Historians have long sought putative connections between different areas of Newton’s scientific work, while recently scholars have argued that there were causal links between even more disparate fields of his intellectual activity. In this paper I take an opposite approach, and attempt to account for certain tensions in Newton’s ‘scientific’ work by examining his great sensitivity to the disciplinary divisions that both conditioned and facilitated his early investigations in science and mathematics. These momentous undertakings, exemplified by research that he wrote (...) up in two separate notebooks, obey strict distinctions between approaches appropriate to both new and old ‘natural philosophy’ and those appropriate to the mixed mathematical sciences. He retained a fairly rigid demarcation between them until the early eighteenth century. At the same time as Newton presented the ‘mathematical principles’ of natural philosophy in his magnum opus of 1687, he remained equally committed to a separate and more private world or ontology that he publicly denigrated as hypothetical or conjectural. This is to say nothing of the worlds implicit in his work on mathematics and alchemy. He did not lurch from one overarching ontological commitment to the next but instead simultaneously—and often radically—developed generically distinct concepts and ontologies that were appropriate to specific settings and locations as well as to relevant styles of argument. Accordingly I argue that the concepts used by Newton throughout his career were intimately bound up with these appropriate generic or quasi-disciplinary ‘structures’. His later efforts to bring together active principles, aethers and voids in various works were not failures that resulted from his ‘confusion’ but were bold attempts to meld together concepts or ontologies that belonged to distinct enquiries. His analysis could not be ‘coherent’ because the structures in which they appeared were fundamentally incompatible.Author Keywords: Connectionism; Incoherence; Appropriateness; Setting; Discipline; Genre; Structure. (shrink)

Una din cele mai disputate controverse privind prioritatea unor descoperiri științifice este cea privind legea gravitației universale, între Isaac Newton și Robert Hooke. În acest eseu extind o lucrare mai veche pe aceeași temă, ”Isaac Newton vs. Robert Hooke în legea gravitației universale”. Hooke l-a acuzat pe Newton de plagiat, preluându-i ideile exprimate în lucrările anterioare. În această lucrare încerc să arăt, pe baza unor analize anterioare, că ambii oameni de știință au greșit: Robert Hooke pentru că teoria sa nu (...) era în fond decât idei care nu s-ar fi materializat niciodată fără suportul matematic al lui Isaac Newton; iar acesta din urmă a greșit nerecunoscând niciun merit al lui Hooke în elaborarea teoriei gravitației. Mai mult, după moartea lui Hooke și preluarea prezidenției Societății Regale, Newton a înlăturat orice urmă din instituție a fostului președinte, Robert Hooke. De asemenea, La negarea contribuției lui Hooke a contribuit și statutul său social ”inferior”, fiind poreclit de contemporani ”mecanicul”, spre deosebire de Sir Isaac Newton cel nobil. Pentru aceasta detaliez acuzațiile și argumentele fiecăreia dintre părți, și cum a fost percepută această dispută de către contemporanii celor doi. Finalizez lucrarea cu concluziile desprinse din cuprins. (shrink)

The following paper, together with its sequel ("The use and non-use of mathematics"), is a study in the mathematization of nature. It looks into the history of one of the most emblematic achievements of this fundamental aspect of the making of modem science - the Inverse Square Law of universal gravitation - before its celebrated application by Newton to celestial mechanics. What did it take, we ask, to tum a particular mathematical ratio into a candidate for a law of nature?

Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and theological agenda. It is therefore relevant to take a closer look at Newton’s intellectual choices, at how and why precisely he would occupy himself with specific text-sources, and how this interest fits into the larger picture of his scientific and intellectual endeavours. In what follows, we shall (...) follow Newton into his study and look over his shoulder while reading compendia and original source-texts in his personal library at Cambridge, meticulously investigating and comparing fragments and commentaries, and carefully keeping track in private notes of how they support his own developing ideas. Indeed, Newton was convinced that precursors to his own insights and discoveries were present already in Antiquity, even before the Greeks, in ancient Egypt, and he puts a lot of time and effort into making the point, especially, and not incidentially, in the period between the first and the second edition of the Principia. A clear understanding of his reading of the classic sources therefore matters to our understanding of its content and gestation process. In what follows we will confine ourselves to the classical legacy, and investigate Newton’s intellectual intercourse with it. (shrink)

