The Rise of the “Mechanical Philosophy”: Current Scholarship on Seventeenth-Century ScienceDaniel Garber and Sophie Roux. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 300. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Pp. xviii+327. $139.00 (cloth).

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-357
Author(s):  
Doug Jesseph
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy

Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
Work World ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century.

Francis Bacon and His Fate in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2010–2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-220
Author(s):  
Doina-Cristina Rusu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Theory And Experiments

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions.

Spinoza and the Philosophy of Science

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Proper Method ◽  
Standard Conception ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that the standard conception of Spinoza as a fellow-traveling mechanical philosopher and proto-scientific naturalist is misleading.1 It argues, first, that Spinoza’s account of the proper method for the study of nature presented in the Theological-Political Treatise points away from the one commonly associated with the mechanical philosophy. Moreover, throughout his works Spinoza’s views on the very possibility of knowledge of nature are decidedly skeptical. Third, in the seventeenth-century debates over proper methods in the sciences, Spinoza sided with those who criticized the aspirations of the physico-mathematicians like Galileo, Huygens, Wallis, and Wren who thought the application of mathematics to nature was the way to make progress. In particular, he offers grounds for doubting their confidence in the significance of measurement as well as their piecemeal methodology. Along the way, this chapter offers a new interpretation of common notions in the context of treating Spinoza’s account of motion.

The Reception of Descartes in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Universities: Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy (1650–1680)

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Gellera
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism (1670–90), regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

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