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Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution
The primary objective of this study is to provide a description of the major ideas about void space within and beyond the world that were formulated between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The second part of the book - on infinite, extracosmic void space - is of special significance. The significance of Professor Grant's account is twofold: it provides a comprehensive and detailed description of the scholastic Aristotelian arguments for and against the existence of void space; and it presents (again for the first time) an analysis of the possible influence of scholastic ideas and arguments on the interpretations of space proposed by the nonscholastic authors who made the Scientific Revolution possible. The concluding chapter of the book is unique in not only describing the conceptualizations of space proposed by the makers of the Scientific Revolution, but in assessing the role of readily available scholastic ideas on the conception of space adopted for the Newtonian world.
- GenresPhilosophyHistory
472 pages, Hardcover
First published May 29, 1981
43 people want to read
About the author
Edward Grant
49 books20 followersEdward Grant is an American historian of medieval science. He was named a Distinguished Professor in 1983. Other honors include the 1992 George Sarton Medal, for "a lifetime scholarly achievement" as an historian of science.
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December 7, 2022
In the wake, if not anymore of Newton but at least of Minkowski and Einstein to be sure, we moderns tend to take the view of space as a receptacle or arena for physics for granted but it was by no means always thus. Aristotle’s understanding of place [τόπος], for instance, would appear to acknowledge no role whatsoever for a manifold of points in space, as we would call them, but envisions instead a closely packed collection of macroscopically sized bodies abutting one another and filling up the world. How in an Aristotelian cosmology is locomotion possible at all? To which one may oppose Democritus’ antithetical view of atoms and the void, where the void is characterized by resistancelessness and hence movement presents no problem in principle. As the noted historian of science Shmuel Sambursky describes (in The Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism), the Neoplatonic school which arose in late antiquity interpreted the Stoic identification of the universe with God so as to ascribe to space an active role in shaping lifeless matter to bear the imprint of the intelligibles (Plato: space, or χώρα, as the nurse of becoming) and therefore it assumes an intermediate status between the being of the ideas and the non-being of the transitory physical world. If so there are formative forces acting in space that interpenetrate all bodies. Ancient ideas about space and vacuum then underwent a process of elaboration at the hands of the Arabic philosophers and their Jewish contemporaries, from whom they were transmitted to the Latin scholastics of western Europe and via them to the pioneering mathematicians and natural philosophers of the early modern period.
Edward Grant, a respected emeritus historian of science who specializes in medieval thought, has done us all a great service by tracing these developments with attentive care in his Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, published by the Cambridge University Press (1981). This volume dates from relatively early in his writing career and hence shows itself to be perhaps more ostentatiously scholarly than his subsequent works for a more popular audience [other major studies of Grant’s, perhaps more accessible to the layman: The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (1996); God and Reason in the Middle Ages (2001); and Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (2004)].
Grant easily disposes of the canard that serious reflection on the nature and properties of space began only during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the conception of space does undergo significant alteration from the scholastics to Newton, what Grant wants to document at every stage along the way. Part I on intracosmic space, after a brief summary of Aristotle, takes up medieval conceptions of the nature and properties of void space. A major issue is the very possibility of motion in a void, for these authors as a rule follow Aristotle in supposing that motion requires a continual driving force and that the speed thus attained is inversely proportional to the resistance of the medium. But in a vacuum, the resistance would be zero and its inverse undefined. Some thought any movement would therefore happen instantaneously, others that it could not get started in the first place. Thus, there was latitude for a wide range of opinions and development of ideas. A second topic here is nature’s so-called abhorrence of a vacuum. What one thinks about the possibility of a vacuum depends on the theory of space and the theory of matter adopted, so again, a diverse spectrum of teachings abounded. By the way, it is unclear whether what we today call a vacuum really counts as such, in that the region of space in question, we suppose, will still be populated by various fields – metric, electric, magnetic etc., even if the value of the field there equals zero. A genuine void, on the other hand, would have to be entirely empty.
Part II is devoted to the interesting and – since Kant’s antinomies of pure reason –, often neglected question of the existence of an infinite extracosmic void space (nobody at the time could have envisaged the possibility that space in the large could be compact but without boundary, as a modern geometer might model it). As Grant explains, the question is largely motivated by theological concern and difficult to separate from theology. Later on, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the scholastic tradition vied with newly invigorated non-scholastic schools of thought, all of which Grant covers exhaustively. Names associated with the former include Bradwardine and Suarez, inter alia (including other Jesuits) while with the latter, Giordano Bruno, John Philoponus, Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella.
