Philosophy Compass 5/7 (2010): 525–534, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00307.

Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics

Mary Domski*
University of New Mexico

Abstract
Commentators attempting to understand the empirical method that Isaac Newton applies in his
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) are forced to grapple with the thorny issue of
how to reconcile Newton’s rejection of hypotheses with his appeal to absolute space. On the one
hand, Newton claims that his experimental philosophy does not rely on claims that are assumed
without empirical evidence, and on the other hand, Newton appeals to an absolute space that, by
his own characterization, does not make any impressions on our senses. Howard Stein (1967,
2002) has offered an insightful strategy for reconciling this apparent contradiction and suggested a
way to enhance our understanding of Newton’s ‘empiricism’ such that absolute space can be pre-
served as a legitimate part of Newton’s experimental project. Recently, Andrew Janiak (2008) has
posed a worthy challenge to Stein’s empirical reading of Newton and directed our attention to
the metaphysical commitments that underlie the experimental philosophy of Newton’s Principia.
Although Stein and Janiak disagree on the degree to which Newton’s empiricism influences his
natural philosophy, both agree and clearly show that an adequate treatment of Newton’s empiri-
cism cannot be divorced from consideration of Newton’s views on God and God’s relationship to
nature.

1. Newton’s ‘Empiricism’: The ‘Non-Hypothetical’ Terms of the Debate

Given the impact Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) has
had on the course of scientific practice – given, in particular, that the program of
mechanics contained therein set the research agenda for the physical sciences for the more
than two centuries that followed its appearance – the importance of the Principia for the
history of science has never been a matter of dispute. Where we do continue to find dis-
pute is among the historians and philosophers of science (and more recently, among the
historians of the philosophy of science) who have grappled with the question of why the
Principia wielded the influence that it did. A somewhat standard answer has pointed to
Newton’s alleged success doing what his Scholastic predecessors and Cartesian contempo-
raries failed to do, namely, sever the ties between his investigations into nature and a
commitment to metaphysical ‘first principles’. Recently, this ‘positivist’ portrait – a por-
trait that does not question the ‘empirical’ and anti-metaphysical stance Newton adopts in
his investigation into natural motions and forces – has begun to hold less sway as histori-
ans move toward a more careful examination of the late 17th century context in which
Newton fashioned his natural philosophy.1 As notable context-sensitive commentators
continue to emphasize, we must take care not to impose our contemporary notions of
‘empiricism’ and ‘natural science’ onto the conceptions embraced by Newton, and should
use Newton’s natural philosophical practice and his own commentaries as our point of
departure as we attempt to craft an accurate characterization of Newton’s empiricism.2
Although isolating a single strand of ‘empiricism’ in Newton’s Principia (let alone in
Newton’s corpus) has been no easy task, and though the details and emphases of such

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526 Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics

