Textes philosophiques en anglais – master – premier semestre

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• soit une réponse argumentée et organisée à la question ci-dessous,

• soit un commentaire du passage ci-dessous.

> How are “laws of nature” characterised in Boyle’s Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of
Nature?

> “There is a distinction of local motion into natural and violent that is so generally received and
used, both by philosophers and physicians, that (I think) it deserves to have special notice taken of it
in this section, since it implicitly contains an argument for the existence of the thing called nature, by
supposing it so manifest a thing as that an important distinction may justly be grounded on it. This
implied objection, I confess, is somewhat difficult to clear, not for any great force that is contained in
it, but because of the ambiguity of the terms wherein the distinction is wont to be employed, for
most men speak of the proposed distinction of motion in so obscure or so uncertain a way, that it is
not easy to know what they mean by either of the members of it. But yet some there are who
endeavour to speak intelligibly (and for that are to be commended) and define natural motion to be
that whose principle is within the moving body itself, and violent motion that which bodies are put
into by an external agent or cause. And in regard these speak more clearly than the rest, I shall here
principally consider the lately mentioned distinction in the sense they give it. [...]

And indeed, since it must be indifferent to a lifeless and insensible body, to what place it is made to
move, all its motions may in some respect be said to be natural, and in another, violent. For as very
many bodies of visible bulk are set a-moving by external impellents, and on that score their motions
may be said to be violent, so the generality of impelled bodies do move either upwards, downwards,
etc., towards any part of the world, in what line or way soever they find their motion least resisted;
which impulse and tendency, being given by virtue of what they call the general laws of nature, the
motion may be said to be natural”.

R. Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, section VI

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