Passion and Motion in the New Mechanics

Abstract Descartes’s most important contribution to physics is commonly thought to be his reconceptualization of motion. His Aristotelian predecessors viewed motion as a change or process, but Descartes held that motion is a state. This reconceptualization of motion is considered signiHcant because it paved the way for both Descartes’s and Newton’s laws of inertia. While a change requires a force or cause, a state does not.