Conceptual Shifts in Physics

Abstract

For one and a half millennia the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle powerfully influenced the intellectual tradition of the West through being fused with the developing Christian theology and injections of Islamic thought. But that synthesis, which reached its apogee in the 13th century, ultimately proved unstable. Eventually, the model of scientific explanation carefully worked out in the medieval era collapsed and a different conception of science had to be worked out. But a number of other conceptual changes had also to occur as new metaphysical underpinnings were devised for explaining change. Amongst them were radically revised concepts of nature and of physics. The emergence of these new concepts in the 17th century heralded the invention of a new mathematical science: physics, in the modern sense.