SOURCE: "The Philosophical Significance of Newton's Science," in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, Autumn 1967, pp. 201-15.

In the following essay, Shapere explores the relationship of philosophy and science in Newton's thought, suggesting that Newton approached scientific study in a philosophical manner.

In a famous passage in the preface to the first edition of his Principia, Newton declared that:

I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this—from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.… I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature [besides those dealt with in this work] by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which...