Hilarie Kochiras (post-doctoral fellow, Cohn Institute). Newton’s General Scholium and the Mechanical Philosophy

 

 

Monday, December 9th, 18:00 PM

Gilman Building, Hall 449

 

Chair: Prof. Leo Corry

 

This talk focuses upon Isaac Newton’s General Scholium – this being the tricentennial year of that famous essay – and particularly upon those themes in the essay that relate to the mechanical philosophy.   In the talk’s first section, I consider the question of Newton’s commitment to the seventeenth century mechanical philosophy in its canonical sense.  Although Newton’s theory drew fire from the canonical mechanical philosophers mainly for violating their intelligibility requirement, I focus mainly upon his departure from their ontological requirement; such a departure has the potential to raise an epistemological obstacle to allocating properties to substances, and it reminds us that the exclusion of immaterial spirits from science was not a foregone conclusion.  In the second section I turn to the mechanical philosophy in Newton’s own sense; he alludes to that sense in one of the drafts for the General Scholium, which describes the celestial system as a machine.  In the third section, I consider a concept of matter that Newton develops in a much earlier manuscript, De gravitatione, as it belongs to a concept of substance generally, one that appears in the General Scholium.  I show that a proper understanding of the role of space reveals just how fundamental law-governed action is to the concept of material bodies in that early account.