physics.
Such was the 'Aristotelianism' that Duhem advertised in a variety of articles in the middle to late 1890s, particularly in his historical works culminating in Le Mixte et la Cominaison Chimique and L'Évolution de la Mécanique, before repeating it yet again in 'Physicque de Croyant' after which it disappears from view. It was a pretty minimal Aristotelianism, but after 1905 even that disappears from view. To my knowledge, Duhem never withdrew such views, but their disappearance from his later writings is indicative of his final decisive rejection of neo-Scholasticism and all it stood for, of those of his earlier attitudes that had made it reasonable for Blondel in 1893 to tease him as a peripatetic. Duhem's ultimate reasons for this shift are not completely clear—some possible answers will be explored later in this chapter—yet there can be no question but that it came at a critical time, when the so-called modernist crisis was at its height, and neo-Scholasticism lay at the hearth of that crisis.
I have already referred more than once to the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregris of 1907: the prominent rôle neo-Scholasticism played in it can hardly escape the notice of any reader; implicit in the doctrinal part, it becomes explicit in the disciplinary part that follows. We are told that a distaste for the scholastic method is the surest sign of modernism in any writer (What else would be expected of an adherent of a modern philosophy but opposition to scholasticism?), and the text goes on to insist that scholastic philosophy is henceforth to be the basis for Catholic thought:

We will and ordain that scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences. [...] And let it be clearly understood above all things that the scholastic philosophy We prescribe is that which the Angelic Doctor has bequeathed to us, and We, therefore, declare that all the ordinances of Our Predecessor on this subject continue fully in force [...] Further let Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.

The Angelic Doctor is a Scholastic appellation for Thomas Aquinas.
From all this Duhem had largely stood apart, and events will show him moving yet further away from it. Even in his historical work to date, unusual for its time in that Aristotle is taken seriously, there is no trace of the work on mediaeval science that was to be expected of a historically-minded Catholic scientist in that environment, and was in the end to do more than anything else to perpetuate Duhem's fame. But, as will be seen, when he does get involved in mediaeval science, what he finds is not perhaps what the Pope had in mind. While Pascendi was insisting on the centrality of scholastic philosophy Duhem was increasingly associated with a journal committed to opposing that philosophy. The best place to illustrate Duhem's developing distance from neo-Scholasticism is his association with the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne.

—R.N.D. Martin's Pierre Duhem pgs. 38-49 with quotes from Pope Pius X's encyclical Pascendi Domenici Gregis

Duhem, like Heisenberg, thought there was a "sharp division between faith and science." Even though Duhem made noble discoveries in the history of science related to mediaeval science's contributions, due in large part to the Catholic Church, to modern science; he refused to see the importance of adopting a Scholastic-Thomistic philosophy not especially for theology but for science. Why is this philosophy needed? Primarily because it opposes Modernism and sees that faith and reason "are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth (bina quasi pennæ videntur quibus veritatis ad contemplationem hominis attollitur animus):"

