Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making

6. Sources for a Mechanical Philosophy

As a mechanical philosopher, Beeckman claimed to be self-taught. He wrote in 1620 that “in philosophy and medicine I have had no teacher whosoever, and in mathematicsIhadanonacademicteacherforthreemonthsonly,thirteenyears ago.”1 Earlier, he had admitted to Descartes that he had never spoken with anyone else about his way of integrating physics and mathematics.2 But Beeckman ’s mechanistic interpretation of the world must have been based on some antecedents. Of course, one can speculate that, as a boy, Beeckman became interested in the behavior of natural objects as he watched his father in his workshop in Middelburg and then simply began to develop his no-nonsense, even materialistic approach to natural phenomena. However, such an explanation seems inadequate: of all the people who were familiar with the arts, why should Isaac Beeckman have developed this rather implausible system of natural philosophy we call the mechanical philosophy? The explanation must entail more than simply watching craftsmen at work. ancient atomism, modern mechanics Beeckman—an avid reader of books, both ancient and modern—most likely had access to the library of Philip van Lansbergen, who must have recognized the talents of his best friend’s oldest son during one of his visits to Middelburg .3 Beeckman does not seem to have read widely in Aristotle—perhaps because Lansbergen was not fond of the ancient philosopher—but he was at home with Galen and a host of other ancient and modern philosophers, Sources for a Mechanical Philosophy chapter six sources for a mechanical philosophy 131 physicians, mathematicians, and engineers. Therefore, Beeckman might have gleaned ideas from the books he read during and shortly after his study at Leiden University or during the preparations for the medical degree he earned at Caen in 1618. Beeckman’s mechanical philosophy, developed in the years prior to his first meeting with Descartes in 1618, appears to be a bookish philosophy . He had not done experiments or collected a lot of observations, but he had read a substantial number of books about mathematics, natural philosophy , and medicine. Though reading requires decent eyesight, he complained thathispoorvisionmadehimunfitforempiricalresearchandmedicalpractice. Beeckman did not recognize the value of good empirical and experimental research until the 1620s and 1630s. Yet, as he read, he constantly commented on the books’ contents. One can therefore suppose that Beeckman derived from books the arguments, the concepts, and even some of the experiments he needed to develop his mechanical philosophy and overturn Aristotelian natural philosophy. Books, according to this line of reasoning, constitute a natural starting point to explore the sources of Beeckman’s mechanical philosophy of nature. Two authors emerge as primary sources of inspiration. The first is the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (first century B.C.), the famous (or infamous) atomist. Beeckman, with his strictly mechanical philosophy of nature, comes closer to Lucretius and the other ancient atomists than any of the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers. From a practical standpoint, all proponents of the mechanical philosophy came to realize that a system of natural philosophy based solely on the notions of passive matter and inertia simply did not work.4 Long before Newton, they therefore introduced or reintroduced active principles and inherent forces that acted without direct contact and thus could operate at a distance—unlike Lucretius and Beeckman. The sixteenth-century Dutch or actually Flemish engineer Simon Stevin, who wrote quite a few books on mechanics and left behind some manuscripts that Beeckman studied carefully, also greatly influenced Beeckman. Mechanics had become a well-respected branch of mathematics in the sixteenth century, and Stevin’s work was the culmination of this movement. The fact that Stevin had been an immigrant from the southern provinces, just like Beeckman’s father , also may have created a special bond between Beeckman and Stevin.5 Thus, Lucretius’s atomism and Stevin’s mechanics may have played key roles in the development of Beeckman’s mechanical philosophy. Anyoneinterestedinphilosophyintheearlyseventeenthcenturycouldgeta good idea of ancient atomism’s contributions. Scholars had various texts at 132 isa ac beeckman on matter and motion their disposal containing the atomists’ theories. Both Aristotle and Galen had argued with atomists and thus made the atomist ideas accessible to later generations . Furthermore, Lucretius’s long didactic poem De rerum natura libri VI (Six Books on the Nature of Things) had been rediscovered in 1417 and printed in 1473, with many new editions in subsequent years. Lucretius expounds on Epicurus’s atomistic natural philosophy...