The Mechanization of Nature (1300—1700)

The shift to early modern atomism and corpusculareanism was traditionally attributed to the renaissance revival of ancient atomism, which replaced matter and form, eventually undermining Aristotelian hylomorphism. Some early modern atomists fit this narrative, but as recent research expanded both the range of figures and topics in European philosophy from the 14^th to 17^th centuries, we have become aware of the diversity of Scholastic views of the substantial form, matter, quantity, space, time and causal explanation, as well as their relation to theological debates on creation, the Eucharist, the resurrection and the soul’s immortality. This research indicates that the causal direction was not always from the revival of anti-Aristotelian matter theories to innovations within Aristotelian physics to the replacement of Aristotelian metaphysical principles of matter and form. I show that there is at least one case where the application of Aristotle’s metaphysical principles to the problem of individuation launches an argument against hylomorphism, and for atomism. This counter example challenges standard assumptions and indicates that research must go beyond innovations within 16^th and 17^th century natural philosophies to examine metaphysical arguments fundamental to the broader Aristotelian framework and how they transformed the foundations of natural philosophy.

For a brief time, in the middle of the thirteenth century, it looked as if medieval scholastic philosophy would be deterministic. Then the rise of voluntarism put an end to all of that. Then, some centuries later, it looked once again as if European philosophy would embrace determinism. But again the proponents of anti-indeterminism intervened. Then once again, in the nineteenth century, that movement collapsed, and nowadays proponents of agent causation are few and far between.

It has been known for some time that David Gorlaeus occupies an interesting place in the story of the mechanization of natural philosophy. His atomist physics and his nominalist zeal for eliminating all unnecessary entities from the ontology are strikingly radical, especially considering the relatively early date of composition (before 1612). Gorlaeus’ system of natural philosophy comes close to the mechanical philosophies devised later in the seventeenth century in some respects, which is why he has been considered part of the “pre-history of the mechanical philosophy” (Garber). This makes it all the more interesting to see in what ways and why Gorlaeus deviates from what we have come to think of as the mechanical philosophy. Though the main theses are reasonably well known, the details of his account hide some surprising metaphysical commitments. In the talk, I will draw attention to two of them and discuss how they follow from his reductionist ontology. The first such commitment is that to absolute space. Gorlaeus often argues that this or that Aristotelian category can be reduced to spatial relations among atoms (which he calls the atoms’ situs, a type of mode). In addition to this relative position defined in virtue of individual atoms, however, he holds that one must also recognize an absolute spatium, the abstract space which existed before the creation of the universe. This is a very uncommon position to take among early seventeenth-century natural philosophers of any persuasion. Secondly, when Gorlaeus discusses motion and change, he implies that facts about causation are not reducible to spatial relations in the same way as facts about qualities. As the author himself acknowledges, there is no obvious place for relations of cause and effect in his sparse ontology, even though they are fundamental to the explanation of nature.

The Aristotelian conception of nature as that which had an internal principle of motion and rest and of artifice as that which did not, dominated theoretical thinking about both for much of the Middle Ages. Several factors, notably the collapse of the distinction between matter and body and the suggestion that all bodies were governed by the same divinely instituted universal laws, led to the erosion of the distinction between the natural and artificial in the later Middle Ages. This paper attempts to chart the interaction of these two factors, arguing that together these made the distinction seem arbitrary and opened the door to novel conceptions of life and reason.

Scholastic hylomorphism conceived of matter as a potential substrate whose main function is to be joined to forms. The course of nature happens upon this entity which, inert in itself, is constantly transformed into the matter of something else through the incessant processes of generation and corruption. New interpretations of nature would gradually challenge the usefulness of what appeared to be an idle, elusive substrate. In my talk, I want to photograph Francisco Toletus’s theory of prime matter by considering the overall treatment of this entity that he gives in his commentaries on the Physics and DGC. Firstly, I will discuss Toletus’s stances on the substantiality and potency of prime matter, stressing his strive for a balance between Aquinas’s and Scotus’s positions. Secondly, I will discuss two further aspects related to prime matter with which Toletus engages in his commentaries, namely, the inhesion of accidents in prime matter and the case of elemental mixing. My analysis will shed light on Toletus’s theory of matter and display a certain tension between opposite tendencies in his hylomorphism.

