Meditações - the rise of “the mechanical philosophy”

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.”

Frans van Lunteren