This volume of original papers by a leading team of international scholars explores Isaac Newton's relation to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists. It includes studies of Newton's experimental methods in optics and their roots in Bacon and Boyle; Locke's and Hume's responses to Newton on the nature of matter, time, the structure of the sciences, and the limits of human inquiry. In addition it explores the use of Newtonian ideas in 18th-century pedagogy and the life sciences. Finally, it breaks new ground in analyzing the method of evidential reasoning heralded by the Principia, its nature, strength, and development in the subsequent three centuries of gravitational research. The volume will be of interest to historians of science and philosophy and philosophers interested in the nature of empiricism.
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vii | |
| Contributors |
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ix | |
| Introduction |
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1 | (14) |
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Part One The Roots of Newton's Experimental Method |
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1 Empiricism as a Development of Experimental Natural Philosophy |
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15 | (24) |
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2 Constructing Natural Historical Facts: Baconian Natural History in Newton's First Paper on Light and Colors |
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39 | (27) |
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3 Vision, Color, and Method in Newton's Opticks |
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66 | (31) |
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Part Two Newton and "Empiricist" Philosophers |
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4 Locke's Metaphysics and Newtonian Metaphysics |
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97 | (22) |
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5 Locke and Newton on Space and Time and Their Sensible Measures |
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119 | (19) |
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6 Newtonian Explanatory Reduction and Hume's System of the Sciences |
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138 | (33) |
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7 Enlarging the Bounds of Moral Philosophy: Newton's Method and Hume's Science of Man |
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171 | (36) |
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Part Three Newtonian Method In 18th, 19th, and 20th-century Science |
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8 Living Force at Leiden: De Volder, 's Gravesande, and the Reception of Newtonianism |
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207 | (16) |
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9 On the Role of Newtonian Analogies in Eighteenth-Century Life Science: Vitalism and Provisionally Inexplicable Explicative Devices |
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223 | (39) |
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10 Closing the Loop: Testing Newtonian Gravity, Then and Now |
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262 | (91) |
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| Index |
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353 | |
Zvi Biener is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research concerns the unity of science in early modernity, particularly early-modern views on reduction, the interdependence of branches of knowledge, and the metaphysical underpinnings of the mathematical sciences.
Eric Schliesser is BOF Research Professor at Ghent University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and the sciences, especially Spinoza, Newton, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy as well as philosophy of economics.
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