Samuel Clarke is best known to historians of science for presenting Isaac Newton’s views to a wider audience, especially in his famous correspondence with G. W. Leibniz. Clarke’s independent writings, however, reveal positions that do not derive from, and do not coincide with, Newton’s. This essay compares Clarke’s and Newton’s ideas on the cause of gravity, with a view to clarifying our understanding of Newton’s views. There is evidence to suggest that Newton believed God was directly responsible for gravity, and (...) this interpretation has been promoted by a number of scholars. By comparing Newton’s views with those of Clarke, however, it can be seen that Newton did not subscribe to the kind of occasionalist approach to gravity that Clarke developed. Clarke insisted that matter was categorically incapable of being endowed with powers or forces and that therefore what looks like gravitational attraction has to be performed directly by God or by angels. By comparing Clarke’s pronouncements with Newton’s, it becomes clear that Newton adopted the more standard line: that the first cause, God, operated in nature through secondary causes and that gravitational attraction was just such a secondary (albeit occult) cause. (shrink)

First published Sat Apr 5, 2003; most recent substantive revision Wed Aug 22, 2018. -/- Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) was the most influential British philosopher in the generation between Locke and Berkeley. His philosophical interests were mostly in metaphysics, theology, and ethics.

In the past, experts have disagreed about whether Samuel Clarke accepted the idea that gravity is a power superadded to matter by God. Most scholars now agree that Clarke did not support superaddition. But the argumentation employed by Clarke to reject superaddition has not been studied before in detail. In this paper, I explicate Clarke's argumentation by relating it to an important discussion about the possibility of superadded gravity in the Clarke-Collins correspondence. I examine Clarke's responses to Collins and draw (...) on his other works to reconstruct Clarke's reasons for rejecting superadded gravity. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of preferring local theories to ones that posit lawful or causal influence at a spacetime distance. In this paper, we argue against this preference. We argue that nonlocality is scientifically unobjectionable and that nonlocal theories can be known. Scientists can gather evidence for them and confirm them in much the same way that they do for local theories. We think these observations point to a deeper constraint on scientific theorizing and experimentation: the (quasi‐) isolation of (...) causal or lawful influence. We argue that this requirement ought to replace the locality desideratum in science. We then explore the possibility that the order of explanation has been reversed: perhaps it is isolatable influence that determines what counts as local in the first place. (shrink)

Avtor v prispevku predstavi okoliščine korespondence med teologom in klasicistom Richardom Bentleyem in filozofom Isaacom Newtonom. Bentley je v svojih osmih Boylovih predavanjih, naslovljenih Ovržba ateizma, uporabil številne misli in ugotovitve, ali pa njihove izpeljave, iz Newtonovih Matematičnih principov filozofije narave, ker pa ni pa bil povsem prepričan, ali jih dovolj dobro razume, se je obrnil na Newtona s prošnjo za dodatna pojasnila. Newton v svojih odgovorih pojasnjuje nekatere temeljne elemente svoje filozofske teologije ali metafizike in filozofije narave, predvsem o (...) vlogi in delovanju Boga pri stvarjenju in ureditvi sveta. Tako Bentley kot Newton sta prepričana, je svet ustvaril »umni dejavnik«. Drugi pomemben vidik korespondence predstavljajo Newtonova razmišljanja o gravitaciji ali, povedano drugače, vprašanje, ali je gravitacija materiji vrojena ali ne, in o možnosti delovanja teles na daljavo. (shrink)