editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
Both Newton’s physics and philosophy were heavily influenced by Descartes’ ideas. Descartes' '''mechanical natural philosophy''' was derived from ancient Greek atomism. He was the most prominent member of a community of '''corpuscularist''' thinkers, who maintained that visible objects were made of unobservably tiny particles, whose relations and arrangement were responsible for the properties of visible bodies. Particles influenced one another only by direct physical contact, which was the cause of all motion, and ultimately all change. [[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]] Aristotle explained the properties of visible bodies in terms of their form, rather than in terms of the arrangement of their constituent parts. He maintained that heavy objects, composed of the element earth, tended towards their natural place; the center of the universe. The sphere of earth at rest in the center of the universe was central to Aristotle's entire cosmology. Motion in the terrestrial and celestial realms had fundamentally were fundamentally different.[[CiteRef::Bodnar (2016)]] Descartes' theories explained gravity as due to a swirling vortex of particles around the Earth, which pushed things towards its center. Celestial motions were not different in kind. In accord with Copernican heliocentrism, Descartes posited that a larger vortex surrounded the sun, with the smaller planetary vorticies caught in a larger solar vortex [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]]. The title of Newton's magnum opus, ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' (''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy''), published in 1687 suggests he intended it to be in dialog with Descartes' ''Principia Philosophiae'' (''Principles of Philosophy'') published in 1644, and by then accepted at Newton's Cambridge. In Newton's time, major champions of the mechanical natural philosophy included Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who was to become a major rival of Newton.
Descartes saw the ultimate justification of knowledge claims to lie with human reason and the absence of doubt. He relied on classical methods of theorizing and conjectured hypotheses in order to construct scientific propositions.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Such a '''rationalist ''' approach to knowledge was also championed by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. [[CiteRef::Lennon (2014)]][[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] In the early 17th century Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle (1627-1691) had already begun to elaborate and practice an experimental approach to knowledge. Much of Newton's natural philosophy was adapted from Descartes' views, but Newton was skeptical of Descartes' rationalism and rejected his method of hypotheses outright.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Instead, his epistemological views were similar to those of his contemporary and friend John Locke (1632-1704), who maintained that all knowledge came from experience. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]]
|Major Contributions={{#evt:
service=youtube
