title: Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology)
author: Jed Z. Buchwald
description: ""The authors are well-known Newton experts, and their contributions add many nuances to our image of Newton ..."
zlib_text: This page intentionally left blank
  
  A History of Natural Philosophy
  Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world.
  It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little con-
  cerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences – such as
  astronomy, optics, and mechanics – were narrowly conﬁned to various compu-
  tations that did not involve physical causes. Natural philosophy and the exact
  sciences functioned independently of each other. Although this began slowly to
  change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural
  philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and thereby
  made the Scientiﬁc Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton’s great work,
  The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reﬂects the new
  relationship. Natural philosophy became the “Great Mother of the Sciences,”
  which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physi-