This is the first of two classes on Newton. The assignments in Dear and Kuhn complete their accounts of the Scientific Revolution. Watch for hints of how Newton's work not only completed the revolution but completed it in a specific way that wasn't to everyone's taste.

The two selections from Newton's Principia come from the beginning of the book. One is the first of four prefaces to various editions and the other is a scholium (roughly, a comment) following an initial group of eight definitions (of mass, force, and related ideas). (The scholium is itself immediately followed in the book by Newton's axioms, which are his three laws of motion.)

The preface is a fairly brief statement of Newton's aims and methods. Look for differences from Descartes. There is evidence that Newton was especially interested in refuting Descartes about the time he wrote the Principia and people think its title (in full in English translation: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) was intended to allude to the title of Descartes Principles of Philosophy; and in fact the Cartesian title was used as an abbreviated title for Newton's work by him and others.

The scholium introduces one of the controversial ideas of the Principia, the idea of absolute space and time. There was opposition in his day to this idea by the philosopher Leibniz, who held that space and time were simply relations among the things located with respect to them; and what has come to be called the "rotating-bucket experiment" (see pp. 143f) has stimulated thinking for centuries.