This volume of original papers by a leading team of international scholars explores Isaac Newton's relation to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists. It includes studies of Newton's experimental methods in optics and their roots in Bacon and Boyle; Locke's and Hume's responses to Newton on the nature of matter, time, the structure of the sciences, and the limits of human inquiry. In addition it explores the use of Newtonian ideas in 18th-century pedagogy and the life sciences. Finally, it breaks new ground in analyzing the method of evidential reasoning heralded by the Principia, its nature, strength, and development in the subsequent three centuries of gravitational research. The volume will be of interest to historians of science and philosophy and philosophers interested in the nature of empiricism.

IntroductionI. The Roots of Newton's Experimental Method1. Stephen Gaukroger (Aberdeen & Sydney): "Empiricism as a Development of Experimental Natural Philosophy"2. Dana Jalobeanu (Bucharest): "Constructing Natural Historical Facts: Baconian Methodology in Newton's First Paper on Light and Colors"3. Philippe Hamou (Université de Lille III): "Colorific Properties, Visual Sensation and Method in Newton's Opticks"II. Newton and "Empiricist" Philosophers4.Lisa Downing (Ohio State): "Locke's Metaphysics and Newtonian Metaphysics"5. Geoff Gorham & Ed Slowik. "Locke and Newton on Space and Time and their Sensible Measures"6. Yoram Hazony (Shalem Institute): "Hume's Attack on Newton: A Reappraisal"7. Tamas Demeter (Max Planck Institute): "Enlarging the Bounds of Moral Philosophy: Newton's Method and Hume's Science of Man"III. Newtonian Method in 18th and 18th-Century Science8. Tammy Nyden (Grinnel College): "Living Force at Leiden: De Volder, 's Gravesande and the Reception of Newtonianism"9. Charles Wolfe (Sydney): "On the role of Newtonian analogies in eighteenth-century life science: Vitalism and provisionally inexplicable explicative devices"10. George Smith (Tufts): "Closing the Loop: Testing Newtonian Gravity, Then and Now"