Edward Feser: What is the mechanical world picture?
Edward Feser
"One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy" National Review
"A terrific writer" Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph
"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement
Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
What is the mechanical world picture?
Early modern<br>philosophy and science are often said to have put a "mechanical" or<br>"mechanistic" conception of nature at the center of Western thought. Robert Boyle referred to<br>it as "the mechanical philosophy."<br>Historian of science E. J. Dijksterhuis characterized<br>it as a "mechanization of the world picture." Tim Crane calls<br>it "the mechanical world picture."<br>But what does a mechanical or mechanistic conception of the world amount<br>to?
Dijksterhuis’s<br>book The Mechanization of the World<br>Picture surveys the history of the period during which this conception rose<br>to hegemony, and in the Epilogue he considers several possible interpretations<br>that the survey suggests. First, it is<br>commonly said that a mechanistic conception of the natural world is one which<br>sees it as a kind of machine,<br>analogous to a clock. And such metaphors<br>are, he says, indeed frequent in writers of the period.<br>However, Dijksterhuis<br>does not think this actually captures what is essential to the mechanical world<br>picture. The reason is that the notion<br>of a machine implies teleology. For<br>example, what makes a clock a clock is that it serves the function of telling<br>time. It is true that this suggests a<br>model of teleology that differs from the one associated with Aristotelianism,<br>according to which natural teleology is intrinsic<br>to a substance – in contrast to the teleology possessed by human artifacts,<br>which is imposed from outside by their designers and users. (I have discussed the various conceptions of<br>teleology in many places, such as this<br>article.) All the same, the<br>early modern mechanical philosophy was inspired by ancient atomism, which<br>eschewed teleological explanation. And<br>as the mechanical world picture developed, teleological explanations came to be<br>seen as scientifically deficient. So, Dijksterhuis<br>argues, the machine model does not really capture what is essential to it.
A second<br>possible interpretation of a mechanical or mechanistic mode of explanation sees<br>it as essentially concerned with discovering the hidden mechanisms underlying natural phenomena. Think of the way that we come to understand<br>how an automobile engine works when we see how the burning of fuel creates<br>small explosions that move pistons, which in turn move the crankshaft, and so<br>on. Of course, such an engine is, like a<br>clock, a human artifact with its own distinctive teleology. But the teleology is not what is doing the<br>explanatory work on this second interpretation of what a mechanical explanation<br>amounts to. Rather, the idea is that<br>what illuminates our understanding is coming to see how the behavior of the<br>whole results from the arrangement and interaction of the parts as they push<br>and pull against one another.
The problem<br>with this interpretation, Dijksterhuis points out, is that not all explanations<br>that came to be regarded as mechanistic actually work this way. For example, Newton was never able to<br>identify a mechanism by which gravity worked.<br>And while some at the time were critical of his account of gravity<br>precisely for that reason, eventually it came to be regarded as a paradigm of<br>successful mechanistic explanation.
A third<br>possible interpretation considered by Dijksterhuis holds that a mechanistic conception<br>of nature is essentially "anti-animistic" in character, in the sense that it<br>rejects any explanation of a thing’s behavior in terms of some principle internal to it. Contrast this with Aristotle’s view in the Physics that what is natural to a thing<br>is precisely what does follow from an<br>internal principle. A mechanistic<br>explanation, on this interpretation, is one that explains a thing’s behavior in<br>terms of external factors (whether something pushing or pulling on it, the laws<br>that govern it, or what have you).
The trouble<br>with this interpretation, in Dijksterhuis’s view, is that there are mechanistic<br>explanations that do not operate this way, and Aristotelian explanations that<br>do operate this way. For example,<br>inertial motion seems to be motion that springs from an internal principle,<br>whereas Aristotelian theories of projectile motion appealed to an external<br>principle. Hence, this cannot be the key<br>to what sets mechanistic explanations apart from the Aristotelian explanations<br>they were meant to replace.
A fourth<br>interpretation takes mechanistic explanation to be explanation modeled on<br>mechanics, in the sense in which that term came to be used in modern<br>physics. And mechanics in that sense had<br>to do with explaining local motion in terms of a mathematical description...