"Reading Newton, Reading Rule 3: How Gravity gets Universalized in the Prinicipia"

Dean's Lecture & Concert Series

A Lecturey by Mary Domski, University of New Mexico

Friday, April 22, 2022

7:00 p.m., Great Hall

Mary Domski will present a new and unexplored reading of Newton's Third Rule for the Study of Natural Philosophy, according to which the rule expresses two sufficient (but not necessary) conditions for establishing that a quality of bodies belongs to all bodies universally. She will also show how this reading illuminates the way that Newton uses empirical, “experimental” evidence to establish that gravity is a universal quality of bodies.

Professor Mary Domski is a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, where she currently holds appointments as Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean for Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Domski is a scholar of early modern philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science and mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The bulk of her research has focused on the interplay of mathematics, metaphysics, and scientific method in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Her book Newton’s Third Rule and the Experimental Argument for Universal Gravity (2022) recently appeared with Routledge and it is the basis for the lecture she will be delivering at St. John’s in April 2022.