The house on the corner
is Beeckman’s birthplace in Middelburg.
When I recently wanted to visit Middelburg,
an old and beautiful town in the southwest of the Netherlands, I wondered
whether there might be a well-known philosopher who came from there. So I
searched on the Internet and, indeed, I found one: Isaac Beeckman, who was born
there in 1588. I hear you say: “Isaac who?” You needn’t to be ashamed if you
have never heard of him, for Beeckman did not publish his ideas and outside a little
circle of philosophical experts hardly anybody knows his name. Nevertheless he
had an important impact on philosophy because of his relations with many
outstanding philosophers of his time. He had such a big influence on the development
of science and philosophy that Gassendi called him even the greatest
philosopher he ever met. If you have heard of Beeckman, it is probably because
of his friendship with Descartes. Some call him even his teacher. Anyway, he
stimulated Descartes’s enthusiasm for science and designed mathematical puzzles
for him.
Beeckman’s contributions would have
remained rather unknown, if in 1905 his journal hadn’t been found again by Cornelis
de Waard. Since this journal – which Beeckman kept from 1604 till 1634 – is
very detailed, we know much about his discoveries, ideas and relations. So we
know that Beeckman first met Descartes in Breda, a town in the south of the
Netherlands, where Beeckman then lived and Descartes was garrisoned as a
soldier. It is said that both men met when they were looking at a mathematical
problem on a poster on the marketplace and Descartes asked Beeckman to
translate it for him from Dutch into Latin. They got talking and the next day
Descartes brought Beeckman the solution. They stayed friends till Beeckman died
in 1637 (in Dordrecht), although their friendship was difficult and sometimes
broken off (especially in 1630).
Beeckman studied theology, literature and
mathematics in Leiden, and later also medicine in Middelburg and then in Caen
in France, where he graduated in 1618. Since he couldn’t get a vicarage because
of a theological conflict with the church, he first became a candle maker and
begun to repair water pipes. Returned from Caen he became a teacher at the
Latin School in Utrecht. However, more important is that he was a very curious
man (and maybe this was one of the reasons that he found no time to publish his
ideas) and he did much research and study in all kinds of fields. So he was
active with experiments and the theory of physics, music, medicine and
philosophy, but he tried also to find a proof that God existed. In Leiden Simon
Stevin and Rudolph Snel (Snellius) were among his teachers and later he
corresponded with, for example, the mathematician Marin Mersenne, the
astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the philosophers Pierre Gassendi
and Francis Bacon and the physicians William Harvey and William Gilbert.
In this blog I cannot do more than drawing
attention to this philosopher who was so important for the development of philosophy.
Therefore, I have to limit myself to mentioning only some of his most important
contributions and ideas:
- Beeckman’s idea that matter is composed of
atoms.
- His mechanistic world view.
- Beeckman gave a new and correct description
of inertia, namely that every moving object follows a straight line, unless
other forces work on it. However, he accepted the false idea that also a
circular movement is a basic movement (not seeing that it is caused by a
centripetal force).
- His analysis how a pump works. Beeckman
rejected the prevailing view that water avoids a vacuum but explains the
working with the help of the idea of air pressure.
- His explanation of the relation between
the sound of a string and the length of the string.
- Beeckman made the first weather station
in the world, yet before Torricelli invented the barometer.
It’s no wonder that such ideas brought
Beeckman into conflict with the Calvinistic church in the Netherlands, which
had completely opposite ideas on how the world was constituted and had to be
explained. In his diary on 19 November 1626 he succinctly wrote down what the
heart of the problem was:
“In philosophy you have always to go from
wonder to no wonder. I mean, you must examine so long till what appears strange
to you no longer appears strange to you. However, in theology you have to go
from no wonder to wonder.
Sources:
It’s difficult to find information on Beeckman on
the Internet, so I gathered it by taking here and there some relevant facts
from Dutch websites on Beeckman, from the Wikipedia on Beeckman (Dutch and
English versions), from several books in my library (mainly on Descartes) and
from Beeckman’s journal (on http://www.dbnl.org/titels/titel.php?id=beec002jour00)
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