Aristotle's Physica in John Locke's schemes of natural philosophy

A new conception of matter and of its elementary constituents, as well as a new idea of space and time, made seventeenth- century natural philosophy a markedly anti-Aristotelian science: the main theses of Aristotle’s Physica were refuted by the exponents of the “New Philosophy”, who rejected the speculative approach to the discipline typical of universities privileging experiment and observation. John Locke’s schemes of Physica (1670-1687) represent a privileged observatory for examining the attitude which the foremost exponents of the “New Philosophy” adopted towards Aristotle’s Physica, an attitude expressing both the difficulty of rejecting the influential model totally and the desire to devise a new physica generalis, replacing the Aristotelian one. The peculiarity of Locke’s approach to this task consists in his adhesion to pansophia, and in his consequent reinterpretation of physica generalis as a universal sapientia encompassing all theoretical disciplines.