Individualism,Causal Location,and the Eclipse of Scholastic Philosophy

Abstract

Freudenthal has proposed that seventeenth-century philosophy depends upon a presumption that the behaviour of a material object is to be accounted for in terms of properties that are localized within its fundamental particles, rather than in the relationships between the object and its environment. He attributes this metaphysical preference to a special emphasis on the priority of the individual in contemporary social developments. I argue the contrary: the localization of causality is not a characteristic of the new philosophy, but is indeed one of the fundamental principles of the scholastic tradition, both in its social philosophy and in its philosophy of nature. By comparison with their opponents, the seventeenth-century mechanists are radical holists, promoting the view that the bulk of an object's properties resides in relationships with the remainder of the universe. Freudenthal's contrast between the matter-theory of `feudal-organic' Europe and that of early capitalism is quite invalid, and with it, his attempt at social explanation of the genesis of modern science.