Vital Spaces, Vital Forces: Life in Renaissance and Early Modern Physics Ghent University
According to the common narrative, the early, critical development of classical physics was a turning-away from the living and retreat to the inanimate. The success of classical physics has convinced us of this narrative; my project will demonstrate that this narrative is wrong. I will show that medical and biological ideas were crucial in the formation of science’s basic presuppositions: that of a homogenous matter, force, and space whose ...