III. Relation Between Faith and Science

Faith and Science
Q.—Can we now have some idea of the relations which the Modernists establish between faith and science, including, under this latter term, history?
A.—'16. Having reached this point [...] we have sufficient material in hand to enable us to see the relations which Modernists establish between faith and science, including history also under the name of science.'
Q.—What difference do they make between the object of the one and of the other?
A.—'And in the first place it is to be held that the object of the one is quite extraneous to and separate from the object of the other. For faith occupies itself solely with something which science declares to be unknowable for it. Hence each has a separate field assigned to it: science is entirely concerned with the reality of phenomena, into which faith does not enter at all; faith on the contrary concerns itself with the divine reality which is entirely unknown to science.
Q.—Then, according to them, no conflict is possible between faith and science?
A.—'Thus the conclusion is reached that there can never be any dissension between faith and science, for if each keeps on its own ground they can never meet and therefore never be in contradiction.
Q.—'And if it be objected that in the visible world there are some things which appertain to faith, such as the human life of Christ'?
A.—'The Modernists reply by denying this.'
Q.—How can they deny it?
A.—They say: 'For though such things come within the category of phenomena, still in as far as they are lived by faith and in the way already described have been by faith transfigured and disfigured, they have been removed from the world of sense and translated to become material for the divine.
Q.—'Hence should it be further asked whether Christ has wrought real miracles, and made real prophecies, whether He rose truly from the dead and ascended into heaven,' what do they answer?
A.—'The answer of agnostic science will be in the negative.
'The answer of faith in the affirmative'
Q.—But is not that a flagrant contradiction between science and faith?
'There will not be, on that account, any conflict between them. For it will be denied by the philosopher as philosopher, speaking to philosophers and considering Christ only in His historical reality; and it will be affirmed by the speaker, speaking to believers and considering the life of Christ as lived again by the faith and in the faith.'
Q.—Faith and science acting thus in entirely separate fields, will there be, according to the Modernists, no subordination of the one to the other.
A.—'17. [...] it would be a great mistake to suppose that, given these theories, one is authorised to believe that faith and science are independent of one another. On the side of science the independence is indeed complete, but it is quite different with regard to faith, which is subject to science.'
Q.—Faith subject to science! But on what ground?
A.—'Not on one but on three grounds.'
Q.—According to the Modernists, what is the first ground?
A.—'For in the first place it must be observed that in every religious fact, when you take away the divine reality and the experience of it which the believer possesses, everything else, and especially the religious formulas of it, belongs to the sphere of phenomena and therefore falls under the control of science. Let the believer leave the world if he will, but so long as he remains in it he must continue, whether he like it or not, to be subject to the laws, the observation, the judgments of science and of history.'
Q.—What is the second ground of the subordination of faith to science?
A.—'Further, when it is said that God is the object of faith alone, the statement refers only to the divine reality not to the idea of God. The latter also is subject to science which while it philosophises in what is called the logical order soars also to the absolute and the ideal. It is therefore the right of philosophy and of science to form conclusions concerning the idea of God, to direct it in its evolution and to purify it of any extraneous elements which may become confused with it.'
Q.—What is the third ground?
A.—'Finally, man does not suffer a dualism to exist in him, and the believer therefore feels within him an impelling need so to harmonise faith with science, that it may never oppose the general conception which science sets forth concerning the universe.'
Q.—Then, according to the Modernist doctrine, faith is in bondage to science?
A.—Yes. 'It is evident that science is to be entirely independent of faith, while on the other hand, and notwithstanding that they are supposed to be strangers to each other, faith is made subject to science.'
Q.—How did Pius XI and Gregory IX stigmatize such doctrine?
A.—'All this [...] is in formal opposition with the teachings of Our Predecessor, Pius IX, where he lays it down that: "In matters of religion it is the duty of philosophy not to command but to serve, but not to prescribe what is to be believed but to embrace what is to be believed with reasonable obedience, not to scrutinise the depths of the mysteries of God but to venerate them devoutly and humbly."
'The Modernists completely invert the parts, and to them may be applied the words of another Predecessor of Ours, Gregory IX., addressed to some theologians of his time: "Some among you, inflated like bladders with the spirit of vanity strive by profane novelties to cross the boundaries fixed by the Fathers, twisting the sense of the heavenly pages . . .to the philosophical teaching of the rationals, not for the profit of their hearer but to make a show of science ... these, seduced by strange and eccentric doctrines, make the head of the tail and force the queen to serve the servant."'

IV. Practical Consequences

The Methods of Modernists
18. [...]
Q.—Is this ["the mutual separation of science and faith"] done also in other scientific work?
A.—'So, too, acting on the principle that science in no way depends upon faith, when they treat of philosophy, history, criticism, feeling no horror at treading in the footsteps of Luther [Prop. 29, condemned by Leo X, Bull, Exsurge Domine, May 16, 1520: 'It is permissible to us to invalidate the authority of Councils, freely to gainsay their acts, to judge of their decrees, and confidently to assert whatever seems to us to be true, whether it has been approved or reprobated by any Council whatsoever.'], they are wont to display a certain contempt for Catholic doctrines, or the Holy Fathers, for the Ecumenical Councils, for the ecclesiastical magisterium; and should they be rebuked for this, they complain that they are being deprived of their liberty.'
[...]

I. Rules Relative to Studies

The Study of Scholastic Philosophy
[...]
Q.—Would it be a great disadvantage to set aside St. Thomas?
A.—'Further let Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.'
[...]
Q.—According to what law ought the study of natural sciences to be regulated?
A.—'47. With regard to profane studies suffice it to recall here what Our Predecessor has admirably said: "Apply yourselves energetically to the study of natural sciences: the brilliant discoveries and the bold and useful applications of them made in our times which have won such applause by our contemporaries will be an object of perpetual praise for those that come after us" (Leo XIII. Alloc., March 7, 1880). But this do without interfering with sacred studies, as Our Predecessor in these most grave words prescribed: "If you carefully search for the cause of those errors you will find that it lies in the fact that in these days when the natural sciences absorb so much study, the more severe and lofty studies have been proportionately neglected—some of them have almost passed into oblivion, some of them are pursued in a half-hearted or superficial way, and, sad to say, now that they are fallen from their old estate, they have been disfigured by perverse doctrines and monstrous errors" (loco cit.). We ordain, therefore, that the study of natural science in the seminaries be carried on under this law.'
[...]

