The contribution of the Dutch craftsman and scholar Isaac Beeckman
to early modern scientific thought has never been properly
acknowledged. Surprisingly free from the constraints of traditional
natural philosophy, he developed a view of the world in which
everything, from the motion of the heavens to musical harmonies, is
explained by reducing it to matter in motion. His ideas deeply
influenced Descartes and Gassendi. Klaas van Berkel has succeeded
in unearthing and explicating Beeckman's scientific notebooks,
allowing us to follow how he developed his new philosophy, almost
day by day. Beeckman was almost forgotten until the discovery of
his notebooks in the early twentieth century. "Isaac Beeckman on
Matter and Motion" is the first full-length study of the ideas and
motives of this remarkable figure. Van Berkel's important study
first relates Beeckman's life, placing him in the religious,
intellectual, educational, and social context of the Dutch Republic
in its golden age. Van Berkel then analyzes the notebooks
themselves and the nature and development of Beeckman's "mechanical
philosophy". He demonstrates how Beeckman's artisanal background
and religious convictions shaped his natural philosophy, even as
the decisive influence stems from the educational philosophy of the
sixteenth-century French philosopher Peter Ramus. Historians of
science and the philosophy of science will find the substance of
Beeckman's thought and the unraveling of its growth and development
highly interesting. Van Berkel's account provides a new and
comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the mechanical
philosophy of nature, the philosophy that culminated in the work of
Isaac Newton.
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