Philosophy of space

Galileo
Galilean and Cartesian theories about space, matter, and motion are at the foundation of
the Scientific Revolution, which is understood to have culminated with the publication
of Newton's Principia in 1687.[5] Newton's theories about space and time helped him explain
the movement of objects. While his theory of space is considered the most influential in
Physics, it emerged from his predecessors' ideas about the same.[6]
As one of the pioneers of modern science, Galileo revised the
established Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas about a geocentric cosmos. He backed
the Copernican theory that the universe was heliocentric, with a stationary sun at the center
and the planets—including the Earth—revolving around the sun. If the Earth moved, the
Aristotelian belief that its natural tendency was to remain at rest was in question. Galileo
wanted to prove instead that the sun moved around its axis, that motion was as natural to
an object as the state of rest. In other words, for Galileo, celestial bodies, including the
Earth, were naturally inclined to move in circles. This view displaced another Aristotelian
idea—that all objects gravitated towards their designated natural place-of-belonging.[7]
René Descartes
Descartes set out to replace the Aristotelian worldview with a theory about space and
motion as determined by natural laws. In other words, he sought a metaphysical foundation
or a mechanical explanation for his theories about matter and motion. Cartesian
space was Euclidean in structure—infinite, uniform and flat.[8] It was defined as that which
contained matter; conversely, matter by definition had a spatial extension so that there was
no such thing as empty space.[5]
The Cartesian notion of space is closely linked to his theories about the nature of the body,
mind and matter. He is famously known for his "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am), or
the idea that we can only be certain of the fact that we can doubt, and therefore think and
therefore exist. His theories belong to the rationalist tradition, which attributes knowledge
about the world to our ability to think rather than to our experiences, as
the empiricists believe.[9] He posited a clear distinction between the body and mind, which is
referred to as the Cartesian dualism.
Leibniz and Newton
Gottfried Leibniz

Following Galileo and Descartes, during the seventeenth century the philosophy of space
and time revolved around the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher–
mathematician, and Isaac Newton, who set out two opposing theories of what space is.
Rather than being an entity that independently exists over and above other matter, Leibniz
held that space is no more than the collection of spatial relations between objects in the
world: "space is that which results from places taken together".[10] Unoccupied regions are
those that could have objects in them, and thus spatial relations with other places. For
Leibniz, then, space was an idealised abstraction from the relations between individual
entities or their possible locations and therefore could not be continuous but must
be discrete.[11] Space could be thought of in a similar way to the relations between family
members. Although people in the family are related to one another, the relations do not
exist independently of the people.[12] Leibniz argued that space could not exist independently
of objects in the world because that implies a difference between two universes exactly
alike except for the location of the material world in each universe. But since there would be
no observational way of telling these universes apart then, according to the identity of
indiscernibles, there would be no real difference between them. According to the principle of
sufficient reason, any theory of space that implied that there could be these two possible
universes must therefore be wrong.[13]