Abstract
When I was a student, reigning opinion held that Newton, although unquestionably in the foremost rank of the great among scientists, was a shallow and unoriginal philosopher. In a work whose reputation at that time was high, E. A. Burtt put it thus: “In scientific discovery and formulation Newton was a marvelous genius; as a philosopher he was uncritical, sketchy, inconsistent, even second rate.”
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Notes
- 1.
Burtt 1955, 208.
- 2.
Burtt 1955, 229–30.
- 3.
An equally brilliant accomplishment in the same mode, also embodied in that work, is the discovery of the curve of isochronous vibration for constrained gravitational motion (the so-called “tautochrone” curve).
- 4.
See NC, 92–102. A facsimile reproduction of the letter as it was published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (No. 80, February 19 1671/2, pp. 3075–87), is given in NPL, 47–59. (It should be noted that Oldenburg, in publishing the letter, omitted one brief but rather interesting passage that will be of some concern to us below.).
- 5.
NC, 103, n. 1 (continued from p. 102).
- 6.
NC, 110–4; NPL, 110–5. (One minute point: The text in NPL is a facsimile of the transcription given in volume III of Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society [Oldenburg did not publish Hooke’s critique in the Philosophical Transactions—although he did publish Newton’s reply to Hooke]. In that version, some rectifications of Hooke’s spelling are made [e.g., “wholly” for Hooke’s “wholy” in the first passage here quoted]; but one alteration is curiously for the worse: in that same passage, “phenomæna” where Hooke had “phænomena.”).
- 7.
NC, 110–1; NPL, 111.—There is in this passage a more substantial editorial alteration in the text given by Birch (from the Register Book of the Royal Society): where, in the first sentence quoted, Hooke writes that the experiments and observations seem to him to prove that “light is ... a pulse or motion [etc.],” the text in Birch—hence that in NPL—reads, “white is ... a pulse or motion [etc.]” It appears that the text in Birch corresponds to the copy Newton saw (cf. NC, 115, n. 3).
- 8.
NC, 113; NPL, 8.
- 9.
NC, 173; NPL, 118.
- 10.
NC, 177; NPL, 123.
- 11.
NC, 202; cf. Bacon, Novum Organum: “Now my directions for the interpretation of nature embrace two generic divisions: the one how to educe and form axioms from experience; the other how to deduce and derive new experiments from axioms.” (Bacon 1960, 130).
- 12.
NC, 255–6. The translation from Huygens’ French is mine; Oldenburg published Huygens’ remarks (without identifying him by name), in his own translation, in the Philosophical Transactions, No. 96 (July 21 1673), pp. 6086–7—see NPL, 136–7.—In consulting the latter source, care should be taken to note that what Oldenburg prints immediately following (pp. 6087–92; NPL,137–42) as Newton’s reply is in fact his reply to Huygens’s second letter (printed by Oldenburg in the next number of the Transactions [p. 6112; NPL, 147] after Newton’s actual reply to the first letter [pp. 6108–11; NPL, 143–146]). (There is a half-apology for this mix-up in Oldenburg’s heading to Newton’s reply, p. 6108.).
- 13.
- 14.
See, e.g., Part II of Specimen Dynamicum, in Leibniz 1970, 447.
- 15.
See the early manuscript “The Lawes of Motion,” now in NUP, 157–64; and ibid., 162.
- 16.
NC, 264; NPL, 144.
- 17.
See NC, 100; NPL, 57 (and cf. infra).
- 18.
[Editor’s note: Here we omit a lengthy footnote regarding Thomas Harriot’s optical contributions, obtained roughly 60 years before Newton’s, but not published. Stein notes that “although [Harriot’s] results would indeed predict an oblong shape for the dispersed solar image, the evidence does not suggest that he made observations of that sort at all.”].
- 19.
NC, 95; NPL, 51.
- 20.
NC, 95, 96; NPL, 51, 53; cf. also Stein (unpublished).
- 21.
NC, 97; NPL, 53.
- 22.
NP, 98; NPL, 54.
- 23.
Cf. Stein (unpublished).
- 24.
- 25.
NC, 97; NPL, 53.
- 26.
Newton, Opticks, 124.
- 27.
