The Fate of the Date: The Theology of Newton's <i>Principia</i> Revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
And I, spoke eternity, how shall I appear before mankind so that they will not hold me in terror? Thus spoke the lord: I will grant to mankind one moment to grasp you. And he created love. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs argues that Newton's De gravitatione was composed in the year 1684 or early 1684/5. Most scholars (myself included) have fixed its date of composition no later than 1673. Nevertheless, Dobbs's claim is persuasive if not decisive. I shall assume her dating in reassessing the theological outlook that underlies the structure of Newton's Principia . My concern is how Newton's religious and natural philosophical beliefs interrelate within the intellectual context of their making. If Dobbs is right, De gravitatione is part of a creative process (begun in the mid-1680s) that includes the composition of the Principia This is a significant point. Seen from this perspective, De gravitatione expresses the theological world view that animates the Principia itself. To elaborate this theme, I consider “Tempus et locus,” a manuscript which can be dated to the early 1690s. This important manuscript, I argued, is part of Newton's revisions for the first edition of the Principia (1687), begun directly after that treatise was published. In both De gravitatione and “Tempus et locus” he considers the infinity of spatial extension. In De gravitatione he articulates its geometrical structure in relation to the being and activity of God. Once these connections are evident, the preface to the first edition of the Principia (1687) – which outlines relations between mathematics and nature – throws significant light on the structure of Newton's masterwork.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".