In 2016 2017 it would not be too much to expect a professor of philosophy at an American university to have a working knowledge of the evolution of science in the seventeenth century, particularly given that said evolution had a massive impact on the historical evolution of philosophy. One might excuse a freshly baked adjunct professor at a small liberal arts college, in his first year, if they were not au fait with the minutiae of the history of seventeenth-century astronomy but one would expect better from an established and acknowledged expert. Andrew Janiak is just that, an established and acknowledged expert. Creed C. Black Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Department at Duke University; according to Wikipedia, “Duke is consistently included among the best universities in the world by numerous university rankings”. Janiak is also an acknowledge expert on Isaac Newton and author of Isaac Newton in the Blackwell Great Minds series, so one is all the more dumbfounded to read the following in his article entitled Newton’s Leap on the Institute of Arts and Ideas: Philosophy for our times website:

But wait a minute: what could be more amazing than a young man discovering a fundamental force of nature while sitting under a tree? For starters, we have to recognize how foreign Newton’s ultimate idea about gravity was to philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians in the era of the Scientific Revolution. Newton provided an answer to a question that hadn’t even been asked yet. The problem with understanding the distant past is that we take our twenty-first century ideas and attitudes for granted. We think, for example, that the following is obvious: if the planets, like the Earth and Jupiter, regularly orbit the Sun, there must be something that causes them to follow their orbits. After all, if nothing caused them to orbit the Sun, they would fly off into deep space. [my emphasis]That seems so obvious to us, it’s hard to imagine that for centuries, the world’s leading thinkers, from Aristotle to Ptolemy and onwards, did not have that idea at all. Instead, for many generations, leading philosophers and mathematicians thought this: the circle is a perfect mathematical form, and the planetary orbits are circular, so they are ever-lasting aspects of the natural world. To them, the orbits were so perfect that nothing caused them to occur. They simply were. [my emphasis] The question of what caused the planetary orbits was not even on the table for astronomers in those days. [my emphasis] Down on earth, apples fell from trees throughout history just as they do now. But philosophers and mathematicians didn’t have any reason to think that whatever causes apples to fall to the ground might somehow be connected to anything going on in the heavens. After all, the heavens were thought to be the home of everlasting motions, of perfect circles, and were therefore nothing like the constantly changing, messy world down below, where worms eat through apples as they rot on the ground.

So what is wrong with this piece of #histSTM prose? Let us start with the second of my bold emphasised segments:

Instead, for many generations, leading philosophers and mathematicians thought this: the circle is a perfect mathematical form, and the planetary orbits are circular, so they are ever-lasting aspects of the natural world. To them, the orbits were so perfect that nothing caused them to occur. They simply were.

Whilst it is true that, following Empedocles, Western culture adopted the so-called Platonic axioms, which stated that celestial motion was uniform and circular, it is not true that they claimed this motion to be without cause. Aristotle, whose system became dominant for a time in the Middle Ages, hypothesised a system of nested crystalline spheres, which working from the outside to the centre drove each other through direct contact; a system that probably would not have worked due to friction. His outer-most sphere was moved by the unmoved mover, who remained unnamed, making the theory very attractive for Christian theologians in the High Middle Ages, who simple called the unmoved mover God. Interestingly the expression love makes the world go round originates in the Aristotelian belief that that driving force was love. In the Middle Ages we also find the beliefs that each of the heavenly bodies has a soul, which propels it through space or alternatively an angel pushing it around its orbit.

All of this is all well and good but of course doesn’t have any real relevance for Newton because by the time he came on the scene the Platonic axioms were well and truly dead, killed off by one Johannes Kepler. You might have heard of him? Kepler published the first two of his planetary laws, number one: that the planetary orbits are ellipses and that the sun is at one focus of the ellipse and number two: that a line connecting the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time periods in 1609, that’s thirty-three years before Newton was born. Somewhat later Cassini proved with the support of his teachers, Riccioli and Grimaldi, using a heliometer they had constructed in the San Petronio Basilica in Bologna, that the earth’s orbit around the sun or the sun’s around the earth, (the method couldn’t decide which) was definitely elliptical.

By the time Newton became interested in astronomy it was accepted by all that the planetary orbits were Keplerian ellipses and not circles. Kepler’s first and third laws were accepted almost immediately being based on observation and solid mathematics but law two remained contentious until about 1670, when it was newly derived by Nicholas Mercator. The dispute over alternatives to Kepler’s second law between Ismaël Boulliau and Seth Ward was almost certainly Newton’s introduction to Kepler’s theories.

Turning to the other two bold emphasised claims we have:

Newton provided an answer to a question that hadn’t even been asked yet. The problem with understanding the distant past is that we take our twenty-first century ideas and attitudes for granted. We think, for example, that the following is obvious: if the planets, like the Earth and Jupiter, regularly orbit the Sun, there must be something that causes them to follow their orbits. After all, if nothing caused them to orbit the Sun, they would fly off into deep space.

And:

The question of what caused the planetary orbits was not even on the table for astronomers in those days.

I’m afraid that Herr Kepler would disagree rather strongly with these claims. Not only had he asked this question he had also supplied a fairly ingenious and complex answer to it. Also quite famously his teacher Michael Maestlin rebuked him quite strongly for having done so. Kepler is usually credited with being the first to reject vitalist explanations of planetary motion by souls, spirits or angels (anima) and suggest instead a non-vitalist force (vir). His theory, based on the magnetic theories of Gilbert, was some sort of magnetic attraction emanating from the sun that weakened the further out it got. Kepler’s work started a debate that wound its way through the seventeenth century.

Ismaël Boulliau, a Keplerian, in his Astronomia philolaica from 1645 discussed Kepler’s theory of planetary force, which he rejected but added that if it did exist it would be an inverse-square law in analogy to Kepler’s law of the propagation of light. Newton was well aware of Boulliau’s suggestion of an inverse-square law. In 1666 Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, a disciple of Galileo, published his Theoricae Mediceorum planetarum ex causis physicis deductae in which he suggested that planetary motion was the result of three forces.

Famously in 1684 in a London coffee house Christopher Wren posed the question to Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, if the force driving the planets was an inverse-square force would the orbits be Keplerian ellipses, offering a book token as prize to the first one to solve the problem. This, as is well known, led to Halley asking Newton who answered in the positive and wrote his Principia to prove it; in the Principia Newton shows that he is fully aware of both Kepler’s and Borelli’s work on the subject. What Newton deliberately left out of the Principia is that in an earlier exchange it had in fact been Hooke who first posited a universal force of gravity.

As this all too brief survey of the history shows, far from Newton providing an answer to a question that hadn’t been asked yet, he was, so to speak, a Johnny-come-lately to a debate that when he added his contribution was already eighty years old.

The Institute of Arts and Ideas advertises itself as follows:

So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

Personally I don’t see how having a leading philosopher of science propagating the lone genius myth by spouting crap about the history of science fulfils that aim.