HONR 302 Paper Topic

(Due April 19)

The following is taken from a book titled The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin. In the introduction to the book Shapin writes” There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” In the part of the book I quote, he discusses the mechanical philosophy, or what has become the modern scientific view.

“The framework that modern natural philosophers preferred to Aristotelian teleology was one that explicitly modeled nature on the characteristics of a machine. So central was the machine metaphor to important strands of new science that many exponents liked to refer to their practice as the mechanical philosophy ….proper mechanical accounts of nature were widely seen as the goal and the prize.”

By some Newton is classed as the first mechanical philosopher. In a paper of 4-5 pages show how this is a plausible way of looking at Newton and his work. How was his scientific work different from that in the other works we have read? In particular, were the cosmologies of Aristotle, Plato, and Lucretius mechanical? Where do Copernicus and Galileo fit in?