editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
|DOD Approximate=No
|Summary='''Sir Isaac Newton''' (1642-1727) was a natural philosopher who lived and worked in England in the 17th and 18th century. Newton’s most notable contributions were made to the fields of physics, mathematics, and scientific method, which were so groundbreaking that he is currently considered to be one of the most important physicists in modern Western history.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Philosophers of science credit Newton’s revolutionary theory of gravity and his experimental approach to conducting natural philosophy as outlined in his major work, The ''Principia'' (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica), to be the foundation for the dominant Newtonian mosaic which influenced much of late 18th and 19th century science.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Some consider The ''Principia'' to be the work that initially created physics as its own scientific field separate from the umbrella of metaphysics and philosophy.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]]
|Historical Context=Issac Newton began his studies at Cambridge University's prestigious Trinity College in 1661, just eleven years after the death of [[Rene Descartes]] (1596-1650), and less that thirty years after the publication of his first major work, the 'Discourse on Method'. More than a century had passed since Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) had published his heliocentric cosmology in his 1543 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres'). Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had published his observations with the telescope 1610; half a century earlier, and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) Newton’s curriculum at the University of Cambridge in the 1660’s included Aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy [[CiteRef::Westfall (19841980)]] , Newton is known to have distanced himself from classical metaphysics and instead studied the works of Réné Descartes, who’s work conceived the Cartesian mosaic of science that dominated much of 17th century European natural philosophy.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)|pp. 13,55]]
Both Newton’s physics and philosophy were heavily influenced by Descartes’ ideas. Although he disagreed with many of the theories about the natural world adopted in the Cartesian mosaic, it was clear that Newton viewed the Cartesian mosaic as a step forward from the preceding Aristotelian-scholastic one.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)|p. 55]] When structuring his view of the natural world, Descartes based his model on a Copernican view of the universe, as opposed to the classical geocentric understanding. The previous Aristotelian theory of motion had been contingent on geocentrism,[[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)|p. 37]] as when the Earth is at the centre of the universe, all motion could be explained causally according to whether the moving object in question existed in the terrestrial or celestial realm, which in that mosaic were thought to be fundamentally different.[[CiteRef::Bodnar (2016)]]
