Christiaan huygens’s cosmotheoros: Anthropological theology and the mechanization of nature

Abstract

While it is known that a mechanized universe was adopted among scientists and philosophers during the seventeenth century and that it provided a new understanding of nature, we can see that for many scientists the universe was not entirely empirical. Rather, an automaton universe did entail theological and philosophical implications for figures such as Christiaan Huygens, who presents in his Cosmotheoros a theological anthropology mixed with astronomy and a speculative philosophy. In this paper, I defend that Huygens‟s Cosmotheoros not only could help us to properly understand and re-evaluate his figure, but also to have a complete view of the scientific mechanization of nature in the seventeenth Century.