This paper will deal with the notion of conatus (endeavor) and the role it plays in Hobbes’s program for natural philosophy. As defined by Hobbes, the conatus of a body is essentially its instantaneous motion, and he sees this as the means to account for a variety of phenomena in both natural philosophy and mathematics. Although I foucs principally on Hobbesian physics, I will also consider the extent to which Hobbes’s account of conatus does important explanatory work in his theory of human perception, psychology, and political philosophy. I argue that, in the end, there are important limitations in Hobbes’s account of conatus, but that Leibniz adapted the concept in important ways in developing his science of dynamics.
There can scarcely be any question that the most important of Leibniz's many mathematical contributions was his development of the calculus differentialis. Although his work in such fields as algebra, series summations, combinatorics, determinant theory, and other areas can be seen (retrospectively at least) as original and even groundbreaking, his efforts in these disciplines were not generally made public his day. In contrast, historians of mathematics routinely speak of a "Leibnizian tradition" in analysis that traces back to a series of published papers from the 1680s and constitutes a clear advance in European mathematics. Yet, although the infinitesimal methods Leibniz introduced with his calculus were powerful new techniques opening a vast field of new results, these methods raised significant conceptual and methodological issues. The specific worry voiced by several of Leibniz's mathematical contemporaries was that these new methods were fundamentally unrigorous, so that they not only offended against criteria of mathematical intelligibility, but were also liable to lead to error.
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