Chapter ID: CBB330319363

Introduction (2014)

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Sir Isaac Newton’s association with “empiricism”—or rather, the set of traditions that constitutes “empiricism”—was clearly recognized during his lifetime and enshrined by Enlightenment philosophes as ideology after his death. Voltaire, for example, famously identified Newton’s physics and Locke’s metaphysics as the intellectual framework for the Age of Reason. The association became such a significant feature of the intellectual landscape that in the eighteenth century a thinker’s relation to Newton was often a matter of self-definition; by way of affinity or difference, it was a means of locating one’s advertised position in the philosophical spectrum. The influence of naturalistic and experimentalist thought on Newton was similarly well known. Roger Cotes highlighted it in his polemical preface to the Principia’s second edition. And Newton himself, although he cited sources only sparingly, explicitly affiliated himself in the Principia with the mathematical-experimental tradition of Galileo and Huygens. Moreover, from the 1690s onward Newton used language borrowed from the Baconian/Boylean experimental tradition; and, as the first Part of this volume demonstrates, his first optical works were set in a Baconian natural-historical mold and were read as such by his contemporaries and successors.

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Book Zvi Biener (2014) Newton and Empiricism. unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Boccaccini, Federico
Yoram Hazony
Marmodoro, Anna
Joy, Lynn S.
Jolley, Nicholas
Downing, Lisa
Concepts
Philosophy
Natural philosophy
Empiricism
Methodology of science; scientific method
Science and religion
Philosophy of science
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
Early modern
Enlightenment
19th century
16th century
Places
England
British Isles
Great Britain
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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