Conatus

“Conatus” is a Latin word that is often translated as “endeavor” and “striving” and, by some authors, taken as a synonym of “tendency.” Deriving from a concept discontinuously used within late-scholastic theory of gravitation, the conatus acquired relevance in the thoughts of early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Huygens, Spinoza, and Leibniz and in fields as diverse as physics, optics, physiology, theories of animal locomotion, metaphysics, and ethics. Though these authors meant quite different things when they wrote about the conatus (such that it is hard to provide a comprehensive definition of it), the concept appears to be connected, in very general terms, to the way early modern philosophers tried to account for the behavioral tendencies of bodies.