Conclusion
The Church and Scientific Progress

Triennial Returns
'57. This, Venerable Brethren, is what we have thought it our duty to write to you for the salvation of all who believe. The adversaries of the Church will doubtless abuse what we have said to refurbish the old calumny by which we are traduced as the enemy of science and of the progress of humanity. In order to oppose a new answer to such accusations, which the history of the Christian religion refutes by never failing arguments, it is Our intention to establish and develop by every means in our power a special Institute in which, through the co-operation of those Catholics who are most eminent for their learning, the progress of science and other realms of knowledge may be promoted under the guidance and teaching of Catholic truth. God grant that we may happily realise our design with the ready assistance of all those who bear a sincere love for the Church of Christ. But of this we will speak on another occasion.
'58. Meanwhile, Venerable Brethren, fully confident in your zeal and work, we beseech for you with our whole heart and soul the abundance of heavenly light, so that in the midst of this great perturbation of men's minds from the insidious invasions of error from every side, you may see clearly what you ought to do and may perform the task with all your strength and courage. May Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, be with you by His power; and may the Immaculate Virgin, the destroyer of all heresies, be with you by her prayers and aid. And We, as a pledge of Our affection and of divine assistance in adversity, grant most affectionately and with all Our heart to you, your clergy and people the Apostolic Benediction.
'Given at St. Peter's, Rome, on the 8th day of September, 1907, the fifth year of our Pontificate.'

—Fr. John Fitzpatrick's Catechism of Modernism with quotes from Pope Pius X's encyclical Pascendi Domenici Gregis

Even though Pope St. Pius X says that one "cannot set St. Thomas aside [...] without grave detriment," he was primarily referring to the teaching and study of theology, and in section 47. appears to think the natural sciences should be regulated by a different set of rules and "without interfering with sacred studies." Yet in both cases he is stressing the importance of St. Thomas's "perennial philosophy" in order to avoid "perverse doctrines and monstrous errors" not only in sacred sciences but also in the "profane" or secular natural sciences as well. A notable example of a "perverse doctrine" or teaching in physics is the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the solid "perennial philosophy," only one world can exist. (Summa Theologica Iª q. 47 a. 3).

The mathematician and philosopher Wolfgang Smith (author of "From Schrödinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology" in The Thomist) calls Modernism's influence on science the "plague of scientistic belief:"

Yet, despite the fact of quantum indeterminism, not a few eminent scientists continue to champion the mechanistic tenet. Albert Einstein himself, as one knows, so far from admitting that the discoveries of quantum physics have overthrown the classical postulate, argued precisely in the opposite direction: it is the principle of determinism, he said in effect, that invalidates quantum mechanics as a fundamental theory. This illustrates quite clearly the philosophical and indeed a priori character of the tenet in question, and the fact that propositions of this kind can neither be verified nor falsified by empirical findings. This fact, however, remains generally unrecognized, with the result that the postulate of universal mechanism has retained to this day its status as a major article of scientistic belief.
My second example pertains to a more fundamental stratum of philosophical thought, and is consequently still more far-reaching in its implications: “physical reductionism,” let us call it (for reasons which will presently become clear). The thesis hinges upon an epistemological assumption, an idealist postulate, one could say, which affirms that the act of sense perception terminates, not in an external object as we commonly believe, but in a subjective representation of some kind. According to this view, the red apple which we perceive exists somehow in our mind or consciousness; it is a subjective image, a fantasy which mankind has all along mistaken for an external object. Thus thought René Descartes, to whom we owe the philosophical foundations of modern science. Descartes sought to correct what he took to be the mistaken notions of mankind concerning perceptible entities by distinguishing between the external object, which he termed res extensa, and its subjective representation existing in the mind or so-called res cogitans. What was previously conceived as a single object (and what in daily life is invariably regarded as such) has therefore become split in two; as Whitehead has put it: “Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.” It is to be noted that this Cartesian differentiation between the “conjecture” and the “dream” goes not only against the common intuitions of mankind, but is equally at odds with the great philosophical traditions, including especially the Thomistic, where the opposition becomes as it were diametrical. Now, it is this questionable Cartesian doctrine—which Whitehead refers to as “bifurcation”—that has served from the start as the fundamental plank of physics, or better said, of the scientistic world-view in terms of which we habitually interpret the results of physics. And once again we find that the two disparate factors—the operational facts of physics and their customary interpretation—have become in effect identified, which is to say that the tenet of bifurcation does indeed function as a scientistic belief.
I would like to emphasize that in addition to the fact that bifurcation contradicts the most basic human intuitions as well as the most venerable philosophical traditions, there is also not a shred of empirical evidence in support of this heterodox position. Nor can there be, as follows from the fact that physics can be perfectly well interpreted on a non-bifurcationist basis, as I have shown in a recent monograph. It turns out, moreover, that the moment one does interpret physics in non-bifurcationist terms, the so-called quantum paradoxes—which have prompted physicists to invent the most bizarre ontologies—vanish of their own accord. It seems that quantum physics has thus implicitly sided with the pre-Cartesian world-view.

