Galilei

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, Galilei 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. Galilei 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
Galilei, 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]

Ren� 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 Galilei 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]
Isaac Newton
Newton took space to be more than relations between material objects and based his
position on observation and experimentation. For a relationist there can be no real
difference between inertial motion, in which the object travels with constant
velocity, and non-inertial motion, in which the velocity changes with time, since
all spatial measurements are relative to other objects and their motions. But
Newton argued that since non-inertial motion generates forces, it must be absolute.
[14] He used the example of water in a spinning bucket to demonstrate his argument.
Water in a bucket is hung from a rope and set to spin, starts with a flat surface.
After a while, as the bucket continues to spin, the surface of the water becomes
concave. If the bucket's spinning is stopped then the surface of the water remains
concave as it continues to spin. The concave surface is therefore apparently not
the result of relative motion between the bucket and the water.[15] Instead, Newton
argued, it must be a result of non-inertial motion relative to space itself. For
several centuries the bucket argument was considered decisive in showing that space
must exist independently of matter.

Kant

Immanuel Kant
In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a theory
of knowledge in which knowledge about space can be both a priori and synthetic.[16]
According to Kant, knowledge about space is synthetic, in that statements about
space are not simply true by virtue of the meaning of the words in the statement.
In his work, Kant rejected the view that space must be either a substance or
relation. Instead he came to the conclusion that space and time are not discovered
by humans to be objective features of the world, but imposed by us as part of a
framework for organizing experience.[17]