Today’s common-sense mechanical reality was unnatural and contested in the 1600s

Evidence

The mechanical view of nature now taught in most Western schools is accepted without question as our everyday, common sense reality—matter is made up of atoms, colors occur by the reflection of light waves of differing lengths, bodies obey the law of inertia, and the sun is in the center of our solar system. None of this was common sense to our seventeenth-century counterparts. The replacement of the older, “natural” ways of thinking by a new and “unnatural” form of life—seeing, thinking, and behaving—did not occur without struggle. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 760

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Science had to destroy traditional good sense to create a new one — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1515; Common sense is the sediment of past philosophy, not fixed belief — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 123; Newtonian science shaped a mechanical worldview of human reason — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 22

Broader Connections

• Science had to destroy traditional good sense to create a new one #corroborates (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1515
• Common sense is the sediment of past philosophy, not fixed belief #corroborates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 123
• Newtonian science shaped a mechanical worldview of human reason #expands (0.80) — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 22