The Sociology of the Mechanistic World-Picture

Abstract

From about 1620 on a profound revolution occurred in the thought of the most developed European nations (France, Italy, Holland, and England), which found its most pregnant expression in the birth of the new philosophical schools of Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes. The renewal of philosophy at this juncture in the history of thought, however, does not signify above all a change in the specific, metaphysical content of thought about God, the soul, and immortality, although the revolution in thought does concern these themes as well. Central to the whole “modern” school of philosophers of this period is the constitution of a new conception of nature and – directly for some of them, implicitly for all – of human society as well.