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.

Empiricism as a development of experimental natural philosophy / Stephen Gaukroger -- Constructing natural historical facts: Baconian natural history in Newton's first paper on light and colors / Dana Jalobeanu -- Vision, color, and method in Newton's Opticks / Philippe Hamou -- Locke's metaphysics and Newtonian metaphysics / Lisa Downing -- Locke and Newton on space and time and their sensible measures / Geoffrey Gorham and Edward Slowik -- Newtonian explanatory reduction and Hume's system of the sciences / Yoram Hazony -- Enlarging the bounds of moral philosophy: Newton's method and Hume's science of man / Tamás Demeter -- Living force at Leiden: De Volder, 's Gravesande, and the reception of Newtonianism / Tammy Nyden -- On the role of Newtonian analogies in eighteenth century life science: vitalism and provisionally inexplicable explicable devices / Charles Wolfe -- Closing the loop: testing Newtonian gravity-then and now / George E. Smith.