Renaissance and Revolution is a collection of fifteen essays that open up new perspectives on some of the problems presently seen to be associated with the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The topics treated include the dissemination of Greek science, medical empiricism, natural history, the relations of scholars and craftsmen in various walks of life from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the so-called "mechanical philosophy" in France and England, the work of Isaac Newton, and the difficulties encountered by proponents of Newtonianism in Italy in the...

Henry More (1614-87) was the greatest English metaphysical theologian and the most perplexing; he was also perhaps the most distinguished member of the group of divines known as the Cambridge Platonists. An admirer of Galileo, Descartes and Boyle, he rejected their detailed applications of mechanical philosophy to the explanation of natural phenomena. He was an experimenter, yet also a cabalist, and one of the few writers whom Newton acknowledged as having influenced his ideas. First published in 1990, this thorough and accessible biography is the first book-length treatment of this...

This fifth volume presents the surviving correspondence from the period of almost four years which is, from a bibliographical point of view, the most important time in Newton's life: with Roger Cotes, Newton revised his Philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathematics and saw it through the press. Considered as a single group of letters, the Newton-Cotes correspondence is the largest and most important section of Newton's scientific correspondence that we have. Nowhere else can one witness Newton in a detailed debate about scientific argument and scientific conclusions a debate from which he did...

As Newton had by now entered his eighth decade, it can be no surprise that the correspondence in this sixth volume shows a marked decline in his activity and intellectual vigour. While the number of extant letters written by him on other that Mint business is relatively small, the majority of them are devoted to his controversy with Leibniz - Newton's dominant interest during this period. The correspondence of Newton shades gradually into the correspondence of the Newtonians. Thus notably Keill, De Moivre, Chamberlayne, Brook Taylor, the Abbe Conti and Des Maizeaux interested themselves in...

In this seventh and final volume the letters are divided into two quite distinct groups. The first group begins with the remaining letters of the main chronological sequence written during the closing years of Newton's life, and then proceeds to those few letters to which there is no assignable date with any certainty. The second group of letters, placed in Appendix I, contains corrections and additions to the letters printed in the earlier volumes of the Correspondence. A genealogical table is added to Appendix II to help the reader through the intricacies of Newton's family tree. Even after...