The Place of the “Laws of Nature” in the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution
The Place of the “Laws of Nature” in the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution

Summary/Abstract: The belief that something very important happened to our conception of the world somewhere in the seventeenth century has been for a long time a commonplace in the history of philosophy. One way of expressing this change is to say that from a wide range of competing anti-Aristotelian philosophies, a “new philosophy” emerged, the mechanical philosophy. Another way to put it is to say that a wide range of competing Aristotelian philosophies were defeated by a more or less unique brand of anti- Aristotelianism, the mechanical philosophy. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They simply try to formulate the deep conceptual change that took place in the seventeenth century, sometimes described as the Scientific Revolution.

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