In this paper, I address how music theory, generally, and the case of the octave more specifically, played an instrumental and under-appreciated role in the development of 17^th century mechanization of sensory perception. In particular, I argue that investigation into the causes of the octave, Aristotle’s chosen example of a formal cause, and other musical intervals like it served to undermine the Neo-Aristotelian framework, while also providing key evidence in support of a mechanistic account of sensory perception. I begin by discussing how the case of the octave was understood in Scholastic Neo-Aristotelian philosophy and how this framework was applied in 16^th century music theory. Following this, I show how developments in music theory and acoustics challenged the status of formal causes and real qualities in this Neo-Aristotelian framework. Finally, I show how these developments provided a much-needed detailed, empirically supported example of the mechanistic-style metaphysics of sensory perception that was prevalent in the Early Modern period, focusing primarily on Descartes.

In my paper, I provide a systematic, theoretical examination of Galileo’s principal argument for the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as advanced in his Assayer. I begin with a reconstruction of the key steps in the argument and then proceed to identify and discuss the epistemological and ontological presuppositions underpinning it. I argue that the most crucial and original of these is the superessentialist principle, implying the mutual conditionality of the essentiality and reality of the properties of a material body. Based on these findings, in the second part of my paper, I discuss three main interpretative approaches to the problematic issue of the ontological status of Galileo’s secondary qualities. First, I explore the mechanistic rationale behind his account of them in terms of sensations, in virtue of which it may be called ‘the dustbin theory of the sensorium’. Next, I examine the arguments for the mentalist and materialist readings of his secondary qualities and, by contrasting them with the results of my analysis, the theoretical problems inherent in these interpretations. In particular, I argue that the strictly mechanistic interpretation of Galileo’s theory is theoretically incompatible with the philosophical principles underpinning his argument. Finally, I discuss the hermeneutical advantages and theoretical disadvantages of interpreting Galileo’s secondary qualities in Aristotelian terms. I conclude by indicating the textual basis and historical significance of the interpretative difficulties discussed.

According to a traditional view, in the seventeenth century the concept of laws of nature replaced the Aristotelian notion of powers in natural philosophy. However, a closer look at the work of central figures of the period reveals a more complex conceptual landscape, where the notion of power is not abandoned but transformed and reconceptualized. Thus, a dualist model, where both laws and powers are needed to understand the nomological structure of the world, seems to better account for the views of various early modern thinkers. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between laws and powers in the thought of René Descartes, and defend a realist solution to what is known as the ‘problem of force’ in Cartesian physics, i.e. the problem of how to understand the ontological status of forces in Descartes’s Principia. Contrary to common non-realist views, I will defend a realist account of forces, according to which forces are modes of bodies grounded in motion that ground body-body causation. The main claim of the paper is that Descartes has a concept of force that is structurally similar to the Aristotelian notion of power. Thus, a dualist model of the metaphysics of Cartesian physics looks very promising.

It is often assumed that in the early modern collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all diversity among natures is simply the product of arrangements of matter that result blindly from the operation of laws instituted by the ‘divine artificer’. This paper looks at the collapse from the other angle—what is it that human artificers are doing and what is the status of the artefacts that they produce? Do human artificers make natures? Should a complex machine be thought of as having a distinctive nature aside from the nature of its parts (extension)? This paper considers these questions in the context of Descartes’ philosophy and aims to demystify the relationship between art and nature in the new mechanical philosophy.

