Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the
Timaeus of
Plato, or
Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called
khôra (i.e. "space"), or in the
Physics of
Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of
topos (i.e. place), or in the later "geometrical conception of place" as "space
qua extension" in the
Discourse on Place (
Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab polymath
Alhazen.
[2] Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the
Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of
classical mechanics. In
Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute—in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the space.
[3] Other
natural philosophers, notably
Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by their
distance and
direction from one another. In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian
George Berkeley attempted to refute the "visibility of spatial depth" in his
Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Later, the
metaphysician Immanuel Kant said that the concepts of space and time are not empirical ones derived from experiences of the outside world—they are elem