The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (original) (raw)
Related papers
Newtonianism in the eighteenth century
2021
[This is a preliminary draft for a section to appear in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Mathematics, Volume 4, please do not cite without approval] Isaac Newton’s Principia rocked the intellectual world right from its first appearance in 1687 and attained an iconic status in the eighteenth century. Newton’s mathematico-experimental approach to the natural world was saluted as an examplary method for scientific investigation by most and was the primary target for those who wished to restrict the domain of mathematics. Through Newton, ‘mathematics’ turned into one of the buzzwords of eighteenth-century intellectual culture. As an icon, however, Newton stood for much more than just a particular scientific methodology. A mention of Newton or the ‘Newtonian philosophy’ could, depending on the context, also indicate certain cosmological, theological, and even political positions. Furthermore, a diverse range of mathematicians, philosophers, and entrepreneurs in the eighteenth century adopted ‘Newton’ as brand name without necessarily having much in common with the man himself.
Newtonianism and the physics of du Châtelet's Institutions de physique
Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar: Essays in Honor of Mordechai Feingold, 2022
This paper is about two things that cross paths. One is the many senses of the category 'Newtonian,' and their uses for exegesis. The other is the physics that Emilie du Châtelet grounded philosophically around 1740 in her book, Institutions de physique. I offer it as a tribute to Moti Feingold's magisterial work on how the century after Newton responded to his science. I begin with some context. Many have described Institutions as a work of Leibnizian foundations for Newtonian science. An inspiring image, no doubt, but is it accurate? I argue here that it is not: little physics in her book is really Newtonian. Most of her physics is from figures before Newton; and even when she includes his results, du Châtelet filters them through demonstrably un-Newtonian ideas. So, we must abandon the conventional wisdom about her science. 1 1 In the 20th century, the dominant view became that Institutions is concerned with "merging Leibnizianism and Newtonianism"; is a "marriage between Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian science"; is an "introduction to Newtonian physics" attesting du Châtelet's conversion to "Leibnizian metaphysics"; mediates "between Leibniz and Newton"; is a landmark document in the "history of French Newtonianism" and yet "framed according to Leibnizian principles." Allegedly it is a "fusion of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz," and it synthesizes "Newtonian physics" and "Leibnizian metaphysics." So pervasive is it that it has seeped into the broader consciousness of Anglophone academia. A philosopher of modern physics: du Châtelet "was one of the first people to bring the Newtonian and Leibnizian traditions together." This collective modern verdict echoes the book's approbateur,
Anti-Newtonians on the Continent in the Late Eighteenth Century: an Alternative Scientific Practice?
Historiography has considered that acceptance of newtonianism in France achieved in the mid-1730s with the end of the debate over the Earth shape. However, over the whole century, some scientists still defended mechanism against the idea of an action-at-a-distance. The most famous is George-Louis Lesage (1724-1803), from Geneva, because he intended to demonstrate the attraction law with a physical principle. But the ones who rejected completely the Newtonian theory are less known. First among them, Joseph-Etienne Bertier (1702-1783), Academy of Sciences correspondent from 1748 on, published in 1763 and 1764 some Principes de physique, pour servir de suite aux principes mathématiques de Newton. Others, like David, La Perrière, or Vivens, were members of provincial academies. They all wrote “Essais” or “Systèmes” to refute Newton. My presentation will focus on two main points. 1.What are the arguments used by anti-Newtonians? The latter deliberately matched mathematics with physics. To explain how the world goes, they distrusted calculus techniques as unsuitable to study the very nature of matter and movement. Such an attitude required an alternative epistemology to the Newtonian one. 2.How are these arguments conveyed? After 1740, academic prizes for astronomy dealt only with typical Newtonian questions, e.g. the three-bodies problem. To get an audience, anti-Newtonians submitted their research work and criticisms to periodicals such as the Journal Encyclopédique, the Journal de Trévoux, or the Mercure de France. These journals represented an alternative place to publicize scientific ideas dismissed by the institution.
2016
This paper explores the influence of Isaac Newton"s astronomy on European culture. More than any other astronomer, Isaac Newton gave the 18 th century its cosmology of unity, predictability and order. Newton"s discovery of the law of gravity, published in 1687 in his Principia, provided a single universal "rule" for the entire universe (Cassirer, 1951 [1979]: 9). The application of Newton"s theories to wider culture is known as Newtonianism (Schaffer, 1996: 610-26). Newtonianism emphasised order, stability, regularity and the rule of a law under which all men were equal. It held out the possibility that the current state of political disharmony could be replaced by peace, freedom and harmony. This paper will explore three consequences of Newtonianism. The first is Natural Rights theory: the argument that just as one single law governs the entire universe, so human society must also be governed by the same single law (Becker, 1958). The second is progress theory: the idea that history moves in an ordered pattern, gradually improving until it reaches a final, benign, end point (Condorcet, 1955). The third is sociology, which originated in the attempt to find evidence for the operation of Newtonian law in human society (Comte, 1875). The paper will conclude that an understanding of important cultural developments at the beginning of the modern world requires an understanding of developments in astronomy.