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; a half a century earlier, and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had published his laws of planetary motion, including the claim that the planets orbited the sun along elliptical paths, around the same time. [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 1-7]] Westfall noted that "by 1661 the debate on the heliocentric universe had been settled; those who mattered had surrendered to the irresistible elegance of Kepler's unencumbered ellipses, supported by the striking testimony of the telescope, whatever the ambiguities might be. For Newton, the heliocentric universe was never a matter in question." [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 6]] Newton’s curriculum at the University of Cambridge in the 1660’s included Aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)]] , 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]]
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|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 Descartes first major work, the 'Discourse on Method'. More than a century had passed since Nicolas Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had published his heliocentric cosmology in his 1543 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres'). It had been fifty years since Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had published his observations with the telescope in 1610; half a century earlier. Galileo had discovered dramatic evidence favoring the Copernican system. His discovery of the phases of the planet Venus indicated that it revolved around the sun and was lit by reflected sunlight. His description of four moons circling Jupiter indicated that Earth, with its own moon, resembled this planet. His studies of sunspots indicated that the sun revolved on its axis, and finally, his discovery of surface features on the moon indicated that the moon was another world, as expected under the Copernican system, but not by Aristotelianism. Around the same time, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)had published his laws of planetary motion, indicating that the planets revolved around the sun on elliptical paths, replacing the circular motion and complex epicycles of Copernicus.
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)]]
