The historical background

In the Balkans in the eighteenth century, various social formations came into existence through processes prompted by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Modern Greek society was one such.Footnote ⁵ This society was still in its earliest demographic stages. It consisted of many different populations dispersed within and beyond the empire's borders. The most prominent elements unifying these populations were fundamentally cultural and ideological: the Christian Orthodox faith and Greek-speaking education. This was a result of the political arrangements that had followed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople three centuries earlier. Immediately after the fall of the city in 1453, Sultan Mohammed II appointed Georgios Gennadios (c.1400–72) as new patriarch of the Orthodox Church and provided him with a written privilege granting the Christian authorities jurisdiction over many aspects of the religious and civil life of the Orthodox populations of the Balkans and Asia Minor. The Sultan's decision was a highly symbolic gesture responding both to the complexities of the administration of a continuously expanding empire with a progressively increasing Christian population and to the threat from Christian Europe. When ‘nation’ meant an aggregation of people who shared the same religious beliefs and followed the same rituals, the Orthodox Patriarchate was the only institution in a position to present a somewhat unified expression of the various Christian populations with respect to the Ottoman administration. At the same time Mohammed exploited the deep animosity between the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches after their schism of 1054. The choice of the Orthodox patriarch as the de facto political representative of the Christian populations of the Balkans and the strengthening of the forces opposing Church unification tended to minimize threats of a European crusade against the Ottoman Empire under the aegis of the papacy. Mohammed's arrangements came to be seen as aiding long-term social stability in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ecumenical Patriarchate was integrated into the Ottoman administration as a state institution.Footnote ⁶ It enjoyed a privileged share in the distribution of power and for the first time in its history became in fact ‘ecumenical’.Footnote ⁷ It exerted its power over a vast Christian territory unified by the Ottoman occupation. This power was not only religious but also political and economic.

One of the most important consequences of this arrangement was that it allowed the Patriarchate to gain full control over these populations' educational activities. But education was very poor for a long time it was basically oriented to the reproduction of middle-rank Church officers. According to all (though admittedly limited) extant evidence,Footnote ⁸ sixteenth-century curricula included Aristotle's logic and rhetoric and the patristic tradition of the Eastern Church. The first significant revival of philosophical thought took place in the period of Patriarch Kyrillos Loukaris (1570–1638), who appointed the neo-Aristotelian philosopher Theophilos Korydaleus (1563/74–1646) as director of the Patriarchal Academy.Footnote ⁹ Prompted by Jesuit activity in the eastern Mediterranean, Loukaris sought to promote the shaping of an intellectual identity for the Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire to render them a discrete cultural entity between Muslim East and Catholic West.Footnote ¹⁰ Korydaleus was the first scholar after the fall of Constantinople to introduce systematic interest in Aristotle's physics and draw on the works of past Greek-speaking commentators. He wrote his own extensive commentaries on Physica and De generatione et corruptione using the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the views of the sixteenth-century Italian Alexandrists.Footnote ¹¹ His work was unfavourably received by some contemporaries due to the Alexandrists' tendency towards materialism. However, it enjoyed Church protection as it was the only available antidote to Catholic scholasticism. As a result, it formed the core of subsequent higher philosophical education and had a long-lasting impact on Greek intellectual life.

The forms of education and of intellectual life were further defined by subsequent social developments in the Ottoman Balkans. The early eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of the Phanariots, a group of noblemen who simultaneously served at the courts of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at Phanari (hence the name) and of the Sublime Porte. From the end of the seventeenth century the Phanariots acquired an increasingly important role in the administration of the Ottoman state. At the start of the next century Phanariot representatives were appointed by the Sultan as governors of Wallachia and Moldavia. The Phanariots would soon take the leading role among all other Orthodox Balkan groups. As administrators and diplomats they followed the line of enlightened despotism. Their political dominance reinforced the already strong Greek influence in these regions' economic and cultural spheres. The Phanariots played a significant role in the secularization of education by promoting the establishment of schools and by favouring the introduction of contemporary European trends in education and social life.Footnote ¹² Their presence was especially evident in Constantinople, Bucharest and Jassy. They also intervened in educational matters elsewhere either by offering protection to particular scholars who built their careers on modern philosophy or by contributing to the building of new schools aimed at the wider public.

