La critique de la physique aristotélicienne dans les Dialogues de La Mothe Le Vayer

Résumé 0

In La Mothe Le Vayer’s Dialogues Made in Imitation of the Ancients, Nature, studied from various aspects, appears in particular as the object of physics. However, if the Dialogues claim to reject skeptically all physics, in fact Aristotle is particularly concerned. Specifically, three approaches converge in a questioning of Aristotelian scholasticism. The first is to use Aristotle’s physics against metaphysics and theology. The second is to question this very Aristotelian physics by attacking its principles. The third is to put forward the critique of the Aristotelian cosmos led by Copernicanism. While most authors quoted by La Mothe Le Vayer are chosen among the philosophers of the Antiquity, the text is still enrolled in the movement of questioning of Aristotelianism in the first seventeenth century, and part of the conditions for the development of a "new science". The fact remains that for La Mothe Le Vayer, the implications of the examination of physics exceed a strictly scientific framework.