This assignment includes Dear's and Kuhn's accounts of the thinking that led up to Newton. Dear focuses on the successors of Descartes on the Continent while Kuhn ranges more broadly in time and space to consider uses of the idea of force in accounts of planetary motion.

Huygens was perhaps the most important figure in physics on the Continent between Descartes and Newton. He was the origin of the concept of kinetic energy and was influential in developments that led to the wave theory of light. The selection in Matthews is from the book, his own Treatise on Light, where he developed the latter views. (If you are curious, you can find an edition of the whole book on the course Blackboard site; the selection in Matthews corresponds to the preface and pp. 1-7 of ch. 1.)