Isaac Barrow on God, Geometry, and the Nature of Space Antoni Malet
Isaac Barrow on God, Geometry, and the Nature of Space Antoni Malet Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona INTRODUCTION Historians used to portray Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) as an obscure figure in Newton's background. He was a Janus-faced figure mainly of interest —one of his biographers once famously said— because he was “a link between the old and the new philosophy,” the old being his and the new Newton's.1 This theme became commonplace in dealing with Barrow. For decades, and with the exception of Barrow’s role in the philosophical articulation of the idea of absolute time, Barrow’s contributions were found to be hopelessly out of tune with contemporary modern intellectual tendencies. Consequently, attempts to trace any kind of substantial influence from Barrow on Newton always found an unsympathetic reception.2 The most important attempt to 1 P.H. Osmond, Isaac Barrow, His Life and Times (London: Soc. for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1944), p. 1. 2 Barrow’s articulation of the notion of absolute time is particularly well analyzed in E.A. Burtt’s old but still useful The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989, first ed. 1924), p. 150-61. On Barrow’s notion of space, see E. Grant, Much ado about nothing. Theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 236-238. See also E.W. Strong, 'Barrow and Newton', Journal of the History of Philosophy (1970), 8, 155-72; A. R. Hall, Henry More.
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