attempts continue to vary, there is at least one thing upon which contemporary historians
seem to agree: Any portrait of Newton’s empiricism must engage with his explicit and
career-long rejection of ‘hypotheses’ in natural philosophy. Among the more famous
instances of this rejection appears in the General Scholium that was added to the second
(1713) edition of the Principia, where Newton explicitly contrasts a ‘hypothetical’ method
from his own ‘experimental’ one:
For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called hypothesis; and hypotheses,
whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in
experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the
phenomena and are made general by induction. The impenetrability, mobility, and impetus of
bodies, and the laws of motion and the law of gravity have been found by this method.
(1999:943)
As clearly as the rejection of hypotheses is a feature of Newton’s empiricism, it is also
clearly difficult to reconcile this rejection with the method Newton applies in the Prin-
cipia, especially when we consider the role Newton assigns to ‘absolute, true, and mathe-
matical’ notions in his system of mechanics.
These ‘absolute’ notions – absolute time, absolute space, absolute place, and absolute
motion – are distinguished from the common conceptions of time, space, place, and
motion, because as Newton explains, the ‘absolutes’ cannot be understood ‘solely with
reference to the objects of sense perception’ (Newton 1999:408).3 This separation of the
‘absolute and true’ from the ‘perceptual and common’ is brought out clearly in Newton’s
presentation of absolute space, which is, by his account, ‘of its own nature without refer-
ence to anything external’ always ‘homogenous and immovable’. The parts of this space
‘cannot be seen and cannot be distinguished from one another by our senses’ (Newton
1999:410), and yet it is in reference to the insensible, ‘unmoving places’ of absolute space
that the true and absolute motions of bodies are to be determined.4 Thus, Newton admits
that ‘It is certainly very difficult to find out the true motions of individual bodies and
actually to differentiate them from apparent motions, because the parts of that immovable
space in which the bodies truly move make no impression on the senses’ (1999:414; emphasis
added).
Given the non-sensible character of the ‘absolutes’, and absolute space in particular, the
problem of reconciling these notions with Newton’s rejection of hypotheses should now
be coming into clearer focus. If we must accept the existence of an ‘absolute space’ in
order to determine the true motions of bodies, and more generally, in order to accept his
system of mechanics as a true account of the natural world, then it seems we must, by
Newton’s own admission, accept its existence without any sensory evidence to justify this
assumption.5 Consequently, the existence of absolute space could very well be interpreted
as merely hypothetical, in which case, and contrary to his proclamations, Newton has
injected hypotheses into the allegedly empirical foundations on which the Principia pro-
gram rests.6
Certainly, this is not the end of the interpretative story, and one possible avenue for
reconciliation has been pursued rather vigorously in recent scholarship: Rather than
assume that the lack of direct sensory evidence for absolute space renders it hypothetical,
we should expand our understanding of ‘empirical’ and ‘Newton’s empiricism’ such that
absolute space can be preserved as a legitimately empirical part of Newton’s experimental
program. Among the more influential proponents of this strategy has been Howard Stein
(1967, 2002), and his position will be the focus of Sections 2 and 3. Very recently,
Andrew Janiak (2008) has challenged Stein’s position, and Janiak’s account will be the

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focus of Section 4. Although my treatment is far from a comprehensive survey of recent

literature on this issue, I focus on Stein and Janiak, because they offer us fruitful (though
hardly uncontroversial) ways of bringing Newton’s natural scientific method into conver-
sation with his metaphysics, and as a consequence, of bringing Newton’s method into
conversation with our own contemporary understanding of the philosophical attitudes
toward nature, God, and natural science that were embraced in the late 17th century.

2. The ‘Empirical’ Status of Absolute Space

Stein’s (1967) examination of absolute space begins with appeal to De Gravitatione, a short
tract that remained unpublished in Newton’s lifetime.7 Stein concentrates on the critique
of Cartesian relative motion that Newton presents in De Gravitatione to build a bridge
between the notion of space presented in Newton’s unpublished tract and the absolute
space of the Principia.8 I offer a brief overview of this critique before turning to the details
of Stein’s argument.
Newton’s goal in the first quarter of De Gravitatione is to ‘dispose of [the] fictions’
found in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (Newton 2004:14) precisely by revealing the
absurdities and contradictions that allegedly follow from accepting Descartes’ relativistic
characterization of motion, according to which a body’s true motion is to be determined
in relation to the surfaces of the bodies in its vicinity.9 The final absurdity that Newton
addresses is the most devastating, for as Newton presents it, if we accept the existence of
a plenum as well as Descartes’ relative account of motion, it becomes impossible to deter-
mine that any body in the system has moved. Newton reaches this conclusion by first
showing that, in the Cartesian system, it is impossible to locate the starting point of a com-
pleted motion. For instance, try as we might to identify the place that Jupiter, or some
other planet, occupied a year ago, we would ultimately fail, because the positions of the
particles of ether that fill the space surrounding the planets ‘have changed greatly since a
year ago’. More generally, Newton claims that to accept Descartes’ characterization of
motion is at the same time to accept that there is no time at which bodies are not mov-
ing, because in Descartes’ plenistic system, there is a constant change of the positions of
the particles that surround natural bodies. Consequently, Newton asserts, ‘if one follows
[the] Cartesian doctrine, not even God himself could define the past position of any
moving body accurately and geometrically now that a fresh state of things prevails’ (New-
ton 2004:20). Newton is then quick to point out that if we cannot in fact identify the
place where the motion of a body began (i.e., a place at which the body was initially at
rest), then it follows that: (i) the body has no velocity; (ii) we cannot identify the body’s
intermediate places (i.e., the places between the beginning and end of motion); and (iii) as
‘the space has no beginning or intermediate parts, it follows that there was no space
passed over and thus no determinate motion’. As a final result, Newton claims, ‘It follows
indubitably that Cartesian motion is not motion, for it has no velocity, no determination,
and there is no space or distance traversed by it’ (2004:20).
At this juncture, having revealed Descartes’ failure to provide a coherent account of
true motion, Newton proceeds to present his own, alternative characterizations of space
and then later of body. Among other features, space is presented by Newton as ‘motion-
less’ and ‘truly distinct from bodies’ (2004:20), a feature which allows us to draw a natural
link between the space presented in De Gravitatione and the ‘absolute, true, and mathe-
matical’ space that Newton presents in the Principia. This is precisely what Stein (1967)
does in his analysis of Newtonian space-time. However, the features that Newton ascribes
to space in De Gravitatione are not Stein’s primary concern.10 Instead, to argue for the

