Se buscará mostrar que las críticas de Berkeley son pertinentes al mostrar que Newton utiliza una justificación que se bása en: 1) La experiecia sensible y 2)En una noción de Dios como poder activo. Con respecto a 1) si bien se puede justificar un método con la experiencia sensible, este no dejara este ámbito y no es posible pasar a las matemáticas con este metodo. Con respecto a 2) Dios es una fuente de justificación posbile para la época, sin embargo (...) en Newton se convierte en un poder activo que se contrapone a otras fomas de entender a Dios como garante de las leyes, más no como un poder que intervenga en el mundo. (shrink)

This paper argues that a debate between Toland and Clarke is the intellectual context to help understand the motive behind the critic and the significance of Berkeley's response to the critic in PHK 60-66. These, in turn, are responding to Boyle's adaptation of a neglected design argument by Cicero. The paper shows that there is an intimate connection between these claims of natural science and a once famous design argument. In particular, that in the early modern period the connection between (...) the scientific revolution and a certain commitment to final causes, and god's design, is more than merely contingent. The details of PHK 60-66 support the idea that the critic is responding to concerns that by echoing features of Toland's argument Berkeley undermines the Newtonian edifice Clarke has constructed. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical and religious dimensions of mathematical practice in the early modern era by offering an interpretation of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s Nouveaux éléments de géométrie. According to these important figures of seventeenth-century French philosophy and theology, mathematics could achieve extra-mathematical or non-mathematical goals; that is, mathematics could foster practices of moral self-improvement, deepen the mathematician’s piety and cultivate epistemic virtues. The Nouveaux éléments de géométrie, which I contend offers the most robust account of the virtues (...) cultivated by mathematics in the period, was envisaged by its authors to cultivate moral, Christian and epistemic virtues that could serve in the fulfilment of moral and Christian obligations. In this paper, I set out the goals of mathematical inquiry for the Port-Royalists and describe the specific virtues they believed a revised edition of the Elements of Euclid could foster. I show that Arnauld and Nicole believed that an acquaintance with mathematics could render a student of Euclid more just, truth-loving, attentive and humble, and better able to discern truth from falsity. (shrink)