Is fire an active force that heats an oven? For Aristotelian philosophers of the Middle Ages and the late Scholastic period, this was a natural way of explaining causation: Natural objects were understood as active agents endowed with "substantial forms" and "causal powers" that enabled them to exert an effect. "With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian worldview came under fundamental criticism," says Professor Sebastian Bender. Innovations such as the microscope and the telescope, together with the emergence of Newtonian mechanics, paved the way to completely new insights and deductions that also profoundly influenced the philosophy of the day.

Transcending late Scholastic philosophy

Against this backdrop, Bender is fascinated by the philosophical debates of seventeenth-century thinkers such as René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Anne Conway, Baruch Spinoza, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, David Hume and even Immanuel Kant. His research focuses in particular on how these philosophers understood causal relationships. Many of these thinkers, Bender argues, rejected the Aristotelian model in favor of a mechanistic conception of nature that dispensed with mysterious forms and hidden causal powers. "The central objection to Aristotelian philosophy in the seventeenth century was that it posited entities that could not be observed and were therefore inaccessible to empirical science."