Evidently a slip of the pen for “could be called rays of the same particular sort.” It should perhaps be noted that Newton was mistaken in thinking that a green could be made by composing homogeneous blue and yellow lights. At best, one can obtain in this way a very unsaturated green—a “greenish white.” It is possible that Newton eventually recognized this fact, although he never (so far as I know) announced it; for in the Opticks, in discussing the composition of colors (Book I, Part II, Proposition IV), whereas he tells us that “a Mixture of homogeneal red and yellow compounds an Orange, like in appearance of Colour to that orange which in the series of unmixed prismatick Colours lies between them,” he says something rather different about green in relation to yellow and blue: “And after the same manner other neighboring homogeneal Colours may compound new Colours, like the intermediate homogeneal ones, as yellow and green, the Colour between them both, and afterwards, if blue be added, there will be made a green the middle Colour of the three which enter the Composition. For the yellow and blue on either hand, if they are equal in quantity they draw the intermediate green equally towards themselves in Composition, and so keep it as it were in Æquilibrium, that it verge not more to the yellow on the one hand, and to the blue on the other, but by their mix’d Actions remain still a middle Colour” (Opticks, 132–3).
- 28.
Shapiro 1980, 222.
- 29.
See Hooke’s paper in NC, 113–4; NPL, 114.
- 30.
NC, 100; NPL, 57.
- 31.
Kuhn 1958, 40.
- 32.
NC, 173–4; NPL, 118–9.
- 33.
Thus, for instance, Kuhn speaks of Newton’s “retreat from the defense of metaphysical hypotheses which [he] believed and employed creatively,” as “attested by the inconsistencies in his discussions and use of hypotheses throughout the optical papers printed below [sc., in NPL]”; and details these “inconsistencies” as follows: “In the first paper light was a substance. In the letters to Pardies light was either a substance or a quality, but the definition of light rays in terms of ‘indefinitely small ... independent’ parts made light again corporeal. In the same letter Newton proclaimed that his observations and theories could be reconciled with the pressure hypotheses of either Hooke or Descartes, but in the letter to Hooke he forcefully demonstrated the inadequacy of all pressure hypotheses to explain the phenomena of light and colors.... In 1672 he denied the utility of hypotheses when presenting a theory which he believed could be made independent of them, but in dealing with the colors of thin films in the important letters of 1675/6 he employed explicit hypotheses, presumably because the new subject matter of these letters could not otherwise be elaborated” (Kuhn 1958, 43–4).
Newton’s critics, as I have remarked, not infrequently attach moral culpability to what they see as his errors. Kuhn in particular attributes to Newton (ibid., 39) a “fear of exposure and the correlated compulsion to be invariably and entirely immune to criticism,” accuses him (p. 40) of dishonesty in his response to Hooke (this has already been noted—cf. n. 31 above), and asks whether Newton “is not ... convicted of an irrationally motivated lie” in his reply to Huygens. [Editorial note: we have removed an extended discussion in which Stein critically assesses the evidence offered by Kuhn for these attributions.]
- 34.
Newton, Opticks, 404; and Principia, 547.
- 35.
NPL, 106 (emphasis added).
- 36.
Newton, Opticks, 338–9 (emphasis added).
- 37.
See Rule Three—in CSM, 13; and cf. also the optical example in Rule Eight—ibid., 28–9.
- 38.
Descartes 1979, 50 (French)/51 (English)—emphasis added; my own translation of feindre (Mahoney there has “the liberty of imagining this matter”).
- 39.
I am not sure that Newton knew Le Monde; but it is certain that he had read the Principia very closely.
- 40.
In the first edition, this rule is “Hypothesis I”; and there are small verbal differences—in particular, there is some grammatical confusion of number and mood, with vera and sufficiunt for veræ and sufficiant.
- 41.
NC, 96–7. The passage was omitted by Oldenburg when he published Newton’s paper, and therefore does not appear in the Cohen edition; likewise for the corresponding passage in Newton’s reply to Hooke.
- 42.
NC, 187–8.
- 43.
This is discussed in considerable detail in Stein (unpublished), as is the claim made in the following sentence, and the related question of just what Newton meant by a “deduction from phenomena.”
- 44.
