ABSTRACT
There were at least two main lines of thought about space at the beginning of the seventeenth century: Aristotelians usually conceived of space as an abstraction from body with no reality of its own, and atomists regarded space as something real and independent of body. These divergent lines of thought were clearly linked with debates over the possibility of void space or vacuum. The Aristotelian view culminated in the doctrines of René Descartes (1596-1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The great champion of the atomist view was Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
