Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
by the impact of particles. In this sense, mechanism is also reductionist in that
all qualities (including chemical qualities and reactions) are thought to be ontologi-
cally and epistemically reducible to the mechanical and quantitative properties of
matter. Mechanism not only embraces reductionism, but it also embraces
deducibility, that is, all higher-level phenomena or properties are at least theoret-
ically entirely deducible from lower-level properties. Although the mechanistic
philosophy as such gains dominance in the seventeenth century, it inherits its
commitment to the deducibility and reducibility of higher-level properties from
ancient Democritean and Epicurean atomism. It is, thus, not coincidental that the
revival of classical atomism in the seventeenth century occurs hand-in-hand with
the development of the mechanical philosophy. Accordingly,
the physical world is represented by particles of matter in motion and can be interpreted by
the laws of motion determined by statistics [
...
] dynamics [and] mechanics [
...
] Natural
phenomena such as air resistance, friction, the different behaviors of individual bodies, the
qualitative features of the physical world were now considered irrelevant to the discourse of
natural philosophy or viewed as disturbing circumstances which were not [
...
] to be taken
into account in an explanation of the physical world.
24
For mechanists, “any explanation of natural events requires the building of a
mechanical model as a
for the actual phenomena being studied.”
25
Mechanistic explanations provided an alternative to the vitalistic and teleological
accounts that had dominated natural philosophy up to the sixteenth century, since it
assumed that “the explanation of natural phenomena excludes all references to
vital
forces
or
final causes
.”
26
Since mechanism denied any intrinsic motion or self-
organization to matter, it attributed all motion and organization to external causes.
Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was, arguably, the strongest proponent of mecha-
nistic Epicurean atomism in early seventeenth century France. From the point of
view of chemical philosophy, his
Philosophia Epicuri syntagma
(1649) is signifi-
cant because it marks the shift from the vitalistic corpuscularianism of van Helmont
and Sennert to a mechanistic atomism of the sort later defended by Walter
Charleton, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton. Gassendi contributes to the acceptance
of Epicurean atomism by making this view compatible with Christian theism.
He does this by revising classical atomism in important ways. Significantly,
Gassendi argues against Epicurus that motion is not inherent to matter and that,
therefore, an external cause is required to impress motion upon atoms and this
external cause is God. In the
Syntagma philosophicum
(1658), Gassendi claims that
matter is that which has dimensions and is capable of resistance, which means that
prime matter is constituted of solid and indivisible particles. Thus, unlike Descartes,
Gassendi believes that atoms are indivisible corpuscles endowed by God with mass
and motion, and he refuses to define atoms as mathematical points since these have
no empirical reality. Like Sennert and Boyle, Gassendi believes that “the primordial
substitute
'
'
24
Rossi (
2001
), p. 122.
25
Ibid
, p. 125.
26
Ibid
.
