Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet's are ever relevant today... Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous: she was read and debated from Russia to Prussia, from Switzerland to England, from up north in Sweden to down south ...

Newton is an evocative intellectual history of the life and ideas of Isaac Newton the natural philosopher, covering his influential thoughts about philosophical problems, our knowledge of nature, and even the nature of the divine.Offers a comprehensive and highly accessible introduction to the life and ideas of Isaac Newton, emphasizing his influential contributions to the field of philosophyCovers the principal philosophical topics that captivated Newton’s...

Recurrent questions about space have dogged philosophers since ancient times. Can an ordinary person draw from his or her perceptions to say what space is? Or is it rather a technical concept that is only within the grasp of experts? Can geometry characterize the world in which we live? What is God's relation to space? In Ancient Greece, Euclid set out to define space by devising a codified set of axioms and associated theorems that were then passed down for centuries, thought by many phil...

This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars presents research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke and discuss the ways in which a broad range of figures, including Hume, Maclaurin, Maupertuis and Kant, reacted to his thought. The wide range of topics discussed includes the laws of nature, the notion of force, the relation of ...

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) left a voluminous legacy of writings. Despite his influence on the early modern period, his correspondence, manuscripts, and publications in natural philosophy remain scattered throughout many disparate editions. In this volume, Newton's principal philosophical writings, including excerpts from the Principia and the Opticks and a corrected translation of 'De Gravitatione', are collected in a single place. This newly expanded second edition of Philosophical Writ...