[Submitted for the First Quebec Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, université de Sherbrooke, October 10, 2009]
Scholars have long been aware that 'mechanist' or 'mechanical philosopher' is a very slippery label. There seem to be no necessary or sufficient conditions for classifying certain philosophers as mechanists but not others, and much as with 'feminist' or 'analytic philosopher', the prudent taxonomist will simply permit all self-identifiers to come under the label, while withholding it from anyone who does not actively embrace it. But things may be even more problematic than we've thought: not only do we not really know what a mechanist is; we also don't have a clear idea of what is to count as a machine. Most scholars have taken one kind of machine --the machine driven by pulleys, gears, and levers, and identified somewhat derisively by Kaspar Schott in his 1657 Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica as a merely 'tractoric' machine-- as the model of mechanicity in general. 'Mechanist' philosophers have accordingly often been criticized for letting their analogical imaginations run wild, since patently animal bodies (to cite the most obvious stumbling block for a universally applicable science of tractorics) are not composed of gears and levers. But there were in fact many other kinds of machine, driven by fundamentally different principles than those of the clock. As the title of his book suggests, Schott was mostly interested in machines driven by water and air. Others --particularly those such as Cornelis Drebbel and Joachim Becher who sought to build their own perpetual-motion machines-- were more interested in chemical principles such as fermentation than in tractoric principles as a source of machine motion.
Still others, such as Robert Boyle and G. W. Leibniz,
were principally interested in what Leibniz would call
'hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnical [HPP] machines', that is
machines that are kept in motion by the appropriate interaction of air,
water, and a certain kind of chemical explosion akin to that in
gunpowder. Leibniz thought animal bodies were just such a machine.
Given that Leibniz was also a panorganicist who believed that, in the
end, everything is an animal body or somehting like it, clearly it
should be important for scholars to pay attention to the sort of
machine he took animal bodies to be. In this presentation, I shall
summarize Leibniz's theory of HPP machines, and I shall attempt to show
the importance of this theory for our understanding of his theory of
corporeal substance, and ultimately for our understanding of his
deepest ontological commitments. On the basis of Leibniz's example, I
shall further argue that much late-17th-century mechanism, far from
amounting to a crude 'contraptionism' that would seek to reduce the
complexity of natural beings to whatever passed at a given moment of
history for state-of-the-art technology, in fact sought to incorporate
knowledge of processes gained in the first instance from direct
investigation of natural processes that clearly defied any attempt to
model them tractorically.
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