Dana Jalobeanu

This chapter examines how the problem of the nature of body had become the central debate in the field of natural philosophy in England by the middle of the seventeenth century. It explains that the nature of the physical body is one of the major problems of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and that it began, at least in part, as a byproduct of a change in the philosophical vocabulary. The chapter also evaluates solutions proposed to address the problem concerning the nature of body, including those derived from theory of matter and mixed mathematics.

This volume contains articles addressing relevant issues belonging to the a relatively unexplored territory at the intersection between natural history and early modern natural magic. They move from Giovanni Battista della Porta’s complex and still little explored experimental practices, through issues concerning Francis Bacon’s Latin histories and English Sylva, concluding with a noteworthy example of usage and reading of Baconian natural historical material by one the seventeenth-century novatores, Isaac Beckman.

This volume explores the themes of vanishing matter, matter and the laws of nature, the qualities of matter, and the diversity of the debates about matter in the early modern period. Chapters are unified by a number of interlocking themes which together enable some of the broader contours of the philosophy of matter to be charted in new ways. Part I concerns Cartesian Matter; Part II covers Matter, Mechanism and Medicine; Part III covers Matter and the Laws of Motion; and Part IV covers Leibniz and Hume. Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars of early modern philosophy, as well as some exciting new researchers, _Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion _stakes out new territory that all serious scholars of early modern philosophy and science will want to traverse