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13587 results in History of science and technology

Page 435 of 680

  • ‘A duty of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical criticism

  • Scott Mandelbrote
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 281-302
    Print publication:
    September 1993

  • Will Ladislaw's words, which so disillusion the young Dorothea, might also depress the modern interpreter of Newton's theology. Encountering the bulk of Newton's manuscript theology, it is tempting to sympathize with Dorothea's eventual response to The Key to all Mythologies, and to want nothing of it. The assessment of John Conduitt, Newton's son-in-law and executor, that his ‘relief and amusement was going to some other study, as history, chronology, divinity, and chemistry’ has in the past provided an ample excuse for those who have wished to take such a course, and to ignore Newton's biblical criticism. In the last three decades, however, Newton scholarship has come to terms with its hero's twilight activities, and reclassified them as being at least as important to him as the natural philosophy of the Principia, and intimately bound up with the thinking behind that philosophy. But although many modern scholars are now reluctant to see Newton as Stephen Hawking in breeches, historians of science have tended to concentrate on the implications for Newton's philosophy of his religious and alchemical writings, and in the process often have distorted their religious context. Historians of ideas have been beguiled by Newton's disciples, and by the esoteric texts from Newton's library, to ride hobbyhorses of their own which do not always illuminate Newton's reasons for writing theology. There is a danger of ‘knowing what is being done by the rest of the world’ before troubling with what Newton was up to when he worried about religion and theology, channelling his energies into treatise after treatise on the interpretation of prophecy. I want to suggest what some of Newton's concerns may have been, by looking at his ideas of religious duty and of the Church, and to liberate Newton from his disciples for long enough to consider some of his ideas about the relationships of prophetic and natural philosophical explorations of divinity.

  • Correction

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, p. 383
    Print publication:
    September 1993

  • In the review of Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum, published in our March 1993 issue, p. 115, Professor Winsor is quoted as having concluded that ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century the study of diversity was a natural science.’ This should have read ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century the study of diversity was a mature science.’ We apologize to Professor Winsor for this error.

  • New Editor for BJHS

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, p. 385
    Print publication:
    September 1993
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  • BJH volume 26 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. f1-f2
    Print publication:
    September 1993
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  • Editorial

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, p. 269
    Print publication:
    September 1993
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Page 435 of 680