THIAGO ASTUN CIRINO

This project aims to investigate how the principle of causality becomes central in classical physics as human thought increasingly breaks with the scholastic tradition. With this, we will start with a reflection on the cause and effect relationships in physics, more specifically from the moment in which the mathematization of nature becomes the driving force of the “new man”. It is, therefore, modernity during the seventeenth century, when the philosophies of René Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727) are involved in the debate on causality in the new physics. Thus, we will seek, at the intersection between philosophy of science and history of science, to infer relationships between causes and their effects both in the formulation of the first laws of nature elaborated by Descartes and in the mathematical expression of the laws of motion and resultant force established by Newton, the in order to reach an understanding about the principle of causality in the genesis of classical physics.