2 - Descartes, Harvey, and the Emergence of Modern Mechanism

Summary

Introduction

Aristotle is the one philosopher in our history who is also a great biologist, and, indeed, whose metaphysic, as we have come to call it, serves as grounds for his biological interests. But even in ancient times, as we have seen, his life-centered philosophy was modified in favor of a more mechanistic perspective. Here we will be looking at the seventeenth-century confrontation of the Aristotelian tradition with more mechanistic views, especially in Descartes. In England at least, Gassendi, one of the most outspokenly critical Objectors to the Meditations, was perhaps as influential as Descartes. However, we are not attempting a survey here; and Descartes can certainly be taken as one of the chief proponents of the new mechanism in biology.

Like many such labels, “mechanism” is a term imposed by critics and historians. Moreover, it is an ambiguous term. In connection with the sense of “Mechanics” introduced apologetically by Robert Boyle in the late seventeenth century, mechanism suggests billiard-ball causality, just one thing after another (see O.E.D. entry under “Mechanics”). In an earlier meaning, which still resonates in the notion of mechanistic biology, mechanism is concerned with machines. Thus, for example, when Huygens asked Descartes for some examples of mechanics, Descartes sent him accounts of several “engines by means of which one can lift a very heavy weight with a small lever” – we might say, several mechanisms (Descartes 1637; AT I, pp. 395, 435).