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Newton and the origin of civilization

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0021828615579359

1753-8556

Marco Panza,

Classical Philosophy and Thought

When he died, on 20 March 1727, Newton was a rich man. His main biographer, Richard S. Westfall (Never at Rest, A biography of Isaac Newton , Cambridge, 1980, pp. 870-3) tells us how his death stirred up the appetites of the heirs. Among other things, they especially coveted the large amount of manuscripts whose publication or sale, they imagined, could bring a lot of money. Catherine Barton, Newton's niece, who had cared for him in his last years, and her husband John Conduit (a member of the Parliament and Newton's successor as the Master of the Mint), would have liked to keep the papers in their own hands, but had to negotiate with other parties. It was decided that the manuscripts would be examined by a member of the Royal Society, who would select those suitable for publication. These would be purchased for the common advantage. Thomas Pellet was designed for this task. He took 3 days and finally decided that the only autograph suitable for publication was a treatise that Newton himself had worked on for this purpose in his very last years (at least since 1725 when an abridged edition of an early version had been published in French without Newton's permission), namely, the Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended .Newton had been long exploring this subject as a direct consequence of his interest in prophecies and idolatry, especially in the interpretation of the Apocalypse of John and the Book of Daniel . The later mentions four kingdoms: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. How to square this with the extensive evidence for the existence of other ancient large kingdoms like Egypt and Assyria? This was the main question motivating Newton's researches on this matter. His answer, advanced in the Chronology , consists in a significant shortening of the ancient post-diluvian history, together with a description of the origins of empires in which both Egypt and Assyria did not form unitary kingdoms until quite late.This is the subject of Buchwald's and Feingold's book, the first authoritative study on this subject since Frank E. Manuel's Isaac Newton, Historian (Harvard, 1963), and much more detailed and comprehensive due to the possibility of exploiting much more knowledge of manuscript sources. Buchwald and Feingold examine the content of Newton's treatise and the vivid polemical reactions that followed (and even preceded) its publication. They provide a detailed account (largely based on manuscript sources) of how Newton came to his conclusions - changing not only his mind in many details but also the very purpose of his enterprise - by considering a triple context: the variety of Newton's scientific interests during his life and the way they transformed into each other; chronological and historical studies made by other early modern scholars, especially in Britain, and Newton's methodological attitude towards different forms of evidence.This last motive, brilliantly summarized in Chapter 13, makes the book an important contribution not only to the history of early modern science but also to philosophical reflection on the nature and role of evidence in rational argumentation and to the way this role has changed over time. A splendid example of this is the discussion, in Chapter 2, of the way Newton treated, especially (but not only) in his researches on light and colour, imprecise and conflicting experimental data in order to use all of them to support (supposedly in a strong way) his conclusions. …