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‘empirical’ status of space, Stein focuses on the function space plays in Newton’s mechan-
ics, both in De Gravitatione and in the Principia – a function we can best comprehend by
situating Newton’s notion of space in the context of his De Gravitatione project to remedy
the shortcomings of Descartes’ mechanics. As Stein emphasizes, Newton’s remedy relies
on doing precisely what Descartes failed to do: provide an account of space, and other
foundational notions such as ‘time’ and ‘body’, which are required by a science of
mechanics that can make sense of the motions we witness in nature. That this is New-
ton’s project is signaled by the text. Immediately after arguing that ‘Cartesian motion is
not motion’, Newton writes, ‘So it is necessary that the definition of places, and hence of
local motion, be referred to some motionless being such as extension alone or space in so
far as it is seen to be truly distinct from bodies’ (2004:20). Using the context of Newton’s
treatment of space and this particular remark as a springboard, Stein proposes that we
look at Newton’s account of space as one which is intended to improve upon Descartes’
insofar as Newton is presenting the structure of space that is required ‘to make possible
an adequate expression of the principles of dynamics’. In other words, Newton takes it as
his empirical given that there are motions in the natural world and then, as indicated by
his criticism of Descartes, he offers the form of space that is necessary to account for these
motions.
Having this richer sense of how Newtonian space is ‘empirical’, Stein turns to the pro-
ject of the Principia and attempts to correct those commentators who have suggested that
the reality of absolute space is grounded on its ‘objective existence’ as a ‘cosmic substra-
tum’. Building off his analysis of De Gravitatione, Stein claims in contrast that Newton has
granted absolute space reality just insofar as this space offers an ‘objective framework for
the phenomenal universe’. In other words, just as the space of De Gravitatione was
demanded, although not directly confirmed, by empirical evidence, so too the space of
the Principia should be viewed as a part of the very ‘theoretical apparatus’ that is required
for his science of motion and forces – an apparatus ‘deduced from the phenomena’ in the
same manner as gravitation:
Newton’s use of the ‘absolute’ kinematical notions should be regarded as of the same class with
his use of such theoretical notions as ‘force’ or ‘attraction’ or ‘gravitation’. His philosophical
investigation of the system of the world led Newton to conclude that things themselves [objects
of experience] all mutually attract one another, although this attraction amongst the objects
around us is quite inaccessible to our ordinary sensible measures. (Stein 1967:190)
By associating absolute space with gravitation, Stein highlights his strategy for preserving
the empirical and non-hypothetical status of absolute space in Newton’s mechanics. For
on Newton’s own account, gravitation has been ‘deduced from the phenomena’ insofar
as his mathematical treatment of natural forces and motions points to the existence of this
universal force of attraction.11 In other words, sensory evidence confirms that there are
particular motions by which planets and other bodies proceed, and Newton’s mathemati-
cal analysis reveals that these motions are the result of an inverse-square force that acts on
all natural bodies. Thus, although the gravitation of these bodies is not directly confirm-
able – we cannot simply see or otherwise sense the existence of this attraction – it is
nonetheless ‘deduced from the phenomena’ insofar as its existence is confirmed by the
evidence that bodies do in fact move and move according to particular laws of motion.12
The structure of space is ‘deduced by the phenomena’ and empirically-grounded in the
same way; it is a structure that is not confirmable or determinable by direct sensory evi-
dence, as Newton admits, but it is nonetheless the structure that is demanded by the sen-
sory evidence we have at hand. Stein elaborates:

