Newtonianism

Newtonianism is a philosophical and scientific doctrine inspired by the beliefs and methods of natural philosopher Isaac Newton. While Newton's influential contributions were primarily in physics and mathematics, his broad conception of the universe as being governed by rational and understandable laws laid the foundation for many strands of Enlightenment thought. Newtonianism became an enormously influential intellectual program that applied Newton's principles in many avenues of inquiry, laying the groundwork for modern science (both the natural and social sciences), in addition to influencing philosophy, political thought and theology.

Isaac Newton's first published scholarly work was Opticks, which was printed in 1704 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, an organization of which he became president in 1703. The treatise, which features his now famous work on dispersion and the composition of sunlight, is often cited as an example of how to analyze difficult questions via quantitative experimentation. Even so, the work was not considered revolutionary in Newton's time. One hundred years later, however, Thomas Young would describe Newton's observations in Opticks as "yet unrivalled... they only rise in our estimation as we compare them with later attempts to improve on them." Newton's Principia Mathematica, published in a small personal printing in 1686 but not published widely and in English after his death, is rather the text cited as revolutionary or otherwise radical in the development of science. The three books of Principia, considered a seminal text in mathematics and physics, is notable for its rejection of hypotheses in favor of inductive and deductive reasoning based on a set of definitions and axioms. This method may be compared to the Cartesian method of deduction based on sequential logical reasoning, and showed the efficacy of applying mathematical analysis as a means of making discoveries about the natural world.

The first edition of Principia features proposals about the movements of celestial bodies which Newton initially calls "hypotheses"—however, by the second edition, the word "hypothesis" was replaced by the word "rule", and Newton had added to the footnotes the following statement:

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