Sir Isaac Newton's The Mathematical Principles Of Natural Philosophy

Reading Sir Isaac Newton’s book, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy Vol. 1”, felt like I was reading a history book despite it being a philosophical book. Given that it deals with explaining the natural phenomena through laws of mathematics, it somehow felt like I was peeking through a time portal and seeing how the world was when these concepts were new to them, waiting to be proven. It feels awkward to imagine the world not knowing what the concept of force was, or quantity and motion. Back in elementary, these concepts seemed to me like they were just part of our everyday life, like it’s just there because it’s there. But now that I think about it, they are ideas that had to be thought well beyond of what was accepted at

Its consists of: [1] Isaac’s definitions of quantity, motion, and forces, [2] his axioms or what came to be known as the three laws of motion, lastly [3] his propositions that explain the motion of celestial bodies. The third part somewhat serves as a means of providing examples in order to prove his points in the first two parts. But before I go into the three parts, I would to first talk about the author’s preface; as it gives a clearer picture to how he structured his

And he has done so in such a way that he has reached the point where mathematics has become philosophical. He refers to the natural phenomena as mechanics, which is said to be divided into two parts (as said by the ancients). Mechanics can either be rational or practical. Rational mechanics is defined to be the science of motion resulting from any kind of motion. It involves accurate proposal and demonstration. He then categorizes the forces involved into five parts, namely: gravity, levity, elastic forces, resistance of fluids, and attractive and impulsive forces. These forces are supposedly required for other phenomena to be demonstrated; and this was the basis for the propositions of the first two books. As for practical mechanics, it involves the manual arts by artificers. He further distinguishes two kinds of such which are imperfect and perfect. What I got from this is that Isaac is truly a mathematician; his personality that drives him to only believe on things which he can quantify, and nature itself is not an exemption. I can’t imagine myself now, nor during their time, to seek for philosophical truth using mathematics. I always thought that philosophy and math were to separate fields, but recently I learned