Descartes Vs Fontenelle

392 Words2 Pages
In the centuries following Aristotle, there were many philosophers’ that were skeptical and challenged his Aristotelian philosophy. Rene Descartes, a philosopher and key figure to Fontenelle, was an anti-Aristotelian who brought about the views of a mechanical philosophy; a framework that modern natural philosophers preferred to the Aristotelian teleology (Shapin, 30). In Fontenelles’ novel “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds”, he distinguishes between two types of philosophers, those that are curious and those that have poor eyesight. He focuses on the concept of nature in comparison to an opera house, and how these two types of philosophers would view the hidden wires and machinery of nature and the opera house. On the first evening,