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This Episode:
Today we have on /u/link0007, better known as Lukas Wolf, who is flaired on AskHistorians for 18th Century Newtonian Philosophy. This is an interesting and in depth episode because it talks about a couple of fields that do not get a lost of interest--history of philosophy and history of science. In this episode Lukas describes how the early scientists dealt with the questions of where god was in the research they were doing, and how creationism plays into early scientific arguments. We also cover Robert Boyle, David Hume, the Royal Society (the first scientific organization) and many more interesting people.
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Oh shit there goes my weekend! ^(^at ^least ^I ^hope ^so, ^I ^love ^answering ^questions!)
Finished listening to this on my way to work this morning. The main thing I want to know is the answer to the opening question - where did the anthropic principle first come from? Was it Hume?
Another thing that interested me was the comment about how separate history of philosophy is from history generally. Do you know if that's distinctive to Groningen, or The Netherlands, or a more general way of organising things?
I also loved the commentary of how history of philosophy is philosophy in a way that the history of pornography isn't pornography. I see a new AskHistoriansAfterDark feature coming up on the sexiest stories, works of art and artefacts from history.
Here's a question I thought to ask later! To what extent did the Royal Society embrace or reject creationism? If they embraced it did they later go on to reject it?
Thank you for the podcast, /u/link0007! I have many questions - the reality behind the common story of a sudden enlightenment/invention of science fascinates me. One thing I'm wondering about: to what extent was scientific discovery guided by what the Royal Society did and didn't like, and what did they think they were doing when they passed such judgments?
You very likely discuss this on the podcast - I haven't got to it yet - but Newton was born the year after Descartes published First Meditations and in physics, Descartes was a major figure; did Newton ever comment on 'cogito ergo sum'/ Descartes' philosophy of mind?
So there's all this discussion about decades of argument from design, people proposing theories, people shooting them down, arguments, lectures, ....
Then William Paley's Natural Theology, and the podcast basically says "and that ended all discussion and everyone was happy with it until Darwin".
Am I misunderstanding or missing something? How did decades of discussion suddenly stop with one side winning completely, from a summary work at that?