French philosopher and mathematician 

René Descartes was the first to

propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his Le Monde  (ou
Traité de lumière) which he wrote in 1632 and 1633 and for which he
delayed publication because of the Inquisition and it was published only
after his death in 1664. In his view, the Universe was filled with vortices of
swirling particles and the Sun and planets had condensed from a
particularly large vortex that had somehow contracted, which explained the
circular motion of the planets and was on the right track with condensation
and contraction. However, this was before Newton's theory of gravity and
we now know matter does not behave in this fashion. [3]

Artist's conception of a protoplanetary disc

The vortex model of 1944,[3] formulated by German physicist and

philosopher Baron Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, which harkens back to
the Cartesian model, involved a pattern of turbulence-induced eddies in a
Laplacian nebular disc. In it a suitable combination of clockwise rotation of
each vortex and anti-clockwise rotation of the whole system can lead to
individual elements moving around the central mass in Keplerian orbits so
there would be little dissipation of energy due to the overall motion of the
system but material would be colliding at high relative velocity in the inter-
vortex boundaries and in these regions small roller-bearing eddies would
coalesce to give annular condensations. It was much criticized as
turbulence is a phenomenon associated with disorder and would not
spontaneously produce the highly ordered structure required by the
hypothesis. As well, it does not provide a solution to the angular
momentum problem and does not explain lunar formation nor other very
basic characteristics of the Solar System.[4]
The Weizsäcker model was modified[3] in 1948 by Dutch theoretical
physicist Dirk Ter Haar, in that regular eddies were discarded and replaced
by random turbulence which would lead to a very thick nebula where
gravitational instability would not occur. He concluded the planets must
have formed by accretion and explained the compositional difference (solid
and liquid planets) as due to the temperature difference between the inner
and outer regions, the former being hotter and the latter being cooler, so
only refractories (non-volatiles) condensed in the inner region. A major
difficulty is that in this supposition turbulent dissipation takes place in a time
scale of only about a millennium which does not give enough time for
planets to form.
The nebular hypothesis was first proposed in 1734 by Emanuel
Swedenborg[5] and later elaborated and expanded upon by Immanuel
Kant in 1755. A similar theory was independently formulated by Pierre-
Simon Laplace in 1796.[6]
In 1749, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon conceived the idea that
the planets were formed when a comet collided with the Sun, sending
matter out to form the planets. However, Laplace refuted this idea in 1796,
showing that any planets formed in such a way would eventually crash into
the Sun. Laplace felt that the near-circular orbits of the planets were a
necessary consequence of their formation.[7] Today, comets are known to
be far too small to have created the Solar System in this way. [7]
In 1755, Immanuel Kant speculated that observed nebulae may in fact be
regions of star and planet formation. In 1796, Laplace elaborated by
arguing that the nebula collapsed into a star, and, as it did so, the
remaining material gradually spun outward into a flat disc, which then
formed the planets.[7]