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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=Although Newton’s curriculum at the University of Cambridge in the 1660’s would have consisted of Aristotelian-scholastic science, 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]]