Aither 31/2024:62-89 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2023.008

Na cestě ze scholastiky: Amortova a Hauserova reakce na novověkou fyziku

Miroslav Hanke

Filosofický ústav Akademie věd České republiky, v. v. i.

The early modern mechanics, as developed in the works of Descartes, Newton, and Wolff, introduced as its principle (in some cases, as axiom) the law of inertia, stating that “every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its
state by forces impressed.” The present paper presents the eighteenth-century debates on the law by the Augustinian Eusebius Amort (1692–1775) in his Philosophia Pollingana (first edition published 1730) and by the Jesuit Berthold Hauser (1713–1762) in his Elementa philosophiae (8 volumes published between 1755 and 1764). To explain their positions in the contemporary debates, their concepts of nature and natural motion (in the sense of a motion driven by the intrinsic principles of a body), which give the proper background to the laws of motion and to the law of inertia in particular, are discussed, resulting into a confrontation of a more traditional Aristotelian notion held by Amort with the Wolffian mechanicistic
reading of the same notion which Hauser leans towards. The analysis of these sources uncovers interesting reconciliation attempts between mechanicism and scholasticism in the eighteenth-century physics.

Received: May 9, 2023; Revised: May 9, 2023; Accepted: October 12, 2023; Published: January 11, 2025  Show citation