17th century Mechanicism: Descartes’ philosophy.

Review of the History of Psychology: Mechanicism, with Descartes as its main representative.

The 17th century begins with a scientific scientific revolution and ends with a political revolution in England (1688) from which the modern liberal state is born. Theocratic monarchy was replaced by constitutional monarchy. Locke will philosophically justify the revolution, which places reason above tradition and faith.

Mechanism in the 17th century: Locke and Descartes.

The Baroque dominates the century. Painting is filled with darkness, shadows and contrasts. In architecture the pure and straight Renaissance lines are broken, twisted, balance gives way to movement, to passion. Baroque and the body. Presence of death, of the double. The difference between reality and dream. The great theater of the world, the world as representation (Calderón de la Barca). The novel genre is consolidated (Don Quixote appeared in 1605; during the XVII century, the picaresque novel triumphed). In painting, Velázquez (1599-1660).

The conception of the world became scientific, mathematical and mechanistic. Scientists demonstrated the mechanical nature of celestial and terrestrial phenomena and even of the bodies of animals (End of the Animism).

A scientific and intellectual revolution

The scientific revolution meant displacing the earth from the center of the universe. The beginning of the revolution can be dated to 1453, with the publication of the Revolution of the celestial orbits by Copernicuswho proposed that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Copernicus' physics was, however, Aristotelian, and his system lacked empirical demonstration. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the most effective advocate of the new system, underpinning it with his new physics (dynamics), and providing telescopic evidence that the moon and other celestial bodies were no more "celestial" than the Earth. However, Galileo believed, like the Greeks, that the motion of the planets was circular, even though his friend Kepler showed that planetary orbits were elliptical. The definitive unification of celestial and terrestrial physics occurred in 1687 with the publication of Newton's Newton's Principia Mathematica.

The laws of motion of Isaac Newton reaffirmed the idea that the universe was a great machine. This analogy had been proposed by Galileo and also by René Descartes, and became the popular conception at the end of this century.

As a consequence, the idea of an active and vigilant God, by whose express intention even the last leaf of a tree would fall, was reduced to that of an engineer who had created, and maintained, the perfect machine.

From the very birth of modern science, two conflicting conceptions are present: an old Platonic tradition supported a pure and abstract science, not subjected to a criterion of usefulness (Henry More: “science is not to be measured by the help it can give you at your back, bed and table.”). Wundt and Titchener will be supporters of this point of view for psychology. In this century, on the other hand, an idea of utilitarian, practical, applied science developed, whose most vigorous advocate was Francis Bacon. In the following century this tradition became firmly established in England and North America, moving towards anti-intellectualism.

The scientific revolution, in either conception, reissues an old atomist idea according to which some sensory qualities of objects are easily measurable: their number, weight, size, figure and movement. Others, however, are not, such as temperature, color, texture, smell, taste or sound. Since science must be science of the quantifiable, it can only deal with the first type of qualities, called primary qualities, which the atomists had attributed to the atoms themselves. Secondary qualities are opposed to primary qualities because they exist only in human perception, resulting from the impact of atoms on the senses.

Psychology would be founded, two centuries later, as a study of consciousness and, therefore, included in its object all sensory properties.. The behaviorists, later on, will consider that the object of psychology is the movement of the organism in space, rejecting the rest. Motion is, of course, a primary quality.

Two philosophers represent in this century the two classical tendencies of scientific thought: Descartes for the rationalist view, with a conception of pure science, and Locke for the empiricist, with a conception of utilitarian or applied science.