Modern Metaphysical Materialism

Also known as “mechanical materialism”. The materialist philosophy in the history of Western philosophy developed during the 16th-18th century following the ancient naïve materialism. It was appropriate to the needs of development of capitalism in its early stage, and appeared along with the emergence of modern natural science; it was the world outlook and methodology of the bourgeoisie in its rising period, the ideological-theoretical weapon of the bourgeoisie against feudalism and religious theology. The chief representatives were the 17th-century British philosophers Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza and the 18th-century French philosophers La Mettrie, Helvetius, Diderot, d’Holbach and others.

Modern metaphysical materialism prevailed in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scientists at that time classified nature into different parts and studied them in different categories, thus examined its properties from without. Such inquiry was a necessary stage in the development of science; it was conducive to the accumulation of knowledge and the establishment of various disciplines, and played an important part in the early scientific development. When Bacon and Locke introduced this method of inquiry from the sphere of natural science into the sphere of philosophy and combined it with materialist ontology, it became a metaphysical materialist philosophy that looked at the world from an isolated, stationary and one-sided point of view.