All this sets the context for the rise of the radically novel view of space entertained by the instigators of the scientific revolution which led to the establishment of classical mechanics although the development could hardly be characterized as one of direct descent but rather represents a complicated web of dependencies and influences. Patrizi (1529-1597), who revives the Stoic tradition, represents the watershed. Numbered among Patrizi’s followers are Gassendi, Henry More and Spinoza. In a subsection, Grant criticizes the view of Koyré to the effect that space underwent a geometrization in the sense that Euclidean space with its metrical properties replaced the Aristotelian cosmos – how we look on the matter in retrospect, but recall, the disciplinary boundary between physics and mathematics was drawn much more sharply at that time than we would be inclined to today, and the problem of space was thought by contemporaries to implicate physics more than mathematics. Part III closes with a look at Isaac Barrow, Locke, Newton and the celebrated Leibniz-Clarke debate.
Part III consists in a summary and reflection, at just six pages concise but nonetheless consequential. To recapitulate, the background of everything Grant treats is Aristotle’s denial of a separate void space and of resistance in vacuo or in mixed bodies. In what may come as a surprise to those inclined to view the medievals as hidebound to tradition, the event of all the scholastic debates was the emergence of a widespread acceptance of the possibility and intelligibility of finite, successive motion in hypothetical vacua. By contrast, an extracosmic void space was termed imaginary. Newly available Greek texts in the late 15th to 16th centuries encouraged anti-Aristotelians and non-scholastics to render it real, but how? Paradoxically in view of common stereotypes, physics became more not less theological. Since many will find this contention startling, let us quote Grant at length:
In the historical developments described here, it was medieval and early modern scholastics who, for better or worse, introduced God into space in a manner more substantial than the vague, if dazzling, metaphors found in the earlier patristic, cabbalistic and Hermetic traditions. Jean de Ripa, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicole Oresme would proclaim an infinite, extracosmic void space with an omnipresent deity in the fourteenth century. Indeed Oresme called that infinite and indivisible space God’s immensity. From then on, until the eighteenth century, scholastics and nonscholastics would attempt to explain and describe how God and space might be related. Scholastics linked a nondimensional space with an unextended God; others, such as Gassendi, would assume a three-dimensional space and an unextended God; and in the final stage, More and Newton would join an extended space to an extended God. Certain important nonscholastics, such as Gassendi and Guericke, revealed deep scholastic influences; others seem to have been indirectly affected, revealing an influence only in their use of scholastic terms and expressions that had become part of the language of philosophical and theological discourse. Scholastic ideas about space and God form an integral part of the history of spatial conceptions between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the Scientific Revolution. From the assumption that infinite space is God’s immensity, scholastics derived most of the same properties as did nonscholastics, and did so before the latter. As God’s immensity, space had to be homogeneous, immutable, infinite and capable of coexistence with bodies, which it received without offering resistance. Except for extension, the divinization of space in scholastic thought produced virtually all the properties that would be conferred on space during the course of the Scientific Revolution. [p. 262]
Grant goes on to attribute the continued relevance of scholastics during the period, unjustly excluded from previous histories, to a better ability to hold their own in the debate whenever it turns more on conceptual than on concrete quantitative questions, for which their rivals were better equipped in terms of mathematical technique. His concluding paragraph deserves notice:
Because God’s eventual elimination from infinite space failed to affect the properties of space, does it not seem plausible to conclude that the intrusion of God into space was a mistake from the outset? Did it not delay for centuries the acceptance of a purely objective, scientific, physical space? Had the God-free, three-dimensional, infinite space of the Stoics and atomists been accepted immediately, a purely physical space would have been available at least two centuries earlier. In effect, we have already answered these hypothetical questions. No separate, external, infinite space could have been adopted in medieval and early modern Europe without an explanation of its relationship to God, on whom it had to depend in some way. For centuries, that relationship was explored, even as the physical properties of space received early and general acceptance. Before God could be removed from space, a general realization had to develop that the various mechanisms devised over the centuries to explain His omnipresence in infinite space were not only unsatisfactory but ultimately unintelligible. Only then could God be removed from space without a theological reaction and charges of atheism. After centuries of debate and controversy, this stage was finally reached in the eighteenth century, helped along, to be sure, by Berkeley and Leibniz. In a curious sense, one might argue that John Duns Scotus and Gottfried Leibniz triumphed over Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton. It was better to conceive God as a being capable of operating wherever he wished by His will along rather than by His literal and actual presence. Better that God be in some sense transcendent rather than omnipresent, and therefore better that He be removed from space altogether. With God’s departure, physical scientists finally had an infinite, three-dimensional, void frame within which they could study the motion of bodies without the need to do theology as well. [pp. 263-264]
After this, there follow a generous 144 pages of end notes the bulk of which do not merely tuck in quotations of supporting passages but extrapolate his exposition along tangents that would be difficult to compress into the text itself; and a 19-page bibliography and pleasingly detailed index.
