ABSTRACT
The seventeenth century saw the robust reemergence of the ancient view that we best account for the nature of matter and manifest qualities of familiar material objects by postulating invisible elemental particles from which all such objects are constituted. Atomist views and related corpuscularian doctrines were principally designed by their authors as fundamental ontologies for physical theories, and, in the early-modern era, these theories were generally associated with one or another mechanical outlook. Yet, for several epistemological and physical reasons, atomism failed adequately to furnish a universe conceived as mechanical, and it proved dispensible to the classical mechanics developed in the wake of Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727) Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687). Nonetheless, early-modern atomism paved the way for particulate-matter theories of greater sophistication by suggesting how grasping macrophenomena might depend on first understanding the structure and behavior of ultimate building blocks on the microlevel.
