Experimental Evidence for and against a Void: The Sixteenth-Century Arguments

Abstract

ONE OF THE CHIEF identifiable characteristics of the period which we call the Renaissance is that philosophical thought gradually but steadily rejected Aristotle as the dominant authority. The Stagirite's teachings regarding logic, metaphysics, and psychology were all seriously and fundamentally questioned during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the course of the sixteenth century there emerged a strong critical tendency which directed its attention more toward Aristotle's natural philosophy. Among the thinkers of this century who criticized Aristotle from one or another viewpoint concerning his doctrines of natural philosophy were Gianfrancesco Pico, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giambattista Benedetti, Giordano Bruno, and the young Galileo Galilei. In all of these writers we find a deep-seated antipathy to the Peripatetic world view. Included in nearly all sixteenth-century critiques of Aristotle is some discussion of whether a void or empty space exists or could exist in without supernatural intervention. Since the Aristotelian dictum nature abhors a vacuum turned out to be one of his most questionable pronouncements and one which seems to have been experimentally refuted in the seventeenth century, it may be fruitful to once more consider the background of these important experiments.1 In my opinion we can distinguish at least four different ways in which the