Newton on Matter and Activity

Ernan Mcmullin

Description

"Newton on Matter and Activity shows persuasively that while the Principia remains within the first two stages of inquiry (mathematical and physical) into nature, Newton spent the next forty years of his life making a philosophical analysis of matter, force, and transmission of force. Close attention is paid to methodological issues, especially Newton's move beyond inductivism and toward a reproductive theoretical schema of interpretation required to treat of attraction, hardness, and impenetrability." —Cross Currents

Sujets

• 18th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Modern history
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268160142
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Newton on Matter and Activity
Newton on Matter and Activity
ERNAN McMULLIN
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 1978 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McMullin, Ernan, 1924-
Newton on matter and activity.
ISBN : 978-0-268-01343-1 (paperback)
ISBN : 978-0-268-01342-4 (hardback)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Matter-History-Sources. 2. Motion-History-Sources. 3. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642-1727. I. Title.
QC171.2.M3 531 77-82480
eISBN 9780268160142
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
The Universal Qualities of Matter
1.1 The Limits of Transmutability
1.2 Intensity-Invariance as a Criterion of Universality
1.3 Induction and the Analogy of Nature
1.4 The Definition of Matter
CHAPTER TWO
Is Matter Active?
2.1 Leibniz
2.2 Newton
2.3 Vis Inertiae
2.4 Active Principles
2.5 The Impulse to the Principia
2.6 Force in Matter?
2.7 Matter and Spirit
CHAPTER THREE
Is Gravity an Essential Property of Matter?
3.1 Absolutely Not!
3.2 Gravity
3.3 Essential to Matter
3.4 Universal Gravitation
3.5 Universal versus Essential
3.6 Gravity and the Mechanical Philosophy
CHAPTER FOUR
How Is Matter Moved?
4.1 Early Solutions
4.2 An Ontology for the Principia
4.3 Light as a Mover of Matter
4.4 The Electric Spirit
4.5 The Active Aether
4.6 Rational Reconstruction
4.7 Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE
Epilogue: Matter and Activity in Later Natural Philosophy
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS WORK WAS substantially completed during a period of research support from the National Science Foundation at Cambridge University in 1973-74. I am indebted to the Foundation for its continuing support.
I wish to express my appreciation to D. T. Whiteside for his helpful comments on a first draft of the work, completed in May 1969. My special thanks go to J. E. McGuire, whose articles on Newton were an indispensable resource for me and whose detailed comments on successive drafts of the work were of enormous help. Discussions with Alan Shapiro and Cecil Mast aided me through some tangled stretches.
I am grateful to the University Library in Cambridge for permission to work with the Newton manuscript material, to the staff of the Research Library at the Whipple Science Museum, Cambridge, for their generous provision of research resources, and to the Fellows of St. Edmund s House for their hospitality during my stay in Cambridge.
One point of editorial usage may be noted here. Typography has been pressed into the service of clarity in a way which is happily becoming standard in philosophical works. Single quotes are used for mention only, that is, in order to name the expression they enclose. Double quotes are used not only for quoting material but also (in the case of words or short phrases) to indicate that the expression that they enclose is being used in some special sense. Italics are used for emphasis, or to indicate that the expression italicized is borrowed from a language other than the main one of the text. Finally, punctuation does not appear within quotes, unless it is part of the material being quoted.
Ernan McMullin
Introduction
I N THE STORY of the concept of matter, Newton plays a paradoxical role. On the one hand, he struggled with the intricacies of this concept for sixty years while building his system of the world around it. Yet on the other hand, he provided scientists with a neat and manageable substitute for it, one which would later supplant the older concept in the explicit symbolic systems of modern science. If one defines Newton s achievement in mechanics by the text of the Principia , an assumption that philosophers of science have often found convenient, it would be plausible to say that matter occurs there only in the phrase quantity of matter , and thus that in Newton s own work the function of the concept of matter has already been taken over by that of mass. Yet, as we shall see, nothing could be further from the truth. In the immense effort to construct an adequate natural philosophy around and beyond the Principia , an effort which occupied Newton through much of his later life, the concept of matter played an altogether crucial role.
