Isaac Newton 1642 – 1727
Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) was an English philosopher of the Modern era, associated with Early Modern Philosophy and Empiricism.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation for classical mechanics and helped to inaugurate modern science. His three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation unified terrestrial and celestial physics in a single mathematical framework. He co-developed the calculus with Leibniz and made foundational contributions to optics. The General Scholium appended to the Principia and his letters to Bentley contain his philosophical reflections on God, absolute space and time, and the limits of mechanical explanation. He served as Master of the Royal Mint and as President of the Royal Society.
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 (Old Style) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, three months after the death of his father, a yeoman farmer of the same name. Raised in uneasy circumstances after his mother's remarriage, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661 as a subsizar and stayed for the next thirty-five years. The plague years of 1665-1666, spent back at Woolsthorpe, were his anni mirabiles, in which he laid the foundations of the calculus, of his theory of colors, and of universal gravitation.
He succeeded Isaac Barrow in the Lucasian chair of mathematics in 1669 and remained at Cambridge until 1696, when he moved to London as Warden and then Master of the Royal Mint. The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) presented the laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, and the system of the world; the Opticks (1704) gathered his work on the spectrum, refraction, and the theory of light. He served as President of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death and was knighted in 1705.
Newton's mathematical natural philosophy provided the unifying framework that organized physical inquiry from his own century to Einstein's, and it shaped the philosophical self-understanding of the Enlightenment as decisively as any single thinker. He devoted equally vast energies to alchemy and to anti-Trinitarian biblical chronology, neither of which he published. He died at Kensington in March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Key facts
- Nationality
- English
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Early Modern Philosophy, Empiricism
Selected quotes
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“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants . -
Attributed to Isaac Newton:
“I do not feign hypotheses.”
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“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.”
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas -
“Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse , Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120, as quoted in Socinianism And Arminianism : Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, And Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2005) by Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls, p. 273. | Variant: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplic -
Attributed to Isaac Newton:
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
Isaac Newton by topic
Frequently asked about Isaac Newton
- When did Isaac Newton live?
- Isaac Newton was born in 1642 and died in 1727.
- Where was Isaac Newton from?
- Isaac Newton was an English philosopher of the Modern era.
- What philosophical movements is Isaac Newton associated with?
- Isaac Newton was associated with Early Modern Philosophy and Empiricism.
- What was Isaac Newton known for?
- Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation for classical mechanics and helped to inaugurate modern science.
- How many quotes are attributed to Isaac Newton?
- There are 14 attributed quotations from Isaac Newton in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.
Quotes that are not actually from Isaac Newton
These lines are widely circulated as Isaac Newton, but they do not appear in Isaac Newton's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Actually a statement by American advertising executive and author Howard W. Newton (1903–1951); attributions to Isaac are relatively recent, those to Howard date at least to Sylva Vol. 1-3 (1945), p. 57 , where it is cited to an earlier publication in Redbook . | Variant: Tact is the art of making a
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“Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. | This became widely attributed to Isaac Newton after Dominique Pire ascribed it to "the words of Newton" in his Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1958. Pire refers not to Isaac, but to Joseph Fort Newton , who is widely reported to have said "People are lon
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“If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything.”
This first appears in the Isaac Newton : A Biography (1934), citing unpublished papers by John Conduitt reporting an anecdote of an occasion where Conduitt asked Newton where he obtained the tools to make his reflecting telescope. Newton is said to have laughed and replied, "If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me I had never made anything of it." (Disputed.)
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“Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.”
As quoted in Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist, and Teacher (1975) by John Hudson Tiner. "Atheism is so senseless" is a statement Newton made indeed in "A short Schem of the true Religion", but no source for the rest of this statement has been located prior to 1975. Part of this statement might originate as a summation of observations by Colin Maclaurin in his An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1750), Book III, Ch. 5 : "On the quantity of watter and density of the sun and planets" : "… the earth … those planets which are nearer the sun are found to be more dense, by which they are enabled to bear the greater heat of the sun. This is the result of our most subtle… (Disputed.)