"Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet," observes Heracleitus (fr. 126), as if to state an obvious fact. Yet this fact became highly troublesome to early philosophers.
Although his predecessors had theories to account for natural changes, Heracleitus (c. 540–c. 480 b.c.e.) seems to be the first Western thinker to raise philosophical questions about change itself. According to Plato, Heracleitus held that (1) all things are changing, and (2) comparing life to a river, he claimed that one could not step twice into the same river (Cratylus 402a). On the basi…
In the modern era a fundamental reorientation in the theory of motion occurred when the principle of inertia was recognized. Put forth first by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), and canonized by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) as his first law, the principle stated that a body in uniform straight motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends …
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