Katherine Brading

Recent scholarship challenges the long-standing view among philosophers that Newton-as-philosopher can be largely disregarded. The primary goal of this project is to make a major contribution to this re-assessment. Newton’s contributions to philosophy are much deeper and richer than has hitherto been appreciated. Beginning with general philosophical questions concerning the nature and composition of the material world, and related questions concerning how we obtain knowledge of this world, this project demonstrates the depth of Newton’s philosophical engagement and the philosophical novelty of his solutions. By following his proposals through into contemporary philosophy and physics, it shows the importance of his solutions and re-integrates Newton into the history of philosophy as told today.

This project inquires into the notion of body at the heart of classical physics and philosophical engagements with that notion. The key thesis advanced by philosophers Marius Stan and Katherine Brading is that by 1700 neither metaphysics nor mathematical physics had a coherent and robust notion of body, understood either as physical bodies or those of moral and political agents. They identify this lacuna in the metaphysics of science as the “problem of bodies.” The project explores the resources and solutions available in the Enlightenment for solving this problem. Drawing on Brading’s expertise in early modern thought and philosophy of physics, and on Stan’s background in history of physics, the project focuses on scientific theorists (including Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Siméon Denis Poisson) and philosophers attuned to that science (such as Christian Wolff, Emilie du Châtelet, and Immanuel Kant). Using the “problem of bodies” as an investigative tool, the research uncovers and then assesses the entanglement between philosophies of matter and mechanical theory as both sought to recover a robust notion of body in the eighteenth century. Thereby, it offers a novel, revisionary account of the relationship between philosophy and mechanics in the Enlightenment, and of the split that arose between physics and philosophy. The project’s outcome will be a jointly authored monograph; in addition, the scholars expect to outline and defend a new problematic and research agenda for historians and philosophers of classical science. Award period: July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2019