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It is important to be very clear about one point: The notion of the structure of space-time can-
not, in so far as it is truly applicable to the physical world, be regarded as a mere conceptual
tool to be used from time to time as convenience dictates. For there is only one physical world;
and if it has the postulated structure, that structure is – by hypothesis – there, once and for all.
(Stein 1967:193)13
The notion of ‘hypothesis’ that Stein uses here is importantly different than that used by
Newton. For Stein, the hypothesis of space should be viewed as a conditional: If our
empirical evidence for the motion of bodies is correct, then space has the very structure
that Newton proposes. And this account of ‘hypothesis’ in fact supports a ‘non-hypotheti-
cal’ reading of absolute space in the Newtonian sense. It is not the case that Newton has
proposed a form of space that is unsupported by the evidence or that is assumed without
any experimental justification; rather, as Stein puts it, what Newton did was employ ‘the
only philosophical procedure’ for defining space, namely, to adopt the conceptions of space
and of motion demanded by the evidence and thus, the conceptions ‘on which alone
dynamics can be based’ (Stein 1967:197; emphasis added).14

3. The ‘Empirical’ Status of Newton’s Metaphysics

Beyond granting important insight into how absolute space can be incorporated into the
experimental philosophy of the Principia, Stein’s reading also offers us a way of reconciling
Newton’s metaphysics – his views on God and God’s relationship to nature – with the
empiricism that characterizes his natural scientific work. Namely, Stein motivates and
encourages a thorough-going account of the empiricism we find in Newton’s work, one
that encompasses all aspects of his natural philosophy.
Stein forwards this interpretation at the end of his 1967 paper, contrasting it with one
according to which Newton’s theological (and specifically, neo-Platonist) commitments
are foundational to his investigation of nature. Although Stein finds the affinity between
Newton’s theological ideas and those of neo-Platonists such as Henry More ‘both valid
and interesting’, the assertion that ‘Newton’s doctrine of space, time, and motion, is
based in part on his theology’ is, for Stein, ‘a non sequitur – and for the attempt to under-
stand and evaluate that doctrine, a red herring’. He continues,
There is no serious reason to suppose that Newton, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity
on the basis of a critical analysis of texts, would have adopted a notion of space as the founda-
tion of his mechanics because that notion formed part of the theology of Henry More …. It is
surely more plausible that More’s theology was (in part) acceptable to Newton because its con-
ceptions agreed with those required by mechanics (as the conceptions of the philosophy and
theology of Descartes did not). That is what Newton himself tells us, in effect; the celebrated
passage on God in the General Scholium to Book III of the Principia concludes: ‘And thus
much concerning God; to discourse of whole from the appearances of things, does certainly
belong to Natural Philosophy’. In the scholium on space and time, on the other hand, he tells
us that we ought not to base our philosophical concepts upon the authority of sacred texts,
since these speak the language of ordinary discourse, not of philosophy. (Stein 1967:197–8;
underscore added)
Notice that Stein offers a rather strong ‘bottom-up’ reading of Newton’s views on theol-
ogy, one that is thoroughly consistent with how he portrays Newton’s views on absolute
space. Much as Newton rejected Descartes’ account of motion based on empirical evi-
dence regarding the motion of bodies, so too, Newton bases his choice of theology on
the evidence gathered from nature and from his critical analysis of texts. In other words,
Stein’s Newton begins with a careful and critical investigation of nature and chooses a

