Descartes and the Problem of Action at a Distance

Abstract

My aim in this Note is to examine Descartes’ position on the problem of action at a distance. Since the time of ancient Greece philosophers and physicists have puzzled over the phenomena which seem to show that one body can act upon another at a distance. Many have proposed to solve the problem by introducing sufficient kinds and quantities of unobservable matter to reduce every appearance of action at a distance to a series of contiguous actions; but they have been unable to silence the skepticism of those who could find no independent evidence for the existence of this new matter. On the other hand, those who have erected action at a distance itself as an ultimate principle have been unable to convince their fellow-investigators that it cannot be eventually explained away by more satisfactory modes of contact action. The result has been an interminable controversy still unsettled in our own time.¹