The seventeenth century saw the emergence of the corpuscularian, or ‘mechanical’, philosophy, which succeeded far beyond any previous science or philosophy in explaining particular phenomena of nature, and which, as a general framework for thought about the physical world, has continued to guide philosophical and scientific investigation down to the present day. Modern scholars have often sought to understand the emergence of this new philosophy by placing it within the context of some previous tradition of thought. In the words of J. H. Randall:

Two generations later, there is still no agreement. In what follows I will not attempt to assess the relative importance of the different intellectual traditions leading up to the seventeenth century (in any case, the relative importance of these different traditions as background will vary widely, depending on which seventeenth-century figure we wish to study), but I will try to indicate the broad range of intellectual traditions in terms of which the various seventeenth-century figures defined their attempts to establish a new philosophy.