Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics: A Study of Conceptual Development in Early Modern Science: Free Fall and Compounded Motion in the Work of Descartes, Galileo and BeeckmanThe question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. Descartes, Galileo, and other protagonists of what the authors call "preclassical mechanics" struggled with fundamental concepts and contributed crucial insights to classical mechanics, but it is not clear that they actually realized these insights themselves. This book argues that the emergence of classical mechanics was neither a cumulative change nor an abrupt revolution, but rather that the transformation was the result of exploring the limits and exhausting the possibilities of the existing, largely Aristotelian conceptual system. |
Contents
Concept and Inference Descartes and Beeckman on the Fall of Bodies | 11 |
Conservation and Contrariety The Logical Foundations of Cartesian Physics | 73 |
Proofs and Paradoxes Free Fall and Projectile Motion in Galileos Physics | 137 |
Epilogue | 281 |
Documents | 289 |
385 | |
407 | |