• DOI:10.1086/392885
• Corpus ID: 144781947

Commentary on Ernan McMullin, "The Impact of Newton's Principia on the Philosophy of Science"

@article{Voelkel2001CommentaryOE,
  title={Commentary on Ernan McMullin, "The Impact of Newton's Principia on the Philosophy of Science"},
  author={James R. Voelkel},
  journal={Philosophy of Science},
  year={2001},
  volume={68},
  pages={319 - 326}
}

• James R. Voelkel
• Published 1 September 2001
• Physics
• Philosophy of Science

I have been asked to comment on Ernan McMullin's paper in my capacity as an historian, and more specifically as specialist on Johannes Kepler. I will thus restrict myself to commenting on its characterization of Kepler's philosophy and methodology, which I think will in no way undermine his broader analysis of Newton's philosophy of science and of the impact of that philosophy on eighteenth-century thinkers. My task is made somewhat unmanageable by my skepticism that a fully coherent and consistent philosophy of science can be extracted from Kepler's oeuvre. His reasoning was at times, such as in the Harmonices mundi (1619), rigorous and formal. At other times, as in the Astronomia nova (1609), it had a frankly seat-of-the-pants character. To make the situation muddier, historical contingencies served to distort some of Kepler's most important statements of his own philosophical principles. His most succinct account of philosophy of science, the "Apologia pro Tychone contra Ursum," was commissioned by Tycho Brahe, and was thus constrained to defending a common locus of their beliefs. (Jardine 1984) In my own work, I have argued that the very existence of the Astronomia nova and its curious nature must be understood in the context of Kepler's struggle with Tycho's heirs over the right to publish anything at all based on the Dane's observations. (Voelkel 1999, 2001) This conflict and its effect on Kepler's exposition in the Astronomia nova is apposite in discussing his philosophy of science, for I argue that in order to evade hostile editorial censorship and to forestall the censure of the contemporary astronomical