Hello everyone!

I wrote a brief and general text comparing Descartes to Newton to my final exam on Philosophy of Science. As I will have only 5 minutes to orally answer to the question, I didn't go into details. However, I do not feel secure about my answer. The seminars I had were confusing and the lecturer seemed not to understand the subject herself (I had lectures with a good professor, but the seminars were held by a very young doctoral student) and I don't feel like asking her to help me with it.

Anyway, if any of you could tell me what is good and wrong with my brief analysis, I would be very grateful!

"Both Cartesian and Newtonian natural philosophies are looking for universal laws. The difference lies on the principle of deduction versus induction. Descartes starts from the most simple principles, the most simple and universal truths that are the most apparent to him as a human being and a creation of God. From this simple stage, he goes into more complex natural by derivation. It means that it is like a stair that gets more complex every time it goes up. The aim of science, then, is to explain the laws the natural phenomena is working upon. These laws were somehow created by God.

The subject of highest importance in this scheme is the Cartesian body, having as its fundamental property the property of extension. The body and the property of extension are static, while the laws are dynamic. Descartes believes that the way these laws act upon the world is dynamic, while Newton believes they are static. Descartes defends that we should analyse the world from its basic elements because they are near our reality and are easier to understand. But he also acknowledges that God, having free will, could have chosen so many different ways, paths of creating the world, that we will never be able to decide on each path he actually chose. We should think our method as always being hypothetical, hence its denomination as hypothetical deductive reasoning. Deduction = from the basic to the complex. Sensorial data, experimentation and observations in harmony with one hypothesis indicates one to be near to the way God in fact created the world. We need to be in constant inquiry to get near to the universal law and uncover the ways God had chosen to create the world.

On the other hand, Newton is opposed to the idea of hypothetical deductive reasoning. Newton says that despite God having free will, he does not work randomly upon the world. So, if we want to reach real knowledge, truth, we cannot admit only hypotheses, we need to go after truth itself. He believes that world was created in a reasonable way. If God is perfect, so should be the world. The perfect tool to analyse is mathematics, so we need to inquire about nature not on a hypothetical ground, but in harmony with mathematics and the synthetic and analytical method. For Newton, God didn’t change his ways. The laws are static and we can get to know them through methodology and the principles of mathematics. Newton also defends an inductive approach, going from the more complex to the simple facts, based on a highly experimental basis. The rainbow would be an example of that. He first gets to the more complex conclusion that white light is made of several colours to only then explain how rainbows happen, which is a more basic phenomenon."