Article ID: CBB613435200

Mechanism and Materialism in Early Modern German Philosophy (2016)

unapi

The paper focuses on the gradual separation between materialism and mechanism in early modern German philosophy. In Germany the distinction between the two concepts, originally introduced by Leibniz, was definitively stated by Wolff who was the first to provide a definition of the new philosophical term Materialismus, and of the related philosophical sect. In the first part I describe the initial identification of mechanism and materialism in German philosophy between the last decades of the seventeenth century and 1720. Mechanism is here mostly conceived within a monistic metaphysics of body, which refers mainly to Hobbes and to some (unfaithful) interpretations of Spinoza’s pantheism. This tight connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and the Deus sive natura issue leads to a negative judgement on mechanism and its materialistic implications, both charged with a form of more or less explicit atheism. In the second part I describe the gradual emancipation in Germany of mechanism from materialism according to the distinction between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ materialism. In the third and final part, I sketch the first appearances of the entry ‘materialism’ in the philosophical encyclopaedias of early modern Germany, pointing out the by-then clear distinction between this metaphysical issue and the mechanical claim.

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Authors & Contributors
Vassányi, Miklós
Dyck, Corey
Howard, Stephen
Abou-Nemeh, Samar Catherine
Wilkins, Emma
Wahrig-Schmidt, Bettina
Concepts
Philosophy
Metaphysics
Mechanism; mechanical philosophy
Materialism
Natural philosophy
Philosophy of science
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
Early modern
Modern
Places
Germany
Netherlands
France
Europe
Institutions
Prussian Academy of Sciences
Académie des Sciences, Paris
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