scholarly journals Reassessing the Wider Aspects of Newton’s Thought – A Symposium

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-123
Author(s):  
John Henry
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Disciplinary Procedures ◽  
Working Practices ◽  
Key Questions

Abstract After a brief introduction, this “symposium” presents four essay reviews of three recent major studies of Newton’s life and works beyond the mathematics, physics and natural philosophy for which he is principally known: Jed Buchwald’s and Mordechai Feingold’s Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013), Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (2017), and William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2019); and they address Newton’s work on history, chronology, theology and alchemy. The four reviewers are leading Newton scholars in their own right, and assess how these three studies advance our understanding of Newton the “scientist”, as well as Newton the man in his times. Niccolò Guicciardini considers their relevance to our understanding of Newton’s mathematics; Scott Mandelbrote assesses how they advance our understanding of Newton’s local and historical context; Steffen Ducheyne focuses on what we can learn about Newton’s methodological concerns and working practices; while Stephen Snobelen considers how these studies can help us understand the place of religion in Newton’s life and work. We conclude with responses from each of the reviewed authors: Feingold (representing also his co-author Jed Buchwald), Iliffe, and Newman. New insights into key questions are afforded throughout. Should Newton’s work in these different areas be considered continuous with his more “scientific” works, or compartmentalized according to his rigorous disciplinary procedures?

Thomas Reid on the Improvement of Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Shrock
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work.

scholarly journals From Maimonides to Microsoft: The Jewish Law of Copyright Since the Birth of Print, Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Netanel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Property Right ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Fair Compensation ◽  
Jewish Learning ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Key Questions

In this book, Neil Netanel traces the historical development of Jewish copyright law. In so doing, he compares rabbinic reprinting bans with secular and papal book privileges and relays the stories of dramatic disputes among publishers of books of Jewish learning and liturgy, beginning with the early sixteenth century and continuing until today. He describes each dispute in its historical context and examines the rabbinic rulings that sought to resolve it. Remarkably, the rabbinic reprinting bans and copyright rulings address some of the same issues that animate copyright jurisprudence today: Is copyright a property right or just a right to receive fair compensation? How long should copyrights last? What purposes does copyright serve? While Jewish copyright law has borrowed from its secular counterpart at key junctures, it fashions strikingly different answers to those key questions.

Essay review: The ultimate commentary: a consideration of I. Bernard Cohen's Guide to Newton's Principia

2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-238
Author(s):  
J.P Zinsser
Keyword(s):  
Essay Review ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Isaac Newton

An Essay Review of ‘Isaac Newton, The Principia: mathematical principles of natural philosophy ’, translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz; preceded by ‘A guide to Newton's Principia ’ by I. Bernard Cohen.

Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy, by Niccolò Guicciardini

Nuncius ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 460-462
Author(s):  
Lucia Bucciarelli
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Isaac Newton

Absolute Time

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Absolute Time ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Celestial Bodies ◽  
Material Bodies ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Century Development

What is time? Traditionally, it has been answered that time is a product of the human mind, or the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or eternal duration is ‘absolute’, in the sense it is independent of human minds and material bodies. This study explores the development of absolute time or eternal duration during one of Britain’s richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. It features an interconnected set of main characters—Henry More, Walter Charleton, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson—alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysics are all read in their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of thought on time. In addition to interpreting the metaphysics of these characters, this study advances two general, developmental theses. First, the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. Second, distinct kinds of absolutism emerged in British philosophy, helping us to understand why some absolutists considered time to be barely real, whilst others identified it with the most real being of all: God.

Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and Newton

2019 ◽  
pp. 803-815
Author(s):  
Andrew Janiak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Space Time ◽  
First Line ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Time And Motion ◽  
René Descartes

Isaac Newton had a vexed relationship with his most important immediate predecessor in mathematics and philosophy, René Descartes. He was typically loath to admit the importance of Cartesian ideas for the development of his own thinking in mathematics and natural philosophy. For this reason, generations of students and scholars relying on Newton’s published work had little inkling of Descartes’s significance. This unfortunate fact was compounded by the tendency of philosophers to focus on the Meditations or the Regulae in their scholarship, for it was Descartes’s Principles above all that influenced Newton’s thinking as a young man. With the discovery of a previously unpublished manuscript amongst Newton’s papers by two famous historians of science in the middle of the twentieth century, everything changed. The manuscript, now known as De Gravitatione after its first line, illustrates the astonishing care with which Newton read the Principles, focusing his critical acumen on Descartes’s understanding of space, time, and motion. These criticisms of Descartes, in turn, shine light on otherwise opaque passages in Newton’s most significant published discussion of space, time, and motion, the Scholium in Principia mathematica. Indeed, the very title of the latter work represents both an homage to, and a swipe at, Descartes’s work: Newton would offer mathematical principles of natural philosophy to replace Descartes’s qualitative account. It is not a stretch to say that Newton saw further because he stood on Descartes’s shoulders, even if he wouldn’t admit it publicly.

Cambridge Platonism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
Reason And Faith ◽  
Cambridge Platonism ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason in metaphysics, religion and ethics. The Cambridge Platonists made reason rather than tradition and inspiration their ultimate criterion of knowledge. Their central aim was to reconcile the realms of reason and faith, the new natural philosophy and Christian revelation. Although loyal to the methods and naturalism of the new sciences, they opposed its mechanical model of explanation because it seemed to leave no room for spirit, God and life. In epistemology the Cambridge Platonists were critics of empiricism and stressed the role of reason in knowledge; they also criticized conventionalism and held that there are essential or natural distinctions between things. In metaphysics they attempted to establish the existence of spirit, God and life in a manner consistent with the naturalism and method of the new sciences. And in ethics the Cambridge Platonists defended moral realism and freedom of the will against the voluntarism and determinism of Hobbes and Calvin. Cambridge Platonism was profoundly influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the inspiration behind latitudinarianism and ethical rationalism, and many of its ideas were developed by Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.

On the Genius and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-86
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Universal Gravitation ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

This chapter presents George Boole's lecture on the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. The first subject of importance that engaged Newton's attention was the phenomena of prismatic colors. The results of his inquiries were communicated to the Royal Society in the year 1675, and afterwards published with most important additions in 1704. The production was entitled “Optics; or, a Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light.” It is considered one of the most elaborate and original of his works, and carries on every page the traces of a powerful and comprehensive mind. Newton also discovered universal gravitation, which was announced to the world in 1687 through the publication of the “Principia, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” The object of the “Principia” is twofold: to demonstrate the law of planetary influence, and to apply that law to the purposes of calculation.

scholarly journals III. An essay on the force of percussion

1768 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 17-23
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton

When we consider the extraordinary advancement in natural philosophy, from the surprising discoveries of the great Sir Isaac Newton, and other ingenious men, who have followed his example; it may afford matter of the greatest wonder, to find the most acute philosophers still contending, whether the force of percussion be in proportion to the velocity of bodies in motion, or the squares of those velocities.

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