Newton and Empiricism

This volume of original papers by a leading team of international scholars explores Isaac Newton's relation to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists. It includes studies of Newton's experimental methods in optics and their roots in Bacon and Boyle; Locke's and Hume's responses to Newton on the nature of matter, time, the structure of the sciences, and the limits of human inquiry. In addition it explores the use of Newtonian ideas in 18th-century pedagogy and the life sciences. Finally, it breaks new ground in analyzing the method of evidential reasoning heralded by the Principia, its nature, strength, and development in the subsequent three centuries of gravitational research. The volume will be of interest to historians of science and philosophy and philosophers interested in the nature of empiricism.

Zvi Biener is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research concerns the unity of science in early modernity, particularly early-modern views on reduction, the interdependence of branches of knowledge, and the metaphysical underpinnings of the mathematical sciences.

Eric Schliesser is BOF Research Professor at Ghent University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and the sciences, especially Spinoza, Newton, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy as well as philosophy of economics.