A handful of minor quibbles. The Arabic natural philosophers, above all Avicenna and Averroes, though mentioned of course, receive short shrift; anyone who has gone through, say, Anneliese Maier’s erudite and painstakingly detailed studies would be aware of their centrality as a springboard for virtually all Latin scholastic speculation. Indeed, it would not be that far-fetched to suggest that the medieval scholastics might more aptly be termed Avicennians or Averroists than Aristotelians. By the same token, Grant includes little on post-18th century developments beyond stray allusions in some of the end notes. Another, perhaps a fault common to historians: the exposition does not proceed synthetically but as a hodge-podge of synopses of the major along with many of the minor figures. The problem with this is that since Grant has no doctrine of his own he is seeking to defend, one is left mainly with unassimilated recapitulation – not at any rate the ideal, if however necessary to round out one’s education especially given how parochial in time most scientists’ formation is nowadays.
A critical comment to close: in view of Piaget’s genealogy of the genesis of the concept of space in children (see our review here), one might be entitled to ask whether Aristotle could have been right after all? Kant does not pay any attention to the psychological formation of our spatial intuitions but we may. What does Piaget say, in a nutshell? First one has to learn to recognize objects and their permanence. Then, become familiar with the phenomena of perspective and measure (i.e., the spatial metric which establishes a notion of distance) and, from these, figure out how to interrelate the objects of experience from multiple points of view in an overarching schema, to which we give the name of a locally Euclidean manifold together with its Cartesian coordinatization. Here we claim that Piaget implicitly embraces a Leibnizian relativism and that, this being the case, Leibniz’ view of space itself makes sense only as an abstract from naïve experience which, as always, will bear an Aristotelian stamp. The answer to our question depends on whether material bodies are to be viewed as existing in their own right with the fact that they have spatial extension playing a subordinate role (as would be the predominant view among physicists these days) or as Neoplatonic derived products of a dynamical process taking place in space as a fundament. For if the latter, then the former would be inconceivable without a properly dynamical grounding. In this reviewer’s estimate, it is by no means self-evident which way one ought to go. The attentive reader who has the patience to suffer through a full-length monograph on the subject of space – and at that, to pore over ideas long since outmoded – will perhaps be equipped to speculate with profit on this and like questions thanks to Grant’s tireless industry and scholarly meticulousness!
Edward Grant, a respected emeritus historian of science who specializes in medieval thought, has done us all a great service by tracing these developments with attentive care in his Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, published by the Cambridge University Press (1981). This volume dates from relatively early in his writing career and hence shows itself to be perhaps more ostentatiously scholarly than his subsequent works for a more popular audience [other major studies of Grant’s, perhaps more accessible to the layman: The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (1996); God and Reason in the Middle Ages (2001); and Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (2004)].
