Matter Matters : Metaphysics and Methodology in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Why is there a material world? Why is it fundamentally mathematical? This book explores a seventeenth‐century answer to these questions as it emerged from the works of Descartes and Leibniz. What we learn is the sense in which these philosophers held that an analysis of the material world must inevitably lead to mathematics, and that mathematics must inevitably take matter as its object. Here the connection between matter and mathematics was cast in terms of the conditions of intelligibility—matter is what underwrote the very intelligibility of mathematics. Thus, in every world in which mathematics in intelligible, matter exists, and vice versa. On this view, then, matter is not seen as a cosmic anomaly or divine afterthought, but as an essential constituent of the universe. As the title of the book asserts: matter matters.