Another social group sought simultaneously to secure its share in the distribution of social and economic power among Orthodox Balkan populations. This was the group of wealthy craftsmen and merchants of Epirus, western Macedonia and Thessaly. The area had a long tradition in commercial and handicraft activities but also included the most important migration centre of the Ottoman Empire. It offered a link between Ottoman territories and European commercial routes. Its inhabitants were traditionally the intermediaries of this communication and many generations migrated to central Europe to establish or maintain the links of this commercial network.Footnote ¹³ The area gradually became an educational centre since the wealth and size of the local communities allowed them to establish many new schools.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, during their period of self-assertion and due to their distance from traditional political and educational centres, these communities encouraged the creation of an intellectual atmosphere receptive to new educational and philosophical trends of European thought. Most Greek-speaking scholars who treated the sciences and new natural philosophy during the eighteenth century came from this narrow area of the south-western Balkans.Footnote ¹⁵

None of these developments changed the basic features of educational activity or, most importantly, the Church's predominance in educational matters. Both Christian faith and Greek-speaking education, the two elements that unified such different groups as the Phanariots of Constantinople, the Vlach merchants of Epirus, the Greek fraternity of Venice, the Greek-speaking immigrants of central Europe and the administrative elite of the semi-autonomous Danubian regions, were under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. But in the light of eighteenth-century developments both were now also heavily coloured by various local communities' particularities. This was particularly important in education because, due to the lack of other (state) institutions, Greek-speaking education became the main intellectual territory for various forms of negotiation and collective pursuit around the emergent society's political and intellectual identity. This was also the context in which the assimilation of the new natural philosophy took place during the lengthy period from the late seventeenth century until the Greek war of independence in the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁶

The second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth witnessed the publication of many scientific and philosophical books aiming to cross-fertilize Greek intellectual life with the achievements of the European Enlightenment. The protagonists of this initiative were almost exclusively teachers. Their books were meant to serve as textbooks for the schools of the period. The figure of the teacher held a central position in Greek-speaking education throughout the eighteenth century. Although a common curriculum tended to prevail, especially in higher education, the master of every local school remained the ultimate authority over curriculum structure and the textbooks to be used in each thematic area. The master was personally responsible for his students' philosophical instruction, which also included mathematics and natural philosophy. Almost every major scholar of the time had been a schoolmaster. Many of them had published more than one scientific or philosophical textbook.Footnote ¹⁷

These scholars belonged to a transitional generation. Intellectual life was then dominated by the neo-Aristotelian tradition established in the early seventeenth century by Theophilos Korydaleus. From the start of the eighteenth century, however, Greek-speaking scholars started travelling throughout Europe. Padua ceased to be almost exclusively the university where they would go to study. They also began travelling to the German states, the Low Countries, Russia, the Habsburg Empire and, to a much lesser extent, France and England. They were thus acquainted with a multitude of intellectual traditions and schools, related mainly to recent developments of the European Enlightenment. When these travellers returned home after between four and ten years in European educational centres, they sought social recognition matching their intellectual qualifications. The quest for modernization of certain local societies provided the ground on which their social aspirations could flourish. These scholars perceived themselves and were perceived by others as agents of a new spirit in Greek intellectual life. Far from sustaining a homogeneous programme of modernization, far from having gained local authorities' general consent, they were considered the agents upon whom the most dynamic social groups counted for shaping their collective form. But this form's constituents were still in question. As a result, the Greek-speaking scholars of the time found themselves at the intersection of multiple cultural traditions and social interests. The textbooks they wrote and the philosophical discourses they elaborated exactly reflected this ambiguous situation.Footnote ¹⁸

Historiographical remarks

According to many Greek historians a convenient way to account for the philosophical production of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars is to focus on the interplay between progressive and conservative intellectual trends in Greek society of the time. Progressive scholars were those who displayed a positive attitude towards the attainments of European thought, while the conservatives tended to uphold religious authorities' policy as well as the antiquity-oriented educational curricula. The sciences seemingly play a significant role in this approach since they represent the indisputably progressive force in modern society. From the early eighteenth century in particular, when according to these historians the scientific landscape in Europe had already been transformed, the distinction between the scholars who embraced modern science and those who kept at a distance from it became acute. The touchstone for this distinction was the conformity of each scholar to so-called Newtonianism. Progressive scholars were then to be defined as those who endorsed ‘Newtonian physics’ and its philosophical and political counterparts, while conservative scholars were those who rejected the new teachings in the name of a well-established local intellectual tradition.Footnote ¹⁹