The conventional view of the prehistory of Newton's synthesis in the Principia of his predecessors' work in planetary theory and terrestrial gravitation is still not seriously changed from that which Newton himself chose to impose on his contemporaries at the end of his life. In his own words:‘… the same year ‘1666’ I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon & having found out how to estimate the force wth wch [a] globe revolving within a (...) sphere presses the surface of the sphere from Keplers rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their Orbs, & having deduced that the forces wch keep the Planets in their orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about wch they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly …’. (shrink)

It is here argued that Halley's comet had a more pivotal role than has hitherto been believed in triggering Newton's acceptance of the law of gravity, dispelling his belief in Descartes' theory of vortices. It is found that historians have been unduly prone to credit Newton with dynamical insights at an earlier date than is warranted by the historical documents. A more convincing account of the transition from the period of Newton's alchemical researches of the 1670s to that of his (...) dynamical insights in the 1680s thereby becomes feasible. Acceptance of a principle of rectilinear inertia was a precondition for formulating the law. (shrink)

The concept of natural kind is center stage in the debates about scientific realism. Champions of scientific realism such as Richard Boyd hold that our most developed scientific theories allow us to “cut the world at its joints” (Boyd, 1981, 1984, 1991). In the long run we can disclose natural kinds as nature made them, though as science progresses improvements in theory allow us to revise the extension of natural kind terms.

This volume, The Brazilian Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, is the first attempt to present to a general audience, works from Brazil on this subject. The included papers are original, covering a remarkable number of relevant topics of philosophy of science, logic and on the history of science. The Brazilian community has increased in the last years in quantity and in quality of the works, most of them being published in respectable international journals on the subject. The (...) chapters of this volume are forwarded by a general introduction, which aims to sketch not only the contents of the chapters, but it is conceived as a historical and conceptual guide to the development of the field in Brazil. The introduction intends to be useful to the reader, and not only to the specialist, helping them to evaluate the increase in production of this country within the international context. (shrink)

The widely accepted supposition that Newton’s De gravitatione was written in 1684/5 just before composing the Principia is examined. The basis for this determination has serious difficulties starting with the failure to examine the numerical estimates for the resistance of aether. The estimated range is not nearly nil as claimed but comparable with air at or near the earth’s surface. Moreover, the evidence provided most likely stems from experiments by Boyle, Hooke, and others in the 1660s and does not use (...) evidence available in the late 1684. The document supports Newton’s contention that the aether medium incorporates very large voids thereby proving that body and space differ but does by no means completely reject its corporeal nature or eliminate its resistance. Newton’s use of the term inertia provides no conclusive evidence for a late date as often claimed and his definition of gravitas is difficult to reconcile with a late one. (shrink)

The following is the second part of our Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law. Together these papers examine the transformation of the inverse square ratio from its origins in a metaphysical image of medieval thought in Grosseteste and the perspectivist tradition, through a playful magical practice in the Renaissance with Cusanus and Dee, and into a mathematical tool, applicable to the physical world. This last transformation allowed Newton to condense the geometrical image into a celebrated algebraic equation for universal gravity, (...) but it proved particularly confusing for the people who wrought it, Kepler and Hooke. (shrink)

From the very day in 1686 when Edmond Halley placed Book I of the Principia before the Royal Society, Robert Hooke's claim to prior discovery has been associated with the law of universal gravitation. If the seventeenth century rejected Hooke's claim summarily, historians of science have not forgotten it, and a steady stream of articles continues the discussion. In our own day particularly, when some of the glitter has worn off, not from the scientific achievement, but from the character of (...) Newton, there has been a tendency vicariously to atone for the treatment Hooke received. The judgement Lohne cites with approval from Vavilov appears to summarize the current estimate of the issue—in the seventeenth century only Newton could have written the Principia; nevertheless Hooke first sketched out its programme. What with all the knocks he has received both alive and dead, one feels guilty in assuming the role of “debunker” at this late date. Apologetically draped in sackcloth then, head covered with ashes I venture softly to suggest that Hooke has received more than his due. There is no question here of justifying Newton's behaviour toward Hooke. Wholly lacking in generosity as it appears to me, Newton's behaviour neither deserves nor can receive justification. The question turns rather on Hooke's scientific theories. Granting always his lack of demonstrations, historians have been prone to interpret his words in the light of Newton's demonstrations. A close examination of Hooke's writings does not sustain the interpretation. Contrary to what is generally asserted, he did not hold a conception of universal gravitation. And if he announced the inverse square relation, he derived it from such a medley of confusion as will not allow his claim to priority. (shrink)