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Text The Cartesian Philosophy of Motion

1.6.1 Read the text, traslate it and answer the questions: What was the role of René Descartes in the development of science? What is he notable by?

Figure 3 - René Descartes (1596-1650)

The French philosopher René Descartes was well-connected to, and influential within, the experimental philosophy networks. Descartes had a more ambitious agenda, however, which was geared toward replacing the Scholastic philosophical tradition altogether. Questioning the reality interpreted through the senses, Descartes sought to reestablish philosophical explanatory schemes by reducing all perceived phenomena to being attributable to the motion of an invisible sea of “corpuscles”. (Notably, he reserved human thought and God from his scheme, holding these to be separate from the physical universe). In proposing this philosophical framework, Descartes supposed that different kinds of motion, such as that of planets versus that of terrestrial objects, were not fundamentally different, but were merely different manifestations of an endless chain of corpuscular motions obeying universal principles. Particularly influential were his explanation for circular astronomical motions in terms of the vortex motion of corpuscles in space (Descartes argued, in accord with the beliefs, if not the methods, of the Scholastics, that a vacuum could not exist), and his explanation of gravity in terms of corpuscles pushing objects downward.

Descartes, like Galileo, was convinced of the importance of mathematical explanation, and he and his followers were key figures in the development of mathematics and geometry in the 17th century. Cartesian mathematical descriptions of motion held that all mathematical formulations had to be justifiable in terms of direct physical action, a position held by Huygens and the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who, while following in the Cartesian tradition, developed his own philosophical alternative to Scholasticism, which he outlined in his 1714 work, The Monadology [10, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics].

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