ABSTRACT
If it were possible to mark what was distinctively novel about the Scientific Revolution in just one word, that word would be ‘motion’. Never at the center of any piece of mathematical analysis in abstract, Alexandrian fashion, rather neglected in the atomist natural philosophy of corpuscles moving through the void, categorized as just one among four subclasses of change in the Aristotelian philosophy of nature, motion acquired a radically novel emphasis as a fundamental unit of analysis and/or explanation by the early 17th century. By then, specific movements began to be invoked with a view to accounting for specific phenomena, as with Galileo’s laws of falling bodies or Kepler’s laws of planetary trajectories or Beeckman’s account of sympathetic resonance. Also, motion began to be analyzed as a philosophical category in its own right – a subject on which Descartes was as vocal as Galileo was silent. But between the specific and the categorical levels of dealing with motion, an intermediate level of analysis emerged as well. On that level the challenge was to define characteristics shared by whole ranges of actual movements. I introduce for it the term ‘motion considered generically’. It is situated halfway the level of principles, which it helped fill with more concrete meaning, and the level of phenomena, where it served both as abstraction from, and as exemplar for, specific cases.
