Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In the comments, Greg speculated that the Cartesians rejected Newton because his theory was unfamiliar and, they thought, incorrect. But the actual situation is almost the exact opposite: Newton's theory seemed all too familiar to them: they thought it was a throwback to Scholasticism. Moliere famously lampooned scholastic philosophers in a scene where they "explain" opium's sleep-producing properties as due to its " dormitive principle ." Well, that was the way Newton's theory looked to the Cartesians: he was "explaining" gravity by an "attractive principle" contained in matter. It was not that they thought Newton's theory was wrong : they didn't think it had any explanatory power. There were Cartesian theories that contained inverse square laws, but which, to them, provided explanations of gravity, in line with their mechanical philosophy .

As noted by Ed Feser, Thomas Nagel pins the tail on the exact same donkey I have in some recent posts: The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essentia...