This book offers a collection of essays on the history and background of the mechanization of natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries. It rewrites the history of mechanism and shows that the philosophical ideas present in Descartes and Newton’s era have a history much longer and more complicated than previously thought. It presents new, original research on three aspects of the mechanical tradition, namely causal powers and laws of nature, conceptions of matter, and the concept of cause, especially final causes. Previous research has indicated that the development of mechanical philosophy in the 17th century is much indebted to the late Aristotelian philosophers of the 16th century. This book, however, takes a further step back in history and by studying the three aspects of the mechanical tradition, shows that philosophical reflection on these topics started in the 14th century and continued up to the time of Newton. The new insights gained by the editors and contributors ensures this book is of great interest to scholars in history of philosophy and historians of science interested in mechanization.

Henrik Lagerlund is professor of the history of philosophy at Stockholm University in Sweden, and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy in Canada. He is series editor of Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind (2002-); editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy (2010); and co-editor of Causal Powers in Science: Blending Historical and Conceptual Perspectives (2021). He is also the author of Skepticism in Philosophy: A Comprehensive, Historical Introduction (2020). He leads the project The Mechanization of Philosophy 1300-1700 funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Sylvain Roudaut, Ph.D. (2017), University of Rennes, is Senior Researcher at the CNRS (SPHERE, Paris). His research focuses on the interaction between philosophy, science, and mathematics in the Latin and Arabic traditions in the Middle Ages. He published La mesure de l’être (2021) and Hylomorphism into Pieces: Elements, Atoms, and Corpuscles in Natural Philosophy and Medicine, 1400–1600 (2024).

Erik Åkerlund, Ph.D. (2011), Uppsala University, is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Newman Institute, Uppsala (Sweden). He has a research focus on 15th to 17th century philosophy, especially natural philosophy but also extending to political philosophy. His articles include “Chrysostom Javellus and Francis Silvestri on Final Causation” (2024) and “Models of Finality: Aristotle, Buridan, and Averroes” (2023).