This addresses the transformations of metaphysics as a discipline, the emergence of analytical mechanics, the diverging avenues of 18th-century Newtonianism, the body-mind problem, and philosophical principles of classification in the life sciences. An appendix contains a critical edition and first translation into English of Newton's scholia from David Gregory's Estate on the Propositions IV through IX Book III of his Principia.

Inhalt

Introduction; W. Lefèvre. Part One: Siesmic Vibrations in Metaphysics. 1. Disciplinary Transformations in the Age of Newton: The Case of Metaphysics; A. Gabbey. Part Two: Metaphysics and the Analytical Method. 2. Leibniz' Concept of Possible Worlds and the Analysis of Motion in Eighteenth-Century Physics; H. Hecht. 3. The Limits of Intelligibility: The Status of Physical Sciences in d'Alemberts Philosophy; F. De Gandt. 4. Order of Nature and Order of Science; H. Pulte. Part Three: Avenues of Newtonianism. 5. Samuel Clarke's Annotations in Jacques Rohault's Traité de Physique, and How They Contributed to Popularising Newton's Physics; V. Schüller. 6. Kant on Extension and Force: Critical Appropriations of Leibniz and Newton; E. Watkins. 7. Enlightenment Scotland's Philosophico-Chemical Physics; D. Wilson. Part Four: Can Matter Think? 8. Materialistic Theories of Mind and Brain; A. Thomson. 9. Kant's Second Paralogism in Context: The Critique of Pure Reason on Whether Matter Can Think; F. Wunderlich. Part Five: Metaphysics and Natural History. 10. Natural or Artificial Systems? The Eighteenth-Century Controversy on Classification of Animals and Plants and its Philosophical Contexts; W. Lefèvre. Appendices.