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The Mechanical Philosophy and Newton’s Mechanical Force

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Hylarie Kochiras
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Abstract

How does Newton approach the challenge of mechanizing gravity and, more broadly, natural philosophy? By adopting the simple machine tradition’s mathematical approach to a system’s covarying parameters of change, he retains natural philosophy’s traditional goal while specifying it in a novel way as the search for impressed forces. He accordingly understands the physical world as a divinely created machine possessing intrinsically mathematical features and mathematical methods as capable of identifying its real features. The gravitational force’s physical cause remains an outstanding problem, however, as evidenced by Newton’s onetime reference to active principles as the “genuine principles of the mechanical philosophy.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 557 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This article was written primarily during my stay as a visiting scholar at the University of Athens, and for that I would like to express my gratitude to Stathis Psillos, along with Dionysios Anapolitanos, Costas Dimitracopoulos, and the rest of the faculty of ΜΙΘΕ. I am indebted to Peter Machamer and Ted McGuire for our discussions at Pittsburgh; much of this article elaborates my contribution to our coauthored paper, and the discussions benefited me for both works. I am also grateful to Mary Domski for comments on the coauthored paper and to Alan Gabbey for comments on both. An initial version of this article was presented at the University of Pisa, and for that opportunity I thank Pierluigi Barrotta as well as New Europe College and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme within the European Institutes for Advanced Study Programme, for their support and financial contribution, respectively, during that presentation’s preparation. I also extend my appreciation to the audience at the University of Athens, for discussion of a later version. Finally, for their close reading and comments, I thank the anonymous referees for this journal; shortcomings are my own, as always.

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