—Wolfgang Smith's "The Plague of Scientistic Belief"

This mechanism has far-reaching philosophical consequences which in turn influence how subsequent science is performed and interpreted. E.g., in Galileo's description of tickling, he adopts a subjectivist, agnostic philosophy because he denies that the nature of "feather," something beyond the senses, can be known; for him, sense knowledge begins and ends in the senses.

I move my hand first over a marble statue and then over a living man. To the effect flowing from my hand, this is the same with regard to both objects and my hand [Here he assumes spatial motion is all that matters.]; it consists of the primary phenomena of motion and touch, for which we have no further names. But the live body which receives these operations feels different sensations according to the various places touched. When touched upon the soles of the feet, for example, or under the knee or armpit, it feels in addition to the common sensation of touch a sensation on which we have imposed a special name, "tickling." This sensation belongs to us and not to the hand. Anyone would make a serious error if he said that the hand, in addition to the properties of moving and touching, possessed another faculty of "tickling," as if tickling were a phenomenon that resided in the hand that tickled. A piece of paper or a feather drawn lightly over any part of our bodies performs intrinsically the same operations of moving and touching, but by touching the eye, the nose, or the upper lip it excites in us an almost intolerable titillation, even though elsewhere it is scarcely felt. This titillation belongs entirely to us and not to the feather [therefore subjectivism]; if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no more than a mere word. I believe that no more solid an existence belongs to many qualities which we have come to attribute to physical bodies-tastes, odors, colors, and many more.

—Galileo's Il Saggiatore pg. 275

As interesting as Gailileo's description of tickling may be, he is wrong. Here is why:

Those who hold for the subjectivity of sensible qualities maintain that such qualities have no existence independently of the sensing subject, and on this ground effectively deny the very existence of objective intentions for such qualities. They find convincing Galileo's example of the movement of a feather across the skin to explain the tickle. So they introduce a distinction between primary qualities such as movement and secondary qualities such as the sensed tickle, and hold that the primary qualities have objective existence whereas secondary qualities do not. As a result they populate the universe with particles in motion and attempt to explain all sensations by the various kinds of movement these particles undergo, meanwhile denuding the objective world of sensible qualities in their traditional understanding.
The source of the difficulty here is an improper grasp of the role of the mental representation in the knowledge act. To think of the concept as what is known, rather than seeing that the nature is what is known, though by means of the concept, is to cut oneself off from intellectual knowledge of the real, for one is always left wondering about any extra-mental reality to which the concept might correspond. Similarly, to think of the sensation or the percept as itself what is known, rather than seeing the sensible quality as what is known, though by means of the sensation or percept, is to be imprisoned within one's sense organs and brain. The result is a radical solipsism that prohibits individuals from ever making statements about the objects of experience, leaving them to dwell in a world of their own imaginings.
The tickle may be something sensed on the surface of the skin, but that admission surely does not permit the inference that there is no movement there, or extending the argument further to hold that there is no heat in boiling water, no color in a ruby or a rose, no sound in the cry of a bird, or no odor or taste in an onion. All of these are accidents or accidental modifications of the subjects in which they are sensed. Just as those subjects have natures (inorganic, plan or animal in kind), so accidents may be said to have natures in an analogous sense. And even if we cannot know precisely the nature of heat, of color, and so on, we can at least model those natures in terms of the modalities they introduce in the components of the substantial natures in which they exist, namely the electrons, atoms, and molecules [...]

—Fr. William A. Wallace, O.P.'s The Modeling of Nature (pgs. 148-149)

With the adoption of a Thomistic philosophy, we can avoid all these sorts of philosophical and scientific methodological errors; we can interpret quantum mechanics correctly, for example; and, in short, we can prevent scientistic belief from plaguing science.