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530 Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics

form of space required for his mechanics; only later, after the mechanics has been estab-
lished, does Newton choose a theological doctrine, because his chosen theology must be
consistent with the system of motions and forces presented in the Principia.
In his more recent account of Newton’s metaphysics, Stein develops this portrait
of the connection between Newton’s theology and physics. Relying on ‘the fact
that [Newton’s] chief published discussions of the metaphysics of nature, and of his
views concerning God in relation to nature, occur at the end of his two great treatises’
[namely, in the General Scholium to the Principia and in Query 31 of the Opticks], Stein
suggests that Newton viewed metaphysics as Aristotle, according to whom metaphysics,
or first philosophy, comes after physics, insofar as metaphysical truths are ‘to be known
only after the special sciences themselves have been established’ (Stein 2002:261). He uses
this suggestion to challenge the view set forth by McGuire (and supported by others)
that ‘the basic concepts of Newton’s natural philosophy can be ultimately clarified
only in terms of the theological framework which guided so much of his thought’
(McGuire 1968:154). Stein argues to the contrary, and claims specifically that, ‘in light of
his explicit statements’, ‘Newton’s doctrine about space and time … did not teach that
space and time per se, or their attributes, depend upon the nature of God’ (2002:297,
Note 17).

4. Janiak’s Challenge: Revisiting God’s Place in Newton’s Physics

In the recent literature, Andrew Janiak (2008) has offered a worthy challenge to Stein’s
thoroughly empirical portrait of Newton, a portrait according to which space and time
are to be understood independently from Newton’s views on the nature of God. Accord-
ing to Janiak, a reconsideration of De Gravitatione leads us to a different understanding of
the role God plays in Newton’s account of space. In brief, he argues that Newton’s views
on God, and God’s relationship to space and nature, are components of a ‘divine meta-
physics’, a fixed and unrevisable metaphysics that serves as a ‘basic framework for all of
Newton’s thinking about the physical world’ and that is not, as Stein suggests, derived
from his empirical investigations of nature or of texts.15
To support his case, Janiak considers the fundamental features Newton attaches to
space in De Gravitatione and then later in the Principia. As we saw above, Newton claims
in De Gravitatione that space is ‘motionless’ and ‘truly distinct from bodies’ (2004:20). But
he also claims that space ‘has its own manner of existing which is proper to it and which
fits neither substances nor accidents’ (Newton 2004:21). Specifically, space is not a sub-
stance ‘because it is not absolute in itself, but is as it were an emanative effect of God and
an affection of every kind of being’ (Newton 2004:21). Even without a detailed discus-
sion of ‘emanation’ and ‘affection’, we notice here that Newton is claiming that space is
not absolute precisely because its existence (somehow) depends on God’s existence.16
How are we to reconcile this remark with the absolute space of the Principia, a space that
is absolute precisely because it is, ‘of its own nature without reference to anything exter-
nal’, always ‘homogenous and immovable’ (Newton 1999:410)?
To reconcile the apparently contradictory characterizations of space in De Gravitatione
and the Principia, Janiak urges us to take seriously the different yet complementary
projects Newton adopts in these two works. As he puts it, the project of De Gravitatione
is one of ontology: Newton explicates the features that are necessarily attached to the
existence of space, i.e., of extension considered distinct from bodies. The project in the
Principia, on the other hand, is to clarify the relationship between absolute and relative
spaces and offer a definition of space that provides a way of clearly defining absolute

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motion. We thus find that the apparent contradiction cited above actually reveals two
complementary senses of ‘absolute’ at play in Newton’s work, namely,
In De Gravitatione, Newton invokes strong sense of absolutism according to which space is
not absolute insofar as its existence depends on God’s existence, i.e., space does not exist indepen-
dently of everything; and on the other hand,

