Overview

During the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, the Aristotelian theory of substance which had dominated European thought for 2,000 years was progressively abandoned in favor of various "corpuscular" or particulate matter theories. While foreshadowing the classical and modern atomic theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not all corpuscular theories were atomic in nature, and various ones differed on key points. Whereas some were inspired by ideas drawn from the ancient Greek atomists, others developed out of Western and Islamic medieval matter theories. All of them, however, fundamentally challenged previously accepted notions of matter, motion, space, and substance in physics and chemistry, and generated intense philosophical and religious controversies as well.

Background

Western culture inherited two major philosophical theories about matter and motion from ancient Greece. Leucippus (fl. fifth century B.C.) and Democritus (c...