Qualitative Atomism and Life within the 18th-Century Atomistic Perspective

Abstract

Abstract This chapter initiates the book’s investigations by closely examining the rise of modern atomism in the 17th century, a time during which modern, post-Aristotelian science was developing and defining its methods and conception of the material world. The chapter will examine how the atomism of philosophers such as Pierre Gassendi, and even the corpuscularianism of René Descartes and Robert Boyle, resulted from the Renaissance revival of ancient atomism in Europe that occurred with the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, in which the Roman philosopher extolls the virtues of the particulate conception of matter that he inherited from Epicurus, Leucippus, and Democritus. As we examine the ancient and modern versions of atomism more closely, however, we will note the beginning of a divergence between these two conceptions of fundamental particles. For example, although ancient atomists drew no distinction between the atoms of animate and those of inanimate matter, many early modern thinkers affirmed this dichotomy. The chapter will show that many corpuscular and atomic theories of matter in the 17th century still embraced either a vitalistic or a hylomorphic ontology, so that many early modern natural philosophers embraced a qualitative particulate theory of matter. The chapter will discuss several of the major figures of this period, including Daniel Sennert, Jan Baptista van Helmont, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, all of whom rejected a strictly mechanistic, quantitative, and reductionistic conception of fundamental particles.