Do you think in today’s modern society Newton would be still viewed as controversial? Why or Why not?
Answers
philosophically rich and tumultuous time, one that saw the end of the Aristotelian dominance of philosophy in Europe, the rise and fall of Cartesianism, the emergence of “experimental philosophy” (later called “empiricism” in the nineteenth century) in Great Britain, and the development of numerous experimental and mathematical methods for the study of nature. Newton's contributions to mathematics—including the co-discovery of the calculus with his (eventual) foe Leibniz—and to what is now called physics, including both its experimental and theoretical aspects, will forever dominate discussions of his lasting influence. But his impact on the development of early modern philosophy was also profound, so much so that it is difficult to grasp the history of philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without considering Newton's role. His engagement with Cartesian ideas and methods early in his life was just as significant to the transformation of philosophy in the seventeenth century as his debates with Leibniz were to the setting of the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth. Obviously, Newton is not part of the traditional canon of the period, which would focus on the great sextet, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. (The distinction between the two pairs of three “rationalists” and “empiricists” owes much to the Kantian conception of the history of philosophy in the late eighteenth century.) But this conception of the canon has been challenged substantially by the past generation of scholarship