Isaac Newton: Influences from Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton’s Role in the Scientific Revolution

Robert Geib
There is little doubt that Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the Three Laws of Motion and Law of Universal Gravitation marked the climax of a revolutionary paradigm shift from ancient methodology to the modern scientific method. However, Newton did not work alone in a vacuum. He has, in fact, been attributed with the remark that if he was able to see "further" than others, it was only because he "stood on the shoulders of giants." These giants were the philosophers, astronomers, and mathematicians whose ideas were synthesized and expanded upon to culminate in Newton's own theories and Laws. An argument could then be made that without the aid of Francis Bacon's inductive methodology, Galileo Galilei's principle of inertia, Johannes Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, and Rene Descartes' analytic geometry, Newton would not have made such progressive discoveries in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

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Psychology and Philosophy