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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=When Issac Newton began his studies at Cambridge University's prestigious Trinity College in 1661. More , more than a century had passed since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had published his proposed a '''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. 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 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. [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 1-7]] According to Westfall, "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 education at Cambridge was nonetheless classical, focusing on Aristotelian rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics. The curriculum had changed little in decades, despite the incompatibility of Aristotelian natural philosophy with Copernican heliocentrism [[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 81-90]][[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] Like many of the more ambitious students, Newton is known to have distanced himself from classical metaphysics and instead studied the works of René Descartes(1596-1650) on his own. Descartes had died just eleven years prior to 1661, and his first major work, the 'Discourse on Method' had been written less than thirty years earlier. By about the 1680's, Descartes works would become the accepted centerpiece of the Cambridge curriculum [[CiteRef::Barseghyan
, who’s work conceived the Cartesian mosaic of science that dominated much of 17th century European natural philosophy.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)|pp. 13,55]]