Meditações - um fascínio por autómatos e relógios...

There is no single way to account for the rapid rise of the mechanical philosophy in the second third of the seventeenth century. A fascination for automata and clocks, the increasingly productive role of machines, the problem of longitude, the social rise of engineers, dissatisfaction with substantial forms as an explanatory category, the seventeenth-century revival of classical atomism, the mathematical study of motion, the political and religious crisis of Europe, the commercial revolution, theories of political absolutism, and many other factors somehow contributed to, and were strengthened by, the rise of “the mechanical philosophy.” Seventeenth-century authors managed to forge several connections, each highly contingent, between elements of all these different practices and viewpoints, thereby producing a kind of discourse that, for all its variability, flexibility, and contestability, nevertheless has some recognizable features.

Franz van Lunteren