Teleology and Contingency

Many Renaissance philosophers shared an anthropocentric conception of the human position in the cosmos. This was especially true for the Renaissance Platonists, but also for other authors such as Oswald Croll and Johann Amos Comenius. One of the epistemologically striking features of Renaissance anthropocentrism was the conviction that nature or God guaranteed humans the acquisition of knowledge of the cosmos. This knowledge, however, was never an end in itself; it was always part of the journey of the human soul towards God. Therefore, in the anthropocentric concept of nature, there was no place for the idea of scientific progress. Renaissance natural philosophy thus demonstrated convincingly that the idea of the progress of knowledge was not as natural as it may seem to the modern reader. This chapter further explains the rejection of anthropocentrism by early modern natural philosophers such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, and Bernard de Fontenelle. The exclusion of anthropocentric teleology had important epistemological and anthropological implications. The early modern mechanism, the astronomical magnification of the universe, and the introduction of the idea of a plurality of worlds entailed a reassessment of the human position in the universe and, above all, a rejection of the idea that nature was adapted to be cognizable for humans. The reconceptualization of the concept of nature in early modern natural philosophy meant that knowledge of nature would have to be the result of long-term, gradual, slow, and collective collaboration.