TY - BOOK ID - 26306502 TI - The architecture of matter : Galileo to Kant AU - Holden, Thomas Anand AU - Clarendon Press PY - 2004 SN - 0199204209 9780199204205 0199263264 9780199263264 0191601748 9786610754168 0191532460 1280754168 1435621115 DB - UniCat KW - Philosophy of nature KW - Philosophy of science KW - Matter KW - Science KW - History. KW - Philosophy KW - History KW - Constitution (nature) KW - Natural science KW - Science of science KW - Sciences KW - Philosophy&delete& KW - Natural sciences KW - Atoms KW - Dynamics KW - Gravitation KW - Physics KW - Substance (Philosophy) KW - Philosophie des sciences KW - Matière (philosophie) KW - Histoire KW - Matière (philosophie) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:26306502 AB - Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler questions hidden in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. ER -