The Mechanical Philosophy

Robert Boyle grouped his seventeenth century corpuscularian predecessors and contemporaries as the ‘mechanical philosophers’.1 He intended the term as neutral between atomists and non-atomist defenders of a common vision—that the physical world is machine-like and composed of a discernable material substratum the bits of which, in combination, give rise to familiar macro-sized entities and phenomena. While their differences regarding the nature of matter were great, two issues drew together early modern corpuscularians of all sorts, Gassendi among them. First, they were concerned to provide a suitable ontology for the mechanical philosophy. Among other things, this entailed making the mechanist picture work all the way down to the subvisible level, and building that picture up from that level. One reason this is necessary is to guarantee the scalar invariance of physical laws—that such laws work across the spectrum of magnitudes. Second, they were for the most part concerned to meet empiricist constraints and interests of the new science. This entailed,