STS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Magia Naturalis
8 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 9: Mechanical Philosophy
Key Figures
• Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), Thomas Hobbes (1598 – 1676), Pierre Gassendi (1592 – 1655), Marin
Mersennee (1588 – 1648) and Isaac Beekman (1588 – 1636)
Natural Philosophy
• Emergence:
o 1620’s – 1640’s: Ideas emerge
o 1660 – 1670: Variations of Mechanical Philosophy become widely accepted amongst the educated
majority
o 1700’s: Newton’s variations on Mechanical Philosophy then begin to dominate
• Aristotelianism still taught at Universities but dies off and loses prestige
Different Social Orientations
• Mechanical Philosophy: more acceptable to politics of the time – captured various elements of Magical and
Neo-Platonist natural philosophies in a more ‘sober’ way
• Neo-Platonism: linked to Natural Magic and Alchemy which in turn was often linked to more radical
religious and social views
• Aristotelianism represented knowledge of past elites had been eroded via Humanism and other Renaissance
movements was losing credibility
The World
• Galileo was pre-occupied with Primary vs Secondary Qualities in nature
• 3 fundamental things: God, Human mind, Atoms
• No atoms for colour, taste, heat, smells – Atoms just produce these effects in the Human Mind as a result of
their size, shape movement etc
• Machines can be broken down pulled to pieces to help understand how they work and the processes involved
are assumed to be measurable and described according to mathematical rules – Nature should be able to be
broken down taken to pieces see what things are made of how they are arranged and what mathematically
measurable processes may be involved
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