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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

The chain of motions and the chain of thoughts. The diachronic mechanism of Spinoza’s friends

Résumé

This chapter introduces the notion of “diachronic mechanism” to account for experimental approaches to living phenomena that were developed in Spinoza’s circle in the late seventeenth-century. This notion of “diachronic mechanism” allows me to distinguish two compatible types of mechanistic explanations: the well-known synchronic mechanistic explanations, which explain organic functions through the reduction of organisms into smaller components, and what I propose to call “diachronic mechanism,” which focuses on the temporal aspect of organic modifications. This diachronic mechanism describes organic modifications as a continuous series of physical events without specifying the inner structure of the parts which initiate the process. As a consequence, a new kind of analogy between automata and human beings is developed. It shifts the emphasis towards an experimental approach to the interactions between bodies and their environment.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03913522 , version 1 (08-02-2024)

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Raphaële Andrault. The chain of motions and the chain of thoughts. The diachronic mechanism of Spinoza’s friends. Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy, dir. Antonio Clericuzio, Paolo Pecere, Charles Wolfe, Springer, pp.119-135, 2022, 978-3-031-07036-5. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-07036-5_8⟩. ⟨halshs-03913522⟩
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