Grant easily disposes of the canard that serious reflection on the nature and properties of space began only during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the conception of space does undergo significant alteration from the scholastics to Newton, what Grant wants to document at every stage along the way. Part I on intracosmic space, after a brief summary of Aristotle, takes up medieval conceptions of the nature and properties of void space. A major issue is the very possibility of motion in a void, for these authors as a rule follow Aristotle in supposing that motion requires a continual driving force and that the speed thus attained is inversely proportional to the resistance of the medium. But in a vacuum, the resistance would be zero and its inverse undefined. Some thought any movement would therefore happen instantaneously, others that it could not get started in the first place. Thus, there was latitude for a wide range of opinions and development of ideas. A second topic here is nature’s so-called abhorrence of a vacuum. What one thinks about the possibility of a vacuum depends on the theory of space and the theory of matter adopted, so again, a diverse spectrum of teachings abounded. By the way, it is unclear whether what we today call a vacuum really counts as such, in that the region of space in question, we suppose, will still be populated by various fields – metric, electric, magnetic etc., even if the value of the field there equals zero. A genuine void, on the other hand, would have to be entirely empty.
Part II is devoted to the interesting and – since Kant’s antinomies of pure reason –, often neglected question of the existence of an infinite extracosmic void space (nobody at the time could have envisaged the possibility that space in the large could be compact but without boundary, as a modern geometer might model it). As Grant explains, the question is largely motivated by theological concern and difficult to separate from theology. Later on, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the scholastic tradition vied with newly invigorated non-scholastic schools of thought, all of which Grant covers exhaustively. Names associated with the former include Bradwardine and Suarez, inter alia (including other Jesuits) while with the latter, Giordano Bruno, John Philoponus, Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella.
All this sets the context for the rise of the radically novel view of space entertained by the instigators of the scientific revolution which led to the establishment of classical mechanics although the development could hardly be characterized as one of direct descent but rather represents a complicated web of dependencies and influences. Patrizi (1529-1597), who revives the Stoic tradition, represents the watershed. Numbered among Patrizi’s followers are Gassendi, Henry More and Spinoza. In a subsection, Grant criticizes the view of Koyré to the effect that space underwent a geometrization in the sense that Euclidean space with its metrical properties replaced the Aristotelian cosmos – how we look on the matter in retrospect, but recall, the disciplinary boundary between physics and mathematics was drawn much more sharply at that time than we would be inclined to today, and the problem of space was thought by contemporaries to implicate physics more than mathematics. Part III closes with a look at Isaac Barrow, Locke, Newton and the celebrated Leibniz-Clarke debate.
Part III consists in a summary and reflection, at just six pages concise but nonetheless consequential. To recapitulate, the background of everything Grant treats is Aristotle’s denial of a separate void space and of resistance in vacuo or in mixed bodies. In what may come as a surprise to those inclined to view the medievals as hidebound to tradition, the event of all the scholastic debates was the emergence of a widespread acceptance of the possibility and intelligibility of finite, successive motion in hypothetical vacua. By contrast, an extracosmic void space was termed imaginary. Newly available Greek texts in the late 15th to 16th centuries encouraged anti-Aristotelians and non-scholastics to render it real, but how? Paradoxically in view of common stereotypes, physics became more not less theological. Since many will find this contention startling, let us quote Grant at length:
In the historical developments described here, it was medieval and early modern scholastics who, for better or worse, introduced God into space in a manner more substantial than the vague, if dazzling, metaphors found in the earlier patristic, cabbalistic and Hermetic traditions. Jean de Ripa, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicole Oresme would proclaim an infinite, extracosmic void space with an omnipresent deity in the fourteenth century. Indeed Oresme called that infinite and indivisible space God’s immensity. From then on, until the eighteenth century, scholastics and nonscholastics would attempt to explain and describe how God and space might be related. Scholastics linked a nondimensional space with an unextended God; others, such as Gassendi, would assume a three-dimensional space and an unextended God; and in the final stage, More and Newton would join an extended space to an extended God. Certain important nonscholastics, such as Gassendi and Guericke, revealed deep scholastic influences; others seem to have been indirectly affected, revealing an influence only in their use of scholastic terms and expressions that had become part of the language of philosophical and theological discourse. Scholastic ideas about space and God form an integral part of the history of spatial conceptions between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the Scientific Revolution. From the assumption that infinite space is God’s immensity, scholastics derived most of the same properties as did nonscholastics, and did so before the latter. As God’s immensity, space had to be homogeneous, immutable, infinite and capable of coexistence with bodies, which it received without offering resistance. Except for extension, the divinization of space in scholastic thought produced virtually all the properties that would be conferred on space during the course of the Scientific Revolution. [p. 262]
