Newton’s earliest publications contained scandalous epistemological claims: not only did he aim for certainty; he also claimed success. Some commentators argue that Newton ultimately gave up claims of certainty in favor of a high degree of probability. I argue that no such shift occurred. I examine the evidence of a probabilistic shift: a passage from query 23/31 of the Opticks and rule 4 of the Principia. Neither passage supports a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy. The aim of certainty, then, was (...) an enduring feature of Newton’s methodology. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze a momentous change in eighteenth century French life sciences. Whereas in the first half of the century the conception of natural history as the systematic collection of facts had been most successful, at mid-century a new approach emerged. This approach was characterized by an accent on general philosophical themes rather than on observation and experiment. I study the grounds and features of this historical shift through the work of Maupertuis, who published papers in institutional (or (...) Baconian) natural history in his early years, but then adopted a more speculative approach to the life sciences. (shrink)