Book · January 1, 2024
The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barri ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2023
Isaac Newton did more than any other early modern figure to revolutionize natural philosophy, but he was often wary of other aspects of philosophy. He had an especially vexed relationship with metaphysics. As recent scholarship has highlighted, he often de ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2022
During the Scientific Revolution, philosophers wondered how best to understand space. Many debates revolved around the account advanced in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1644), and this chapter treats it as a focal point. Descartes argued for a retu ...
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Journal ArticleRevue D Histoire Des Sciences · July 1, 2021
In Madame Du Châtelet's milieu, many philosophers argued that Newton's physics allowed one to ignore metaphysics, or perhaps required a modest supplement from elements of Locke's metaphysics. In her Institutions physiques, Du Châtelet takes a radically dif ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2020
During the seventeenth century, a profound shift occurred: whereas space and its structure were not major subjects of philosophical analysis in the early part of the century, by 1800 they had become central to many debates. This shift was due to the influe ...
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Book · January 1, 2020
This volume chronicles the development of philosophical conceptions of space from early antiquity through the medieval period to the early modern era, ending with Kant. The chapters describe the interactions between philosophy at different moments in histo ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2018
When Émilie Du Châtelet published her magnum opus, Institutions de physique, in 1740, it was quickly met with excited reactions from mathematicians and philosophers throughout the Continent.1 Within a few short years, it was read and discussed by philosoph ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
During the seventeenth century, there was something approaching consensus about the methodological parameters of natural philosophy. Throughout the century, a debate raged about whether the natural philosopher could legitimately employ geometric and arithm ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of science · June 2015
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In the Scholium to the Definitions in Principia mathematica, Newton departs from his main task of discussing space, time and motion by suddenly mentioning the proper method for interpreting Scripture. This is surprising, and it has long been ignored by sch ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · September 1, 2013
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In this paper, I argue that recent debates about Newton's attitude toward action at a distance have been hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity. To clarify the metaphysical background of the debates, I distinguish three kinds of causes within Newton's wo ...
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Journal ArticleSouthern Journal of Philosophy · September 1, 2012
Scholars have long recognized that Newton regarded Descartes as his principal philosophical interlocutor when composing the first edition of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. The arguments in the Scholium on space and time, for instance ...
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Book · January 1, 2012
This collection of specially-commissioned essays by leading scholars presents new research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibn ...
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Book · January 1, 2012
It may be anachronistic to say that Isaac Newton and his Principia decisively changed physics and philosophy, because separate fields of physics and philosophy did not yet exist. But the notion of decisive change captures something significant about the co ...
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Book · January 1, 2008
Newton's philosophical views are unique and uniquely difficult to categorise. in the course of a long career from the early 1670s until his death in 1727, he articulated profound responses to Cartesian natural philosophy and to the prevailing mechanical ph ...
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Journal ArticlePerspectives on Science · September 1, 2004
Michael Friedman's Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992) refocused scholarly attention on Kant's status as a philosopher of the sciences, especially (but not exclusively) of the broadly Newtonian science of the eighteenth century. The last few years have seen ...
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