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|Historical Context=When Isaac Newton began his studies at Cambridge University's prestigious Trinity College in 1661, more than a century had passed since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had 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, which uncovered dramatic evidence favoring the Copernican system. 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 and Ptolemy.[[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|pp. 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]] A planetary Earth that rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun was incompatible with the accepted physics of [[Aristotle]] (384-322 BCE). The community of the time was engaged with the question of how it could be that the Earth itself was in motion through space, and with the question of how one could hope to gain reliable knowledge in the face of the failure of Aristotelian scholastic knowledge accepted for centuries.
Newton’s education at Cambridge was classical, focusing on Aristotelian rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics. Bound to '''Aristotelian scholasticism ''' by statutory rules,[[CiteRef::Christianson (1984)|p. 33]] the curriculum had changed little in decades.[[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|pp. 81-90]][[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] Like many of the more ambitious students, Newton distanced himself from classical metaphysics and instead studied the works of the French natural philosopher [[René Descartes]](1596-1650) on his own. By 1664, Newton is known to have read the 1656 Latin edition of Descartes' ''Opera Philosophica'', a one volume compilation of Descartes' major works.[[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] Newton is known to have been profoundly influenced by Descartes views of space, matter, and God, and by commentaries on Descartes by Henry More (1614-1687). [[CiteRef::Janiak (2014)]] Descartes had died just over a decade earlier, and his works had first been published within the preceding thirty years. They were gaining in popularity and by about 1680 would become the [[Theory Acceptance|accepted]] centerpiece of the Cambridge curriculum, as they also would in Paris by 1700.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 190]]
When Newton published his magnum opus, ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' (''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'')in 1687, he was challenging a Cartesian orthodoxy. The title of Newton's work suggests he intended it to be in dialog with Descartes' ''Principia Philosophiae'' (''Principles of Philosophy'') published in 1644.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]]