In the Principia, Newton invokes weak sense of absolutism according to which space is absolute
insofar as its existence does not depend on the existence of objects or their relations, i.e., space does exist
independently of those bodies that populate the natural ontology. (cf. Janiak 2008:150–5)
In light of this distinction, the question now is this: On what basis does Newton establish
that space is ‘not absolute in itself’ in De Gravitatione? And in general, on what basis does
Newton establish the fundamental ontological features of space, and specifically, its status
as an ‘emanative effect of God’ and ‘an affection of every being as a being’? Stein, of
course, stresses that both the space of De Gravitatione and the space of the Principia are
granted those very features that allow Newton to treat the motions and forces we witness
in nature, and yet, in saying that the existence of space (somehow) depends on God’s
existence, Newton is attributing to space a feature that is not required for his treatment
of motions and forces.
And this is precisely Janiak’s point: The De Gravitatione account of space reveals that
Newton had commitments that stretched beyond what was required for his system of
mechanics. Specifically, Janiak urges a reading according to which the treatment of space
in De Gravitatione reveals that Newton embraced ‘metaphysical’ commitments that are
independent of his treatment of natural motions and forces. These commitments, which
include space’s dependence on God’s existence, are taken by Janiak to be a part of New-
ton’s ‘divine metaphysics’ – a metaphysics that concerns God’s relationship to nature and
that serves as a fixed and fundamental framework in which Newton’s natural science is
practiced. There is also another sense of metaphysics at play in Newton’s work, and this
is the metaphysics emphasized by Stein: A ‘mundane metaphysics’ that concerns the natu-
ral ontology of forces, causes, and motion. Janiak nicely summarizes his bifurcation of
Newton’s metaphysics as follows:
If we place Newton’s understanding of God at the center of his metaphysical system we obtain
a picture of a nuanced and complex conception of metaphysics in relation to physical theory. In
the broadest terms this conception can be described as follows: the metaphysical aspects of natu-
ral philosophy are bifurcated into what we might call divine and mundane metaphysics. Divine
metaphysics, as we have seen, represents a fundamental conception of God’s nature and relation to the nat-
ural world that is not subject to revision; hence it might be understood to represent a basic framework
for all of Newton’s thinking about the physical world, one that is never questioned as he progresses through
numerous empirical and mathematical investigations. Mundane metaphysics occurs within the basic
framework centered on the divine; it is subject to precisely the sorts of revision and refinement
that characterize all of Newton’s other work. Mundane metaphysics concerns metaphysical issues not
directly focused on the divine: the nature of motion, the existence of various types of forces in nature, the
types of causation involved in natural change, and so on. (2008:44–45; emphasis added)
As stressed in the above passage, it is not merely the subject matter of Newton’s two
branches of metaphysics that differ; because ‘mundane metaphysics’ is the metaphysics of
the natural ontology and is intimately linked with our empirical investigations into natural
motions and forces, it is subject to ‘revision and refinement’ as the claims of ‘divine meta-
physics’ are not. In this sense, then, as Janiak explicitly states, he accepts Stein’s reading
of Newton’s ‘mundane metaphysics’. His contribution is to enhance Stein’s empirical

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view of Newton with a distinctive form of metaphysics such that, on Janiak’s reading,
Newton’s ‘research into nature occurs within a fundamental framework that is fixed inde-
pendently of any empirical findings we make’ (2008:45).

5. Conclusion: Newton in Context

Given the unrevisability that Janiak associates with Newton’s ‘divine metaphysics’, there
is an immediate worry that Janiak has closed the gap between Newton and Descartes that
was so central to Stein’s reading of Newton. For, if Newton’s ‘divine metaphysics’ serves
as a fixed framework in which his empirical research takes place, we seem to be brought
back to a system of mechanics strikingly similar to that of Descartes’ Principles of Philoso-
phy, where the treatment of bodies and motions in Part Two is grounded upon the a pri-
ori and fixed metaphysical truths concerning God’s existence and God’s creation of
bodies, which are presented in Part One. According to Janiak, such a similarity is merely
apparent. Though the claims of Newton’s ‘divine metaphysics’ are as unrevisable as Des-
cartes’ foundational first principles, they do not have the same impact on our empirical
research that Descartes assigns to his metaphysical truths. As Janiak puts it,
God’s relation to the ‘system of the world’ forms a framework within which physical research
takes place, but the elements of that relation play no role in guiding that research. Newton
obviously takes God to have created the universe and to have decreed its laws, but these facts
do not steer our research. (2008:49)
It is precisely at this juncture where the value of the Stein-Janiak debate comes into the
foreground. For notice that although the details and emphases of their interpretations dif-
fer, they do agree on how we should engage with Newton’s philosophy. It is not enough
for us to claim that Newton was a critic of Descartes and thus conclude that he rejected
‘rationalism’ in favor of ‘empiricism’ – at least not without a thorough, context-sensitive
analysis of these terms. As emphasized by Stein and by Janiak, Newton was grappling
with the complicated interplay of the ‘physical’ and ‘metaphysical’ and the ‘empirical’ and
‘rational’ as he engaged with the natural motions and forces of the Principia as well as
with the relationship between God and nature. And as their respective treatments of
Newton’s attitude toward natural science and metaphysics emphasize, we do a disservice
to Newton if we rely on the standard dichotomies of ‘empiricism versus rationalism’ and
‘physical versus metaphysical’ – and moreover, if we rely on our contemporary usage of
these terms – in our attempts to build a framework for understanding the novelty of
Newton’s scientific and philosophical work. Newton himself – his practice and his philo-
sophical pronouncements – should serve as our guide through this complicated terrain.

