Abstract

How did the mechanical philosophy replace Aristotelianism as the philosophical "mainstream" in the seventeenth century? I look at this question by examining critiques of Aristotle in the first two systematic mechanical philosophers, Descartes and Hobbes, and how these critiques fit in with earlier Renaissance anti-Aristotelianism. ;I focus on Descartes's and Hobbes's accounts of the human soul, because this is where their critiques of Aristotle are most clear and where they also differ the most from each other. According to Aristotelian philosophers, human beings, like other living beings, had both a body and a soul. The soul was the substantial form of the body, the thing that gave that body life and the activities of life. Since the Aristotelian account of the human soul had become associated with Christian doctrine concerning immortality, any new competing philosophical system would also have to address the human soul in this context. In Descartes's system there are two different kinds of substances, material substance or body, and immaterial substance or soul. He believed that the Aristotelian notion of "substantial form" derived from a corruption of the clear ideas of body and mind. ;For Hobbes, there are no immaterial things, neither the substantial forms of the Aristotelians nor the immaterial minds of Descartes. These are just meaningless words, instances of the error of "insignificant speech" which he believed to be the foundation of Aristotelianism. ;These different accounts of the human being were difficult to reconcile with the Christian religion, and both philosophers developed strategies for presenting their philosophy in light of this. But instead of looking at the mechanical philosophy as a chapter in a "march of secularism", and religious issues as mere obstacles to progress, we should consider them rather as issues to be worked out by any new philosophical system. There were many ways of being a mechanical philosopher, and many roads to modern philosophy