: The Cartesians have often been read as if they denied spatial presence to incorporeal substances, reserving it for extended things alone. This article explores whether this common interpretation is accurate, examining the cases of both created minds and the divine substance of God Himself. Through scrutiny of the relevant texts of both Descartes himself and his followers, it demonstrates that, in the divine case, this common interpretation is incorrect, and that the Cartesians did believe that God’s own substance really (...) was omnipresent in a literal sense. In the case of created minds, by contrast, the article suggests that the standard reading is probably correct after all, and that these substances were indeed excluded from the spatial world: but it also suggests that, in the hands of at least some of the Cartesians, this position caused certain philosophical tensions and potential inconsistencies within their systems. (shrink)

This paper is in three sections. The first establishes that Newton, in spite of a well-known passage in a letter to Richard Bentley of 1692, did believe in action at a distance. Many readers may see this merely as an act of supererogation, since it is so patently obvious that he did. However, there has been a long history among Newton scholars of allowing the letter to Bentley to over-ride all of Newton’s other pronouncements in favour of action at a (...) distance, with devastating effects on our understanding of related aspects of his physics and his theology. Furthermore, this misconceived scholarly endeavour shows no sign of abating. The second section then offers a historical reconstruction, based on Newton’s writings, of how, when and why he began to accept actions at a distance and make them one of the cornerstones of his physics. Finally, using this chronological account of Newton’s use of actions at a distance, the paper re-assesses the claims of B. J. T. Dobbs that Newton’s important manuscript, De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum, was written, not in the late 1660s or early 1670s as was previously supposed, but during the composition of the Principia, in 1684 or 1685.Keywords: Isaac Newton; Action-at-a-distance; Gravity; Force; Aether; Attraction. (shrink)

We argue that a conflict between two conceptions of “quantity of matter” employed in a corollary to proposition 6 of Book III of the Principia illustrates a deeper conflict between Newton’s view of the nature of extended bodies and the concept of mass appropriate for the theoretical framework of the Principia. We trace Newton’s failure to recognize the conflict to the fact that he allowed for the justification of natural philosophical claims by two types of a posteriori, empiricist methodologies. Newton's (...) thoughts on these methodologies demonstrate that his natural philosophy continued to develop after the publication of the first edition of Principia and that De Grav should be understood as an early, and not necessarily representative, text. (shrink)