Short Biography
Mary Domski’s research centers on the interplay of philosophy and the mathematical and
natural sciences in the early modern period, and especially in the work of Descartes,
Newton, Locke, and Kant. Her papers on these figures have appeared (or will soon
appear) in Locke Studies, Perspectives on Science, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays, and The Oxford Handbook of British
Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. She is also a co-editor, with Michael Dickson, of
Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of
Science (Open Court, forthcoming), a volume of essays that honors Michael Friedman’s
contributions to the history and philosophy of science. Before taking her current post at

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 Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics 533

the University of New Mexico, she taught philosophy at Cal State, Fresno. She holds a
BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in the
History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Leeds, and a PhD in the His-
tory and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University.

Notes
* Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, MSC 03 2140, Albuquerque, NM
87131. Email: mdomski@unm.edu

1
I refer to this reading of the Principia’s success as ‘positivist’ because it is often associated with the work of ‘posi-
tivist’ historians of science, especially Ernst Mach. See DiSalle (2006, Chapter 1) and Janiak (2008, Chapter 1) for
recent treatments of the influence of this reading on our current understanding of Newton’s method and attitude
toward metaphysics.
2
The list of such commentators is a long one. Among those on the list who take a more philosophical approach
to Newton’s natural philosophy are Ernan McMullin (1985) and Alan Shapiro (2004).
3
Newton presents the absolutes in the Scholium appended to the Definitions section.
4
As Newton puts it, ‘Thus, whole and absolute motions can be determined only by means of unmoving places,
and therefore in what has preceded I have referred such motions to unmoving places and relative motions to mova-
ble places. Moreover, the only places that are unmoving are those that all keep given positions in relation to one
another from infinity to infinity and therefore always remain immovable and constitute the space that I call immov-
able’ (1999:412).
5
It is important to note that Newton himself may not have taken the existence of absolute space to be problem-
atic. As Newton claims that space (like time, place, and motion) is ‘very familiar to everyone’ (1999:408), he may
be taking the existence of space as a given – as a claim that would be unquestioned by his readers and that would
not require justification. Nonetheless, even if Newton himself takes the existence of space for granted, my goal
above is to emphasize that this existence is apparently incompatible with Newton’s pronouncements regarding
hypotheses. I thank an anonymous reviewer for urging me to consider this point more carefully.
6
The charge that absolute space is in fact hypothetical was famously forwarded by Berkeley in his De Motu (1721).
To be clear, one could accept Berkeley’s ‘hypothetical’ reading of Newton’s method and still accept the results of
the Principia, although with the qualification that Newton has not offered a (metaphysically) true account of nature
but merely a mathematical theory that ‘saves the phenomena’, i.e., a theory that allows for accurate predictions of
observed events without making claims about the natural ontology. Such a reading of the Principia is apparently
adopted later by Leibniz. See especially Leibniz’s March 1692 ⁄ 3 letter written to Newton (2004:106–7) as well as
his ‘Specimen of Dynamics’ and Letters Three and Four of his famous correspondence with Samuel Clarke.
7
The more complete title of the manuscript is ‘De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum’ (‘On the Gravity and
Equilibrium of Fluids’). Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall made available the Latin text and an English translation
in 1962 in their edited Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Newton 1962). I rely on the new English transla-
tion of De Gravitatione offered by Christian Johnson, with the assistance of Andrew Janiak, which is available on
pages 12 to 39 of Newton (2004). There has been significant disagreement about when Newton composed the text
(see Janiak’s Introduction to Newton 2004, xviii, Note 14). Most recently Mordechai Feingold (2004:25–6) has
suggested that the manuscript was written in stages, with an original date of composition ca. 1671.
8
The first few pages of De Gravitatione serve as an introduction to the ‘science of the weight and equilibrium of
fluids and solids in fluids’. The critique of Descartes immediately follows.
9
In De Gravitatione, Newton summarizes Descartes’ account of relative motion and then offers three arguments
that reveal the contradictions inherent in Descartes’ account of motion and eight arguments that reveal the ‘absurd
consequences’ that follow from Descartes’ doctrines. The argument I summarize below, and which is cited by Stein,
is the final argument among these latter eight. See Newton (2004:14–21) for Newton’s summary and his 11 argu-
ments.
10
I will return to some of the additional features that Newton attributes to space below in Section 4, when I treat
Janiak’s reading of De Gravitatione.
11
See, for instance, the unsent draft of a March 1713 letter Newton intended for Roger Cotes (Newton
2004:119–20).
12
To be clear, Stein admits that even Newton’s account of ‘motion’ is not simply the motion of common sense
experience, that is, Newton is not simply claiming that his senses reveal there are true motions in nature. Rather,
Newton bases his account of motion on the evidence gathered by his predecessors in natural philosophy and
dynamics, in particular (see Stein 1967:197).
13
By claiming that space is not a ‘conceptual tool’, Stein distances his reading from a conventionalist account, as
offered by ‘positivists’ such as Mach, as well as from a neo-Kantian one, according to which the form of space is

