V

Historical interest in the concept of void space has focused primarily on the problems of how, and why, the vacuum came to be seen as a real possibility, and eventually superseded the dominant ancient view, represented most influentially in Western culture by Aristotle, that empty space was a meaningless or contradictory concept. Accordingly, studies of the concept of vacuum concentrate on the period before the establishment of the Newtonian concept of absolute space, which, by providing the theoretical basis for experimental work that seemed to point to the possibility of void space, rendered the concept of vacuum largely unproblematic.