 Aristotle distinguished between quantities and qualities. Examples of quantities are numbers, lines, surfaces, bodies, time and place, whereas examples of qualities are justice, health, hotness and paleness (Categories §6 and §8). According to Aristotle, quantities admit of equality and inequality but not of degrees, as “one thing is not more four-foot than another” (ibid. 6.6a19). Qualities, conversely, do not admit of equality or inequality but do admit of degrees, “for one thing is called more pale or less pale than another” (ibid. 8.10b26). Aristotle did not clearly specify whether degrees of qualities such as paleness correspond to distinct qualities, or whether the same quality, paleness, was capable of different intensities. This topic was at the center of an ongoing debate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Jung 2011). Duns Scotus supported the “addition theory”, according to which a change in the degree of a quality can be explained by the addition or subtraction of smaller degrees of that quality (2011: 553). This theory was later refined by Nicole Oresme, who used geometrical figures to represent changes in the intensity of qualities such as velocity (Clagett 1968; Sylla 1971). Oresme’s geometrical representations established a subset of qualities that were amenable to quantitative treatment, thereby challenging the strict Aristotelian dichotomy between quantities and qualities. These developments made possible the formulation of quantitative laws of motion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Grant 1996).