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Katherine Brading and Marius Stan, Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Oxford University Press, 2024, 431pp., $115.00 (HB) ISBN 9780197678954.
Reviewed by Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam
During the last quarter century, there has been an explosion of scholarship by philosophers of physics and, especially, historians of philosophy on Isaac Newton and his reception in philosophy. This growing interest is prima facie puzzling because Newton did not write a major philosophical work. And while he clearly elicited important philosophical responses (e.g., by Du Châtelet, Kant, Hume, etc.) and engendered important philosophical debates (e.g., Leibniz-Clarke), this does not justify or explain the growing attention. After all, not every person who was a significant interlocutor to philosophers in his own day should be subject of study by a community of historians of philosophy today. (We largely don’t do this for Digby, Mersenne, Riccioli, William Harvey, Kepler, Hooke, Halley, or De Volder, etc.) That Newton…