Grant goes on to attribute the continued relevance of scholastics during the period, unjustly excluded from previous histories, to a better ability to hold their own in the debate whenever it turns more on conceptual than on concrete quantitative questions, for which their rivals were better equipped in terms of mathematical technique. His concluding paragraph deserves notice:
Because God’s eventual elimination from infinite space failed to affect the properties of space, does it not seem plausible to conclude that the intrusion of God into space was a mistake from the outset? Did it not delay for centuries the acceptance of a purely objective, scientific, physical space? Had the God-free, three-dimensional, infinite space of the Stoics and atomists been accepted immediately, a purely physical space would have been available at least two centuries earlier. In effect, we have already answered these hypothetical questions. No separate, external, infinite space could have been adopted in medieval and early modern Europe without an explanation of its relationship to God, on whom it had to depend in some way. For centuries, that relationship was explored, even as the physical properties of space received early and general acceptance. Before God could be removed from space, a general realization had to develop that the various mechanisms devised over the centuries to explain His omnipresence in infinite space were not only unsatisfactory but ultimately unintelligible. Only then could God be removed from space without a theological reaction and charges of atheism. After centuries of debate and controversy, this stage was finally reached in the eighteenth century, helped along, to be sure, by Berkeley and Leibniz. In a curious sense, one might argue that John Duns Scotus and Gottfried Leibniz triumphed over Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton. It was better to conceive God as a being capable of operating wherever he wished by His will along rather than by His literal and actual presence. Better that God be in some sense transcendent rather than omnipresent, and therefore better that He be removed from space altogether. With God’s departure, physical scientists finally had an infinite, three-dimensional, void frame within which they could study the motion of bodies without the need to do theology as well. [pp. 263-264]
After this, there follow a generous 144 pages of end notes the bulk of which do not merely tuck in quotations of supporting passages but extrapolate his exposition along tangents that would be difficult to compress into the text itself; and a 19-page bibliography and pleasingly detailed index.
A handful of minor quibbles. The Arabic natural philosophers, above all Avicenna and Averroes, though mentioned of course, receive short shrift; anyone who has gone through, say, Anneliese Maier’s erudite and painstakingly detailed studies would be aware of their centrality as a springboard for virtually all Latin scholastic speculation. Indeed, it would not be that far-fetched to suggest that the medieval scholastics might more aptly be termed Avicennians or Averroists than Aristotelians. By the same token, Grant includes little on post-18th century developments beyond stray allusions in some of the end notes. Another, perhaps a fault common to historians: the exposition does not proceed synthetically but as a hodge-podge of synopses of the major along with many of the minor figures. The problem with this is that since Grant has no doctrine of his own he is seeking to defend, one is left mainly with unassimilated recapitulation – not at any rate the ideal, if however necessary to round out one’s education especially given how parochial in time most scientists’ formation is nowadays.
A critical comment to close: in view of Piaget’s genealogy of the genesis of the concept of space in children (see our review here), one might be entitled to ask whether Aristotle could have been right after all? Kant does not pay any attention to the psychological formation of our spatial intuitions but we may. What does Piaget say, in a nutshell? First one has to learn to recognize objects and their permanence. Then, become familiar with the phenomena of perspective and measure (i.e., the spatial metric which establishes a notion of distance) and, from these, figure out how to interrelate the objects of experience from multiple points of view in an overarching schema, to which we give the name of a locally Euclidean manifold together with its Cartesian coordinatization. Here we claim that Piaget implicitly embraces a Leibnizian relativism and that, this being the case, Leibniz’ view of space itself makes sense only as an abstract from naïve experience which, as always, will bear an Aristotelian stamp. The answer to our question depends on whether material bodies are to be viewed as existing in their own right with the fact that they have spatial extension playing a subordinate role (as would be the predominant view among physicists these days) or as Neoplatonic derived products of a dynamical process taking place in space as a fundament. For if the latter, then the former would be inconceivable without a properly dynamical grounding. In this reviewer’s estimate, it is by no means self-evident which way one ought to go. The attentive reader who has the patience to suffer through a full-length monograph on the subject of space – and at that, to pore over ideas long since outmoded – will perhaps be equipped to speculate with profit on this and like questions thanks to Grant’s tireless industry and scholarly meticulousness!
February 11, 2014
Citations made in QUAERENDUM SCIENTIAM (The Pursuit of Knowledge)
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