Re: Principia

I'm glad you pointed this out, Daniel...in all my previous responses, I
failed to mention how much I enjoyed this part of Robbie's post.

I'd agree with Robbie that math and the sciences aren't studied as
humanities very much these days -- and they weren't studied that way in
the liberal arts institutions I've attended. That's regretful. I think
the only place you'd get to read Newton is in an institution like St.
John's or St. Thomas Aquinas -- even people in the sciences in state
schools would probably only read it thoroughly as a matter of historical
interest.

Jim

Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:

>I have actually read Principia, and it motivated me to read Newton's Bible
>commentary, by the way, he wrote more Bible commentary then science or math.
>
>Daniel
>
>robbie:
>
>I think all of this might even be tied to the earlier talk of the modern
>divide between the sciences and humanities. While I do still disagree, I
>think that I might be able to see how one might see things as you suggest
>they are if nurtured with and nurturing the divide, but I'm really not sure
>I can imagine at all a person on your side of things who has intensively
>studied math and science, treating them AS humanities (and as the obnoxious
>web article that started this mess made clear, some of the people most
>critical of what you've been talking about are math/science people, even
>those who DON'T treat them as humanities). I have countless examples
>jumping out in my head, but the biggest one -- perhaps because it so
>profound and perhaps because I am even now immersed in it -- is Isaac
>Newton's Principia Mathematica. It is certainly one of the most influential
>books ever written (I don't doubt on par with the Bible, I shit you not) and
>at the same time one of the most unread. It is very difficult -- John Locke
>reportedly went to Newton for help at understanding the central argument --
>and most people who learn about it do so through many degrees of separation.
>Regardless, in it Newton essentially invents modern physics, and much of
>modern science, as he develops a quite new and extraordinary and beautiful
>and fascinating way of looking at the world. There is a moment -- a
>staggering, breath-taking, for some almost tear-inducing moment -- when
>Newton demonstrates that the force that impels an apple off a tree and down
>to the ground is the very same that is required to keep the moon in orbit
>around the earth. Contrary to what most people believe or would expect,
>contrary to what you would think by opening most translations, Newton didn't
>really write this book in the symbols of mathematics. It is largely a
>mathematical work, surely, and there's lots of math in it (he might have
>largely invented the calculus for it), but it's written quite simply in the
>symbols of Latin, in an ordinary (well, dead, but otherwise ordinary)
>language. The book is not like the cold and sterile books that came after
>it and that interpret it and that expand upon it. It contains and
>encourages philosophy, perhaps to some extent even theology. It is a work
>that, however mathematical, is created firmly to sit amongst the humanities.
>
>I read this book very similarly in many important respects to how I read
>Homer. But in this book, the hand and mind of the author are not easily
>doubted. Otherwise, it seems, we wouldn't be able to make it work, we
>wouldn't have been able to use it to put men on the moon.
>
>It might not apply well or at all, perhaps it applies only by analogy, but
>studying a book like Newton's makes it very hard for me to doubt that the
>meaning of the author can be accessible to me.
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Received on Mon Dec 2 12:23:07 2002