See, e.g., CSM, 145 (in Part VI of the Discourse): “For my part, if I have already discovered a few truths in the sciences ..., I can say that these discoveries merely result from and depend upon my surmounting of five or six principal difficulties .... I even venture to say that I think I need to win only two or three other such battles in order to achieve my aims completely, and that my age is not so far advanced that I may not in the normal course of nature still have the time to do this.” Cf. his remarks in Part II (ibid., 116) that “there is not usually so much perfection in works composed of several parts and produced by various different craftsmen as in the works of one man,” and in Part VI (ibid., 146–8) that, in effect, no cooperative effort of thought has been or is likely to be of any use to him; that “if there was ever a task that could not be accomplished so well by anyone other than its initiator, it is the one on which I am working”; and that the one kind of aid he needs is that of hired hands to carry out experiments under his supervision.
- 45.
Newton 1984, 87, 89 (Latin original on 86, 88); I have departed slightly from Shapiro’s translation.
- 46.
NUP, 90–121 (Latin), 121–56 (English). The metaphysical digression occupies pp. 91–114, 123–48.—Unfortunately, the English translation given by the Halls is very seriously defective; some instances will be of concern to us below.
- 47.
Not, as the Halls have it, “evenly.”
- 48.
E.g., Westfall 1980, 302: “The gravamen of [Newton’s] charge [against Descartes] was atheism”(!).
- 49.
The Hall’s translation here (NUP, 132) is very bad: “it is not among the proper dispositions that denote substance.” The Latin reads (ibid., 99): “non substat ejusmodi proprijs affectionibus [etc.]” (emphasis added).
- 50.
Ibid., 132; Latin, 99.
- 51.
The latter citation reads: “1628. T. Spencer Logick 199: This truth is necessary by emanation, and consecution.”
- 52.
NUP, 136; Latin, 103.
- 53.
For all of this, see NUP, 138–40; Latin, 105–6.
- 54.
Ibid., 99: “extensionis Ideam habemus omnium clarissimam”; translation, 132: “we have an exceptionally clear idea of extension.”
- 55.
Ibid., 140; Latin, 106.
- 56.
Ibid., 141; Latin, 107.
- 57.
Ibid., 144–5; Latin, 110–11.
- 58.
Whitehead 1967, 141–4.
- 59.
Newton, Principia, 25 (Scholium to the Laws of Motion and their Corollaries).
- 60.
Newton, Opticks, 398.
- 61.
Indeed, on this view, if all interactions occurred through impacts of fundamental particles every interaction would entail an agglomeration of matter, and elasticity of any sort would be impossible: there would be nothing that could cause a rebound, or a repulsive force of any description. In particular, the ether Newton suggests in the celebrated twenty-first Query of the Opticks (350–2), whose “exceeding great elastick force” may be the cause of gravity, is itself inexplicable on “mechanical” principles, given Newton’s cited position about the impact of “hard” bodies.
- 62.
See, e.g., Descartes’ Rule Eight; CSM, 29.
- 63.
Newton, Opticks, 397.
- 64.
Ibid., 401.
- 65.
Ibid., 397.
- 66.
Ibid., 376 (emphasis added).
- 67.
That is, concludes the theological discussion—not the scholium as a whole. In the Cajori edition of the Principia, the passage occurs on p. 546. (Emphasis added.).
- 68.
Newton, Opticks, 400.
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Editor’s note: This paper is based on a talk originally given at the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) in March 1989, at the conference “How Theories are Constructed: The Methodology of Scientific Creativity,” organized by Jarrett Leplin. Some of the talks from that conference have been published as part of Leplin 1995, but this paper has not been published previously. This version is based on an unpublished manuscript, edited for length—mainly by removing three discursive footnotes, and an introductory paragraph peculiar to the presentation of the paper at the conference. Stein explores the key themes broached in this paper further, in response to comments from the conference, in his unpublished manuscript, “Further Considerations on Newton’s Method,” which can be found (along with a longer version of the current paper) at http://www.strangebeautiful.com/other-minds.html. The places of the three elided footnotes are indicated in the text of the current version of the paper.
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Stein, H. (2023). On Metaphysics and Method in Newton. In: Stan, M., Smeenk, C. (eds) Theory, Evidence, Data: Themes from George E. Smith. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 343. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41041-3_7
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