"The dangers inherent in the twentieth-century classifications of the ‘mechanistic’ are best illustrated by two important works from the early 1960s. Dijksterhuis’ classic work, The Mechanization of the World Picture, traces the history of the emergence of a concept by looking for antecedents of a modern notion of the ‘mechanistic’ in antiquity. His work illustrates the ways in which focus on the different senses of the term ‘mechanical’ affects the questions that are considered. Taking as a given that atomism is a ‘mechanistic’ theory, Dijksterhuis traces the prehistory, in antiquity, of ideas contributing to what came to be called a ‘mechanical’ world-view – the development of mathematical physics and corpuscular materialism – and scarcely considers the contributions made by the discipline of mechanics.6 Tellingly, he downplays the contribution of the machine analogy to the history he is writing, because of its incompatibility with atomism."
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Sylvia Berryman. The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy. Cambridge/New York:Cambridge University Press, 2009. p. 4-5
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eduard_Jan_Dijksterhuis
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Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
(28 October 1892, Tilburg – 18 May 1965, De Bilt) was a Dutch historian of science.
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