Levitin, Dmitri (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 2
Pages: 242-265
This essay provides solutions to the puzzles surrounding the meaning and development of Isaac Newton’s famous “Rules of Philosophizing.” It charts afresh the shift from the “Hypotheses” of the first edition of the Principia (1687) to the “Rules” of the second (1713). A completely new rule of philosophizing from an intermediate stage, when the rules were to be called “Axioms,” is presented: it contains Newton’s first ever planned attack on “hypotheses” as part of the Principia. Subsequently, the meaning and purpose of the notoriously ambiguous Hypothesis III and Rule III become clear. They were developed as part of an argument against the possibility of weightless matter, an issue of immense importance to Newton’s immediate supporters and opponents. As Newton introduced what would become Rule III, he gradually realized that it offered the inductive reasoning that underpinned both this polemical argument and the broader case for the universality of gravitation and other fundamental qualities: extension, impenetrability, inertia, and mobility. Hypothesis III could be removed and the argument against weightless matter confined to Corollary 2 to Proposition 6 of Book III. The Rules were not abstract methodological principles but were designed with a very specific polemical purpose in mind.
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