Andrew Cunningham Category

What’s in a name? Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica

Themes from Andrew Cunningham’s 1988 essay were further developed in his “How the Principia Got its Name: Or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously,” published in 1991. Cunningham wants to concentrate on Isaac Newton’s famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), particularly the phrase “natural philosophy” in the title. What is the “natural philosophy” in Newton’s book? Like […]

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What is Natural Philosophy?

Over the weekend I came across Andrew Cunningham’s collection of essays in The Identity of the History of Science and Medicine (2012). I had briefly mentioned Cunningham in an older post, but for heuristic purposes I thought it would be useful to reflect on some of his arguments here. Beginning in 1988, Cunningham published an […]

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De-centring the Scientific Revolution, Paley’s Natural Theology, Mobilizing a Prophetic Newton, and Maxwell’s Design Argument

I still have several articles open on my pdf reader that are worth mentioning before I officially end my reading of The British Journal for the History of Science, and before tackling other articles from other journals and books. In discussions over the historiography of the “Scientific Revolution,” almost all the authors I have recently […]

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