Descartes attempts to distinguish his "proper" conception of motion, as a change of the "neighborhood" of contiguous bodies, from the common or "vulgar" conception of motion, which is change of internal place (Pr II 10 15, 24 28).
We see the present place of the body; we remember the successive advance it made to that place: the first can, then, only give us a conception of motion, when joined to the last.' (ibid.
Einstein wanted to implement a Leibnizian-Machian relational conception of motion according to which all motion is to be interpreted as the motion of some bodies in relation to other bodies.
Newton, in his controversial Scholium on space, time, and motion, was not merely asserting that motion is absolute in the face of the mechanists' relativist view; he was arguing that a conception of absolute motion was already implicit in the views of his opponents that it was implicit in their conception, which he largely shared, of physical cause and effect.
In the quantum mechanical treatment, the electron in a ground state hydrogen atom has no angular momentum at all an illustration of how the "planetary orbit" conception of electron motion differs from reality.
According to Locke's conception of voluntariness, the motion of your arm is not voluntary, because it is not caused by any volition of yours (indeed, we can even imagine that you do not even have a volition that your arm rise).
On the conception of individuals as ratios of motion and rest that simply happen to endure, none of this would make any sense at all.
It should be noted, however, that if the motion in question had an atomic structure, then ipso facto time would be atomic, and indeed many of those who held this conception of time endorsed atomic motion.
During imitation learning, a crucial element of conception involves segmenting the continuous flow of motion into simpler units – motion primitives – by identifying the boundaries of an action.
The answer to this worry is that falling is an action, according to Locke's Deflationary conception of action, which counts the motion of one's body in any direction as a bona fide action (see Section 1 above).
In this way, Newton did not merely develop an alternative to the Cartesian view of motion, along with its allied conception of space; he presented a view that could be employed to pick out some of the true motions of objects within nature.
