ABSTRACT
Mechanical philosophy was a philosophy of nature, popular in the seventeenth century, that sought to explain all natural phenomena in terms of matter and motion without recourse to any kind of action-at-adistance. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many natural philosophers rejected Aristotelianism, which had provided metaphysical and epistemological foundations for both science and theology at least since the thirteenth century. One candidate for a replacement was the mechanical philosophy, which had its roots in classical Epicureanism. Mechanical philosophers attempted to explain all natural phenomena in terms of the configurations, motions, and collisions of small, unobservable particles of matter. For example, to explain the fact that lead is denser than water, a mechanical philosopher would say that the lead has more particles of matter per cubic measure than water. The mechanical explanation differed from Aristotelian explanations, which endowed matter with real qualities and used them to explain the differences in density by appealing to the fact that lead has more absolute heaviness than the water. A hallmark of the mechanical philosophy was the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, according to which matter is really endowed with only a few “primary” qualities, and all others (such as color, taste, or odor) are the result of the impact of the primary qualities on our sense organs. Nature was thus mechanized, and most qualities were considered subjective. This approach enhanced the mathematization of nature at the same time that it provided an answer to the skeptical critique of sensory knowledge.