When Newton said in the Principia that he intended only to give a mathematical notion of the forces he discussed, without considering their physical causes and seats , this was not at all the prescient positivism that historians have sometimes made it. 1 Newton not only thought that these forces had physical causes and seats but spent much of the rest of his scientific career trying to sort them out. In the Principia itself, he gives a clue to what he felt to be the proper order in this matter:
In mathematics we are to investigate the quantities of forces with their proportions consequent upon the conditions supposed; then, when we enter into physics, we compare those proportions with the phenomena of Nature that we may know what conditions of those forces answer to the several kinds of attractive bodies. And this preparation being made, we argue more safely concerning the physical species, causes and proportions of the forces. 2
There are thus three stages here: mathematics (mathematical analysis of the consequences of different laws of force), physics (establishing which laws of force actually obtain in Nature), and finally the more philosophical part of the task of the natural philosopher, the discussion of such issues as the causes of various forces. Newton deliberately restricted the Principia to the first two stages, which he felt had to be carried out first, before the third stage could profitably be entered upon.
Besides the question of the nature of force, another important problem left unresolved in the Principia was that of the distinction between body and void, around which so much of the formal discussion of motion in the book hinged. Both of these problems reduced to that of the proper understanding of the concept of matter. If matter is to be identified as the inert and passive principle of motion, as Newton, following the neo-Platonic tradition going back through More, tended to make it, then there must be something else ( active principles ) to explain how change originates. But where are these active principles to be located? In the vortices of a Cartesian aether ? This would only push the question one stage further back. Besides, an aether theory was incompatible (as the Principia showed) with the lack of resistance to the planets in their motions around the sun. On the other hand, if one were to postulate atoms moving in a void, how is the transmission of action-especially electrical and magnetic action-to be explained? Further, the Cartesians had seemed to make of the universe an all-sufficient machine. Newton opposed this, on theological grounds, and for a time at least preferred to invoke (as Malebranche had done before him) God s action as the immediate source of change of motion, as the single active principle needed.
These were issues Newton could not avoid facing. It was all very well for the special purposes of the Principia to confine himself to mathematics and physics . But as he knew perfectly well, many ambiguities and inconsistencies still surrounded the central issue: how is action transmitted? The theorems of the Principia did not really help one to understand how gravitational motion occurred, what its causes were. In that sense, they did not explain it. 3 They simply described it, and cancelled out the force-expressions by substituting specific laws of force in the calculation of orbits. There was still much hard philosophical analysis to be done if the nature of force and the transmission of action were to be properly understood, and the assumptions of the Principia adequately protected against attack. And so, in the early 1690 s, Newton set about making drafts for a revision of Book III of the Principia , a revision which was never completed. Work on the Opticks also progressed, and the first edition appeared in 1704, to be followed shortly after by an enlarged Latin edition ( Optice , 1706). The most striking feature of the Opticks was the lengthy set of Queries appended to it, dealing with the interaction of matter and light. 4 This was a topic on which Newton had very definite views, but since he could not deduce his corpuscular model from the phenomena, he preferred to propose his hypotheses as speculative queries in order to encourage a farther search to be made by others . 5 Their avowedly tentative form marks them off from the rest of Newton s published work, and makes them the most significant source, perhaps, for the most general categories of matter and action that informed his researches.
The correspondence with Cotes preparatory to the second edition of the Principia (1713) 6 shows the extent to which the Newtonian group was preoccupied with the criticisms leveled against them by Cartesians concerning the transmission of action and the nature of force. The disagreement finally broke into the open with the famous exchange of letters between Leibniz and the Newtonian, Clarke, on a series of issues centered around the nature of space and the mode of God s action in it. 7 Though now in his seventies, Newton continued to make corrections and to