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Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific RevolutionThe Principles of Natural Philosophy

Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific Revolution: The Principles of Natural Philosophy [In this chapter I consider De Volder’s treatment of the idea of material substance and of the problem of its source of activity, i.e. of the cause and laws of motion. These issues dominated not only his correspondence with Leibniz, but also his natural-philosophical disputations and handwritten texts, in which he aimed at not reverting to the metaphysical idea of God in accounting for the physical problem of the movement of bodies. This notwithstanding, De Volder never arrived at a solution for the problem of activity, as he did not accept either Leibniz’s views on substance or Malebranche’s occasionalism, while at the same time he accepted the idea that the quantity of movement is not necessarily conserved in the world. His detachment of physics from metaphysics, moreover, is observed in his treatment of the problem of the cohesion of bodies – traced back by Descartes to the metaphysical idea of rest, and which De Volder solved by experimental means (viz. by considering the pressure of air). In turn, it was by experiments that De Volder came to accept the correct laws of impact for elastic and non-elastic bodies, already formulated by Huygens, Mariotte, Wallis and Wren.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific RevolutionThe Principles of Natural Philosophy

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References (130)

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
ISBN
978-3-030-19877-0
Pages
249 –358
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-19878-7_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[In this chapter I consider De Volder’s treatment of the idea of material substance and of the problem of its source of activity, i.e. of the cause and laws of motion. These issues dominated not only his correspondence with Leibniz, but also his natural-philosophical disputations and handwritten texts, in which he aimed at not reverting to the metaphysical idea of God in accounting for the physical problem of the movement of bodies. This notwithstanding, De Volder never arrived at a solution for the problem of activity, as he did not accept either Leibniz’s views on substance or Malebranche’s occasionalism, while at the same time he accepted the idea that the quantity of movement is not necessarily conserved in the world. His detachment of physics from metaphysics, moreover, is observed in his treatment of the problem of the cohesion of bodies – traced back by Descartes to the metaphysical idea of rest, and which De Volder solved by experimental means (viz. by considering the pressure of air). In turn, it was by experiments that De Volder came to accept the correct laws of impact for elastic and non-elastic bodies, already formulated by Huygens, Mariotte, Wallis and Wren.]

Published: Nov 19, 2019

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