But this approach reveals little of the nature of these persons' philosophical enterprise. It is instead founded upon two highly disputable assumptions: first, that during the eighteenth century ‘Newtonianism’ or ‘Newtonian physics’ was already a well-defined and complete system of scientific knowledge and practice; second, that the only possible attitude of a scholar from the periphery to modern scientific discourses, especially to such emblematic attainments as ‘Newtonian science’, was either to conform or to abstain.Footnote ²⁰ As a result, the historiography that relies upon these assumptions degenerates into a record of the scientific ideas that passed into Greek intellectual space through the agency of enlightened scholars and of those that failed to do so due to the reaction of tradition's representatives. In both cases, most importantly, local scholars' role is absolutely passive. They either adopted or rejected new scientific ideas and treated them as complete structures, hardly capable of alteration or modification.

To be sure, in recent years a number of historians have seemingly realized that a certain degree of adaptation took place during the assimilation of the new ideas by the eighteenth-century scholars. These scholars tried to adjust the new ideas to their local context so that they fitted better into a philosophically undemanding framework:

Hence, according to this perspective, the involvement of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars with the sciences indicates, at best, an intellectual or cultural disposition but under no circumstances does it indicate active philosophical or scientific pursuits.

Other historians elaborate a more sophisticated argument according to which these Greek-speaking scholars might not have been natural philosophers of the type then to be found in western Europe, but when they intended to address their particular intellectual community they took special care to select, adapt, combine, analyse and produce work proper to educational use:

The fact itself that the Greek-speaking scholars assimilated and spread new ideas, countering both popular ignorance and established authorities, was an invaluable contribution to the synchronization of Greek society with contemporary European developments.Footnote ²³ But at the same time most historians who adopt this approach take the formation of the ‘sciences’ and the shaping of ‘modern European thought’ as complete processes and indisputable steps of progress. The historical circumstances under which the various sciences had been shaped, as well as the multifarious interactions leading to the legitimization of a certain way of viewing nature, remain unquestioned.

Hence the purpose of the historian would be primarily to grasp the continuities and the order of Greek societies' historical progress.Footnote ²⁵ This would mean that one should be interested in the modifications undergone by various scientific ideas in their adjustment to local intellectual patterns. But at the same time, on this showing, one should be aware that these modifications occur almost exclusively in the sphere of distribution and indicate, at best, Greek society's openness to modernity.Footnote ²⁶ This approach has nevertheless produced an impressive volume of historical work recording Greek intellectual life's contact with modern scientific and philosophical developments. These works, however, mainly involve the efforts of the historians who study the construction of the Greek national state and its European integration. In this respect, a most characteristic aspect of this historiography is that it persistently links the introduction of the sciences with the enlightenment of the ‘nation’ and the anticipation of national emancipation.

The aim of this paper is to indicate and to illustrate the possibility of moving beyond the standard approach. In the light of recent developments in history of science, the distinction between the production and the distribution of science fades away. As a result, the history of science in the periphery becomes an organic part of a broader perspective that seeks to illustrate the intricate social, cultural and political interactions shaping modern science and legitimizing its respective civilizational patterns. Local agents' attitudes to new ideas were closely related to the fact that these ideas provided alternative methods and responses to questions to which peoples and cultures already had adequate answers. New ideas were not introduced in a void but needed to displace other, usually strongly entrenched, ideas. Thus historical research cannot be limited to questions of which scientific ideas found their way into that period's Greek intellectual life and which failed to do so, or how fully people understood ‘Newtonian physics’, or even of who resisted and who accepted these new ideas and why. Such questions are not without some interest but can only reveal a relatively shallow layer of the actual historical circumstances. Of ‘Newtonianism’ in particular it should not be forgotten that even during the late eighteenth century the landscape was still unclear and fluid. Such questions thus do not make much sense. One must first define the aspect of ‘Newtonianism’ or ‘Newtonian science’ in question.Footnote ²⁷ But, most importantly, in the middle of this highly diversified universe those who considered themselves agents of an active and still efficient philosophical system had in fact no good reason to side with the new and still unshaped philosophy. What they preferred was exploration of the new ideas' potential and assimilation into their own system of whatever they could appreciate as a valid philosophical contribution. What follows is a case study in which Newtonian philosophy's most significant concept, vis inertiae, became the object of subtle management, clearly displaying this particular disposition on the part of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking scholars.Footnote ²⁸