“Mechanical philosophy” is said to occur for the first time in 1637, in Descartes’ correspondence concerning the just-published Discours de la méthode. By the end of the century, the mechanical philosophy had become a major intellectual player. Nowadays, it still features as a prominent historiographic category. The paper reconstructs the origins of the mechanical philosophy starting from a hitherto neglected occurrence of the term “mechanical” to qualify a philosopher’s doctrine: in this case, that of Aristotle. The paper analyses how the term and cognates shifted in meaning after 1632 – from mechanicῶs (artisan-like) to mechanica (technology-based), from mécanique (lawful) to mechanicé (intelligible) – up until the 1660s, when Robert Boyle turned the “mechanical philosophy” into the rallying cry of Christian novatores against the Aristotelian-minded philosophy of the university establishment. By considering these various, competing connotations, the paper intends to reappraise the “mechanical philosophy” as an actors’ category – indeed, as a cluster of categories pursuing quite different agendas.

Among other things, Lorenzo Valla wrote Disputationes dialecticae (1439). One finds here an interesting study of causation and the question of whether nature obeys to final causes, or to efficient ones. Valla seems to endorse the second perspective. Final causes or ends can be found only in human being’s decisions. Even the Christian God whom Valla deems to be the ruler of reality is considered an efficient cause. This induces Valla to believe that natural phenomena act/happen under the effect of some innate powers, namely under their own structure. In both historical and theoretical terms, Valla’s natural philosophy opens an intriguing question. Did his rejection of final causes lead to mechanicism? This paper will argue that Valla embraced some aspects of the mechanical philosophy that allowed him to reject final causes and substitute them with the “inner powers”. At the same time, he used Christian religion to avoid making chance the ruler of the world. In this sense, the Disputationes dialecticae could be read as a precedent of later philosophical works that only recognizes the role of efficient causes, such as Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia.

Telling the story of the mechanization of early-modern philosophy requires difficult choices. How do we decide who the “main” actors were? Which of their achievements, motivations, and interactions are worth recounting? Which are not? Certainly, such decisions are complicated enough by themselves. However, they are made even more difficult by the fact that some narratives concerning early-modern mechanization emerged hand-in-hand with the historical developments they were trying to portray. Some crucial historiographical choices were made in situ, for reasons that are historically complex onto themselves. This talk narrates the making of one set of highly influential choices: Isaac Newton’s re-telling of the history of mechanics before him, a re-telling that was used as justification for Newton’s own work, and one that was repeated in as late a source as René Dugas. In particular, the talk attempts to explain why Newton’s narrative singled out Galileo as a significant predecessor (given Newton’s scant knowledge of Galileo) and why it omitted more immediate, and certainly more pivotal, influences.

The main thesis of this talk is this: the sources of natural necessity are both laws and powers. This dualist account was first presented by Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos in a paper published in EJPS in 2021 and promises to overcome the problems faced by monistic accounts, that is accounts of natural necessity which posit either laws or powers. Monism has been the dominant approach and comes in two broad forms: one is based on laws, claiming that natural necessity is nomological necessity, while the other is based on causal powers, claiming that natural necessity is a function of the powers particulars have to act and be acted upon. The talk will fall, ideally, into four parts. In part 1, some of the arguments against monistic views, which we categorise as Lawful Powerlessness and Powerful Lawlessness, will be briefly reviewed. It will be suggested that the problems faced by monist accounts are overcome if we adopt a dualist ontology, viz., laws and powers. In part 2, we will revisit Leibniz’s argument, being a precursor of dualism. He had an account of the metaphysics of science in which laws are required for the intelligibility of the world and (active) powers are required for the laws to be ‘executable’ by worldly things. In part 3, Leibniz’s argument will be updated explaining how a relatively thin conception of powers is enough to ground the nomic relatability of worldly things but that laws are also necessary to account for the overall structure of the world as well as for the existence of specific relations among worldly things. The new dualist approach will be briefly examined in the light of a well-known case, viz., Maxwell’s laws. Finally, in part 4, the key methodological problem of the apparent uneconomical (de-ockhamised) character of dualism will be addressed.