mechanicistn.adj.

1879 Princeton Rev. 1 63 A reply to the objection of the mechanicist has been furnished by the distinguished authors of ‘The Unseen Universe’, Professors Tait and Stewart.

1910 Jrnl. Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods 7 583 The apriorist was battling with the sensationalist, the mechanicist with the idealist, the automatist with the spiritualist.

1934 Mind 43 248 ‘Mechanical’ is a highly ambiguous term, and many who call themselves mechanicists would not deem it inconsistent with their principles to recognise in the molecule a different unit from the atom, with different properties.

1939 Nature 8 July 52/2 Controversies about the philosophy of animate Nature..keep alive the old feud between vitalists and mechanicists. The latter favour the view that life is a by-product of blind processes of dead matter.

1966 Philos. Q. 16 363 To interpret Theophrastus, as [Giovanni] Reale does, as a ‘mechanicist’ (anti-teleologist) by the device of exiling his famous statements that nature doesn't ever exist aimlessly..to a footnote.

1986 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 51 13/2 Pragmatism was a reaction to the overdetermined picture of reality painted by rationalist and mechanicist philosophers.

1992 MLN 107 384 Zola's deterministic, mechanicist view of individual human beings.