HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science

The very first issue of HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science is now available online (for free)! The issue is full of swell articles and terrific book-reviews. Have you or your library become subscribers yet? (It's cheap because of the UofC press.)

In light of our recent discussions (see my contributions here, here, here; Jeff Bell here; Mark Lance's post here and Catarina Dutilh's here), on this blog about methodology of the history of philosophy, my paper "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy: a programmatic essay" might be of interest to some. Below is my Introduction.

The main point of this article is to identify a set of interlocking views that became (and still are) very influential within philosophy in the wake of Newton’s success. These views use the authority of natural philosophy/mechanics to settle debates within philosophy. I label these “Newton’s Challenge.” Newton had some hand in promoting them, but he is not responsible for all of them. My article, thus, revisits an old theme articulated by A. E. Burtt (1924/1932), but I offer new arguments and evidence.

The heart of the article (secs. 2–3) identifies the core set of related views that constitute Newton’s Challenge. 

• In section 2.1 I draw on two eighteenth-century figures (Euler and Musschenbroek) to introduce arguments that give evidence for the existence of Newton’s Challenge and distinguish four strands within it. 
• In section 2.2 I use Berkeley as evidence that something like Newton’s Challenge was recognized by philosophical opponents to Newton. 
• In section 2.3, I identify Newton’s contribution to Newton’s Challenge. 
• In section 3, I use the writings by MacLaurin, ’s Gravesande, and Musschenbroek to identify eight arguments that constitute the way Newton’s Challenge was articulated and developed in practice by eighteenth-century Newtonians. 
• In section 4, by focusing on Berkeley and Hume, I contrast my approach with Ernan McMullin’s influential alternative to the reception of Newton’s Principia. I identify in Berkeley’s work five counterstrategies to Newton’s Challenge. 
• In section 5, I offer a brief conclusion with suggestions for further research.

In this article, I make no effort to show that the claims I make about the arguments that I attribute to the authors studied either are central to their concerns or were understood in context in the way that I present them. By the standards of recent scholarship, strictly speaking, I am not engaged in a historical study here. The article is programmatic in three ways:

• (i) not only can some of the claims (particularly about Berkeley and MacLaurin) be developed historically but 
• (ii) also the very idea of Newton’s Challenge is meant to be a useful category in studying contemporary debates over the status of, say, experimental philosophy and the relationships between analytic metaphysics and contemporary philosophy of science as well as various other episodes in the history of philosophy of science of the last few centuries. For example, I expect some of the arguments presented in this article to be familiar to students of the so-called scientific philosophers of the early twentieth century and the ways in which these argued for their research agenda. 
• (iii) This article aims to promote the idea that one of the philosophical roles within philosophy for historians of the philosophy of science can be the creation or coinage of new concepts with which to treat philosophically significant episodes. Here I focus on a single concept, but in passing I mention others.