The Concept of Motion in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Few topics in intellectual history are as poorly understood as the concept of motion, and particularly the changes that this concept underwent during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Part of the difficulty stems from the vaguely defined status of the concept in the sixteenth century, when the groundwork was being laid for the contributions of Galileo and his associates. At least three different speculative views of motion were being discussed during this period, and in academic circles as diverse as those in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Moreover, each speculative view had a distinctive practical import, and thus brought a different influence to bear on the science of motion, or mechanics, that was soon to undergo such extensive development. So complex was the resulting situation in the sixteenth century that any attempt to characterize it in a brief essay must run the risk of being a considerable over-simplification. This risk can perhaps be minimized by following a procedure similar to that adopted in the previous essay of this volume, viz, by restricting attention to the one problem of the entitative status of local motion. More precisely, we aim to examine the question as to how local motion may be said to differ both from the moving object and the terminus it attains, and to discuss the answers being given to it in the early part of the century at the University of Paris, or by thinkers who studied then at the university.