Vis inertiae in the periphery: local perceptions of the new physics

Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) was probably the most representative figure of what G. P. Henderson has called ‘the revival of Greek thought’.Footnote ²⁹ He was born in Corfu and trained in the University of Padua. For twenty years (1742–62) he was a philosophy professor in the most important Greek schools of the southern Balkans and a protagonist in the attempts of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek-speaking nobility to reform higher education. After his educational career in the Greek-speaking regions of the Balkans he continued his intellectual activities for some years in Leipzig, where he also became personally acquainted with several members of Saxony's philosophical community.Footnote ³⁰ He subsequently placed himself under the patronage of Catherine the Great, became a courtier in Saint Petersburg and culminated his career as archbishop of Slavensk and Cherson, a new diocesan see created by the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate especially for him.Footnote ³¹ In 1788, while still in southern Ukraine, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London during the presidency of Sir Joseph Banks.Footnote ³²

Voulgaris was a typical man of letters. His contributions lay in the fields of theology (like most of his contemporary scholars he was an ordained clergyman), metaphysics, literature, political philosophy and the sciences. The latter especially occupied a central place in his interests throughout his life. He was the first to introduce into Greek education the philosophies of the Enlightenment's important representatives, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Newton and Wolff. He was also well acquainted with the works of natural philosophers, including Samuel Clarke, Willem Jacob van 'sGravesande, Petrus van Musschenbroek and Emilie du Châtelet. He incorporated many elements from their textbooks in his teachings and writings. He translated into Greek many treatises including Voltaire's Essai historique et critique sur les dissensions des églises de Pologne (though accompanied by a commentary that questioned the central thesis of the original work),Footnote ³³ 'sGravesande's Introductio ad philosophiam,Footnote ³⁴ Antonio Genovesi's Elementa metaphysicae mathematicum in morem adornata Footnote ³⁵ and John Locke's Essay.Footnote ³⁶ In many of his philosophical writings Voulgaris dealt with natural philosophy and was one of the most dynamic promoters of the new scientific spirit in Greek intellectual life. At the same time, however, he was a pious Orthodox Christian and a well-educated Aristotelian. In this capacity Voulgaris established an open dialogue with contemporary philosophy primarily aiming at a new and original synthesis that would accommodate the new natural philosophy along with the philosophical and the religious commitments of his own cultural environment. The way he dealt with the Newtonian concept of inertia is one of the most characteristic examples of the strategy he followed to achieve this goal.

In his Ta Areskonta tois Philosophois (Philosophers' Favourites), a treatise devoted to natural philosophy that owes its name to, though its content differs from, Pseudo-Plutarch's Placita Philosophorum, he meticulously examined the most significant concept of modern physics.Footnote ³⁷ However, surprisingly, he built his examination around the claim that Keill, Clarke, 'sGravesande and Musschenbroek, some of the most representative ‘Newtonians’ of his time, as well as Newton himself, were in deep confusion. Inertia was not one single concept, as they seemed to believe, but three different concepts corresponding to different ontological states and modes of existence. These three concepts were impotence or sluggishness, indifference or passive force, and counteraction.Footnote ³⁸