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534 Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics

somehow prior to and constitutive of our experience of natural motions. This latter claim has recently been for-
warded by Michael Friedman (1983). DiSalle takes greater care to distinguish Stein’s ‘empirical’ view of absolute
space from the neo-Kantian view adopted by Friedman (see especially DiSalle 2006, Chapter 2).
14
More recently, Robert DiSalle (2002, 2006) has built off of Stein’s suggestions and developed an account that
addresses the specific sense in which Newton’s spatial framework is demanded by the empirically well-grounded
principles of dynamics. According to DiSalle’s trenchant analysis, space must be defined as Newton defines it if we
are to be able to measure the quantities that are foundational to his mechanics, including a body’s absolute centripetal
force and force of inertia.
15
Janiak challenges the reading of Stein as well as that of DiSalle (2002, 2006). As DiSalle’s account is highly
indebted to Stein’s (1967) paper, Janiak refers to the empiricist reading of Newton I attribute above to Stein as the
‘Stein-DiSalle interpretation’.
16
This is a point is reiterated later in the text when Newton draws on space’s dependence on God to establish its
eternity and immutability (Newton 2004:26).

Works Cited
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B. Cohen and G. E. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 33–56.
——. Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006.
Feingold, Mordechai. The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. New York and
Oxford: New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2004.
Friedman, Michael. Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1983.
Janiak, Andrew. Newton as Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
McGuire, J. E. ‘The Origin of Newton’s Doctrine of Essential Qualities.’ Centaurus 12 (1968): 233–60. Reprinted
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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
——. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. 3rd ed. Trans. I. B. Cohen and A. Whitman. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999.
——. Newton: Philosophical Writings. Edited by Andrew Janiak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Shapiro, Alan. ‘Newton’s ‘Experimental Philosophy.’ Early Science and Medicine 9 (2004): 185–217.
Stein, Howard. ‘Newtonian Space-Time.’ Texas Quarterly 10 (1967): 174–200.
——. ‘Newton’s Metaphysics.’ The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Eds I. B. Cohen and G. E. Smith. Cambridge:
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ª 2010 The Author Philosophy Compass 5/7 (2010): 525–534, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00307.x

Journal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd