About God in Newton's correspondence with Richard Bentley and Queries in Opticks

Sfetcu, Nicolae About God in Newton's correspondence with Richard Bentley and Queries in Opticks., 2019 [Preprint]

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English abstract

In Newton’s correspondence with Richard Bentley, Newton rejected the possibility of remote action, even though he accepted it in the Principia. Practically, Newton’s natural philosophy is indissolubly linked to his conception of God. The knowledge of God seems to be essentially immutable, unlike the laws of nature that can be subjected to refining, revision and rejection procedures. As Newton later states in Opticks, the cause of gravity is an active principle in matter, but this active principle is not an essential aspect of matter, but something that must have been added to matter by God, arguing in the same Query of Opticks even the need for divine intervention.

Item type: Preprint
Keywords: God, Isaac Newton, correspondence, Richard Bentley , Opticks
Subjects: D. Libraries as physical collections. > DD. Academic libraries.
Depositing user: Nicolae Sfetcu
Date deposited: 22 Aug 2023 12:27
Last modified: 22 Aug 2023 12:27
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/44665

References

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Newton, Isaac. 1979. Opticks, Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Courier Corporation.

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Schliesser, Eric. 2011. “Newton’s Substance Monism, Distant Action, and the Nature of Newton’s Empiricism: Discussion of H. Kochiras ‘Gravity and Newton’s Substance Counting Problem.’” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (1): 160–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.11.004.


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