In order to make his point clear, Voulgaris started not from Newton but from Aristotle and common sense. We can perceive matter, he claimed, in two different ways, as matter in its own right and as matter that acts and ‘suffers’.Footnote ³⁹ Accordingly, we can distinguish the notions of inertia corresponding to each of these perceptions. In the former sense, matter is unable to change its kinetic status or its shape because its nature is absolutely inert. This is exactly what the moderns call vis inertiae. However, to avoid confusion, ‘impotence’ or ‘sluggishness’ would be more appropriate names. In the latter sense, matter can not only change its own kinetic status and shape but can also affect the kinetic status and shape of other pieces of matter. In all cases, however, the change occurs because matter is, by its own nature, unresistingly receptive to external impacts. The magnitude of a change is proportional to the magnitude of the external impact. Matter, in this specific sense, does not display any resistance to external impacts. So, it does not participate in the determination of the magnitude of the change. The moderns also call this feature inertia, but ‘indifference’ or ‘passive force’ would be more appropriate terms.Footnote ⁴⁰ The third notion of inertia relates to material bodies and differs from the two previous notions, which relate to the concept of pure matter. ‘Counteraction’ is responsible for the resistance a material body displays towards any external impact that tries to change its kinetic status or shape. The magnitude of counteraction is proportional to the quantity of matter the body contains and to the magnitude of the external factor.Footnote ⁴¹According to Voulgaris, all these notions relate to what the moderns call under one name vis inertiae and, in a certain sense, they are constituents of a single instance. They all simultaneously describe how matter participates in the phenomena of change. Conceptually, though, they originate in different philosophical principles, claimed Voulgaris. That is why he took it upon himself to clarify the confusion.

Before proceeding with Voulgaris's enterprise, it is important to note that Newton himself mentioned a similar triple sense when he first defined vis inertiae in the introduction to the Principia. Since Voulgaris was an extremely diligent student of the natural philosophy of his time, it may be safely assumed that he had in mind this pertinent passage from the third definition:

One interpretation of this passage might permit the disaggregation of the original concept of vis inertiae into three different concepts: the inactivity or ‘inertia of matter’, which represents material bodies' innate tendency (vis insita) to preserve their kinetic status; the ‘resistance’, ‘which is commonly attributed to resting bodies’ and represents the force a body exerts in order to maintain its status; and the ‘impetus’, which represents the same force perceived from the point of view of the factor that tries to alter the kinetic status of the body and, as a result, receives a modification of its own kinetic status as well. It is also true that at least two of Voulgaris's concepts, sluggishness and counteraction, could appear under this interpretation and that Newton's reflection itself might have caused Voulgaris to think of a more radical rearrangement of inertia's constituent concepts. But Newton's intention was not to dismantle the concept of inertia, as Voulgaris seems to have been doing, but rather to extricate the particular word from its colloquial connotations. That is why Newton repeatedly stressed that the various alternatives he presented were a matter of perspective. He stated his intention straightforwardly when he wrote that ‘motion and rest, in the popular sense of the terms, are distinguished from each other only by point of view’ but that ‘bodies commonly regarded as being at rest are not always truly at rest’. A few pages later he returned to the same issue when he distinguished time, space, place and motion into ‘absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common’, in order to avoid ‘certain preconceptions’ which result from the fact that ‘these quantities are popularly conceived solely with reference to the objects of sense perception’.Footnote ⁴³ Voulgaris apparently tried to articulate a different approach. It is highly revealing of his intention to pursue his own path that he explicitly stated that Newton and his allies were confused as far as the meaning of inertia was concerned since they gave the same name to three virtually different things. They had erred and his task, as he seemed to perceive it, was to put things straight. What would he do, then, to accomplish this aim?

Voulgaris's starting point was of crucial importance to his further philosophical endeavour. Contrary to Newton, who introduced the notion of inertia in order to expel the metaphysical category of matter from his mathematical treatment of motion, Voulgaris described inertia as a feature of matter itself. Thus reference to vis inertiae in the context of Newton's Principia does not demand further information about the nature of the matter which participates in a certain kinetic phenomenon. Yet when vis inertiae is mentioned in the context of Voulgaris's Ta Areskonta tois Philosophois it is necessary to specify which perception of matter is in question in order to employ the appropriate notion of inertia. In Newton's Principia inertia is evidence of matter's presence while in Voulgaris's Ta Areskonta tois Philosophois inertia is evidence of matter's essence. In the Aristotelian tradition, every material being consists of a certain combination of matter and form. But matter can also be perceived independently of form. This is materia prima and it is the perception of matter that Voulgaris connected with the two former definitions of inertia – that is, with impotence and with passive force. But if materia prima is singular, why then did Voulgaris distinguish between inert matter and potentially active matter? This was because this distinction served two different philosophical needs. Matter as an intrinsically inert substance is the first ‘principle’ of the material world.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is created by God and acquires its active character from Him. As Voulgaris explained when he discussed the causes of motion, every motion emanates, directly or indirectly, from God.Footnote ⁴⁵ An intrinsically active matter would apparently cast serious doubts on the necessity of God's existence. Thus the first definition of inertia (inertia as impotence or sluggishness) was of high priority for the pious Christian philosopher, who wished to secure God as the ultimate active agent of his philosophical system. It is revealing of Voulgaris's attitude that a few pages later he used this specific feature of matter to impugn the Leibnizian idea of matter endowed with an active force.Footnote ⁴⁶

