The Conflict Between Newton’s Analysis of Configurations and Hegel’s Conceptual Analysis

Abstract

Newton’s scientific methodology has seemed, to most of his twentieth-century expositors, to be something of a mystery. I suspect that this is because historians and philosophers of science have taken the hypothetico-deductive method, in one form or another, as their normative and descriptive standard. This assumption has led some to declare Newton methodologically confused or at least naive, although most contemporary Newtonian scholarship seems committed to saving Newton as a hypothetico-deductivist. All of this seems rather remarkable, given that Newton himself makes it perfectly clear that his method is the ancient and venerated mathematical method of analysis and synthesis. Nowhere is this more evident than in his longish methodological statement near the end of the Opticks, where he writes: