INTRODUCTION: “NEWTON AND NEWTONIANISM”

That Isaac Newton (1642–1727) holds a revered place in the history of science is rather uncontroversial. The incredible success and lasting legacy of his two chief works, the Principia mathematica (1687) and the Opticks (1704), have secured his position among the giants of Western science. Gauging Newton’s place in the history of philosophy, on the other hand, has been a more difficult and more complicated matter. There is no debating that several leading eighteenth-century intellectuals paid special attention to the growing success of Newtonian science; however, these philosophical reactions varied. Some challenged the viability of Newton’s program of mechanics by targeting his proposals of absolute space and absolute time and of a universal force of gravitation. Others championed the success of Newton’s mechanics and theory of light as a watershed of human thought and aligned their philosophies with his program of natural philosophy. Yet even among self-fashioned Newtonians, there was no univocal view of why Newton’s science was of such great philosophical importance. Some focused on his use of mathematics to study natural forces; others focused on the foundational role he granted to observation and experiment. The terrain surrounding Newton’s own philosophical commitments is murkier still. Stretching back to his student days in Cambridge, Newton continued to struggle with some of the fundamental questions plaguing his philosophical contemporaries, including the relationship between mind and body, the nature of space and time, and the place of God in the natural ontology. However, since he never penned a systematic philosophical treatise akin to, say, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) or Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), our insight into Newton’s philosophical commitments rests on relatively short commentaries that are scattered throughout his published and unpublished works. Whether these writings The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 50, Issue 3 September 2012