At the same time, however, Aristotle occupied a pre-eminent position in this philosophical discussion. As Voulgaris diligently explained, the combination of matter with form would be impossible if materia prima were not receptive to form. This feature relates to the female character of matter. Voulgaris cited Plato and Aristotle, both of whom spoke of matter in terms such as ‘mother’, ‘nurse’, ‘land’ and ‘mould’. The fact that matter is open to receiving any available form (actually, she is eager to do so) allows not only the formation but also the transformation of material bodies. To the extent that every change in nature is nothing other than a transition from one combination of matter and form to another such combination, the indifference of matter towards forms makes any potential transformation possible.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is this receptivity of materia prima, therefore, that gives birth to the second definition of inertia: indifference or passive force ensures that matter can participate in any formation or transformation without displaying any resistance on its own part.

The third notion of Voulgaris's inertia is, first of all, a matter of logical necessity: counteraction, he remarked, is necessary for the preservation of the stability of the natural world. If natural bodies do not react to the external impacts that seek to alter their kinetic status then every impulse, no matter how small, could produce a perpetual motion, which apparently contradicts common sense and renders the notion of local motion inconceivable.Footnote ⁴⁸ What is important for our discussion, though, is not this statement, which reproduces a trope that occurs in most eighteenth-century treatises of natural philosophy. The important point is that through the notion of ‘counteraction’ Voulgaris moved from the ground of materia prima to the ground of materia secunda. As mentioned above, according to Voulgaris ‘counteraction’ is not a feature of pure matter but of natural bodies. But at the same time the motion of natural bodies in Aristotelian philosophy is not a simple change of place. According to the neo-Aristotelian tradition to which Voulgaris adhered, at least, motion is, like any other kind of change, a process that involves the transition from one combination of matter and form to another. Theophilos Korydaleus, the neo-Aristotelian philosopher of the early seventeenth century who established the tradition that provided Voulgaris's philosophical background, identified motion with the Aristotelian concept of entelechy. The fact that local motion is a special case of entelechy means that even a mere transposition of bodies involves a change of form.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is what Voulgaris had in mind when he introduced the concept of ‘counteraction’. The resistance that occurs during the motion of bodies is not a manifestation of matter but the reaction of a specific combination of matter and form that refuses to yield to another such combination.

At this point one might notice that a serious conflict might have emerged in Voulgaris's manipulations. Counteraction is essentially different from the first notion of inertia, namely the intrinsic inertia of materia prima, which does not manifest itself as resistance but as mere impotence. But how can counteraction coexist with the second notion of inertia, namely the passive force, which represents the receptivity of matter? In other words, how can matter be at the same time both unresistingly receptive and counteractive to external impacts? The answer rests in Voulgaris's special capacity to draw finely designed distinctions that remain dormant in his text until one questions the basic premises of his account.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus when one juxtaposes the two notions of inertia it is clear that the actions they represent have different subjects. In the case of indifference or passive force, the subject is materia prima. The feature of receptivity applies to the relations between matter and form and makes change possible. In the case of counteraction the subject is materia secunda. The feature of resistance applies to the interactions between natural bodies and governs the exchange of actual motion according to the quantity of matter each body contains.Footnote ⁵¹ One might quite plausibly presume that Voulgaris's implicit point was that the former notion of inertia related to matter as a metaphysical category (as is also the case with the notion of impotence or sluggishness) while the latter relates to matter as a natural entity.

Voulgaris clearly elaborated an extremely refined notion of inertia with a well-organized set of philosophical and ontological connotations. Let us now try to set his endeavour in a broader context. Voulgaris was an accomplished philosopher who looked forward to the enrichment of his natural philosophy through modern developments. He appreciated Newton's contribution to natural philosophy. He drew upon a wide variety of ‘Newtonian’ resources. He was well aware of the philosophical significance of the constitutive concepts of the ‘new philosophy’. At the same time, however, he was also well aware of the philosophical discussions throughout Europe about the meaning and the application of these concepts. For this reason he was in a position to understand that Newtonian philosophy was not accepted as a complete synthesis by any protagonist of these discussions. He therefore consciously participated in the philosophical deliberations about the constitutive concepts of Newtonian philosophy. He knew he was not alone in this enterprise. The notion of action at a distance had been the object of much discussion among the greatest philosophers of his time. From the late seventeenth century, debates on the concepts of space and time haunted many as yet inconclusive philosophical debates. Exchanges about the active or passive character of matter, which indeed employed vis inertiae and the force of gravity, formed part of the most significant philosophical and theological debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are only a few of many similar examples. As a learned man and as a cosmopolitan scholar, Voulgaris was well informed about all these debates. Moreover, he was in a position to know that each participant in these discussions carried the philosophical and ontological commitments of their own intellectual tradition, just as he did. The deliberate attempt of Marquise du Châtelet to derive Newton's laws of motion from the metaphysical principles of Leibnizian philosophy, the Cartesian tendency of French mathematicians to advance the concept of motion at the expense of the notion of force and the elaborate reformulation of the kernel of Newtonian mechanics by 'sGravesande in the familiar experimental language of his own cultural environment are only a few instances of this situation.Footnote ⁵²

At the same time, however, Voulgaris, like most Greek scholars of his time, saw the new developments in natural philosophy as evidence of the triumph of Greek philosophy rather than as an irrevocable break with the ancient mode of thought. This is why he took special care to stress that the first notion of inertia he presented in his treatise originated in ancient philosophy and had been known to the ancients under the name ‘plain inertia’. Likewise, when he came to the second notion of inertia, he again took special care to stress that this had also already been known to Plato and Aristotle, who extensively had elaborated on the female character of materia prima. So what the moderns had done was simply to complete the synthesis with the third notion of inertia that was ‘counteraction’. But they fell into confusion by calling the three different notions of inertia by the same name. Voulgaris thought of his role as that of someone who would clear up the confusion. He did so first by connecting each notion of inertia with the proper notion of matter and, second, by directing the moderns' original contribution (counteraction) towards what he considered the appropriate philosophical ground, the conceptual framework of matter and form.

That someone of Aristotelian origin undertook the clarification of the subtle conceptual perplexities of the Newtonian vis inertiae may seem discordant from a modern point of view. But Voulgaris was not then alone in this respect either. Recent studies indicate that after its revival in the European intellectual context around the twelfth century, Aristotelianism had never been a dead body of commentaries insensitive to new philosophical trends. Edward Grant has shown that medieval Aristotelianism involved a wide range of philosophical undertakings capable of adaptation to various environments.Footnote ⁵³ In the early modern period the adaptability of Aristotelianism acquired a more productive face. Several Aristotelian scholars established a comprehensive dialogue with the new natural philosophy, resulting in the assimilation of specific aspects of this philosophy within the Aristotelian framework. Scholastic philosophy was certainly not a marginal aspect of early modern European intellectual life. It was also an active participant in the developments of the new natural philosophy until at least the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this intellectual atmosphere, Voulgaris considered himself legitimately entitled to participate in the general discussion aiming at clarifying the constitutive concepts of Newtonian philosophy. From our perspective, his endeavour might seem regressive. Voulgaris did not see it this way. Inasmuch as he did not see the need for a definitive break with ancient thought, he believed he was bringing the fundamental concepts of modern philosophy into accordance with their original philosophical roots. Thus he produced a new synthesis that, according to his philosophical programme, managed to restore the lost continuity between ancient pronouncements and modern achievements.