metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

, impenetrability is the name given to that quality of

matter In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic part ...

whereby two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The philosopher

John Toland John Toland (30 November 167011 March 1722) was an Irish rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions o ...

argued that impenetrability and

extension Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate * Ext ...

were sufficient to define matter, a contention strongly disputed by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Locke considered impenetrability to be "more a consequence of solidity, than solidity itself."

Notes

References

* * Heinemann, F. H. "Toland and Leibniz." ''The Philosophical Review'', Vol. 54, No. 5. (September, 1945), pp. 437–457. Concepts in metaphysics {{metaphysics-stub

See also

Notes

References