Philip Catton — philip.catton@canterbury.ac.

nz
University of Canterbury Aotearoa/New Zealand

Diagrammatic reasoning,
exemplary practice, public experience:
Newton vs Leibniz
Abstract:
For the diagrammatic mode of reasoning in the classical mathematics of Euclid, think analogue, and for the
symbolically styled, algebraic mode of reasoning (that surged from the seventeenth century onward), think digital.
Newton in such thinking seems like an inventor of an mp3 system, who thereafter champions vinyl. For he invented
the calculus and then resolutely cleaved to diagrammatic reasoning, even fiercely arguing its superiority.
Present day presumption quite interferes with properly understanding why. We list Newton along with Leibniz and
many other seventeenth century figures beginning with Viète and Descartes as players in the early ‘history of
mathematical analysis’. But there is no contrasting rubric, ‘history of mathematical synthesis’, also to capture Newton
under. We lack such a rubric, even though synthesis is quite naturally the higher prize in diagrammatically reasoned
mathematics. Quite evidently we preconceive that progress should fate mathematical synthesis to be superceded, like
vinyl.
Had such a fate unfolded in Newton’s day, had mathematics forthwith essentially become symbolic calculation, then
Newton would not have triumphed in natural philosophy. Neither ‘analysis’ nor ‘synthesis’ meant in classical
mathematics anything concerning symbolic calculation. Both terms concerned modes of reasoning with, and within,
the diagram. Newton extended the reach of both analysis and synthesis in diagrammatic connection, by drawing out
diagrammatically what is momentary about motion. This was not to apply the calculus, either obscurely or
otherwise. To what Newton accomplished in his Principia the whole contemporary notion of “application” of
analytical mathematics is not apt. Newton dealt diagrammatically to nature by dealing in the natural, with his hands.
A harmonious, measured, comprehension of nature resulted, that insofar is mathematical. Analysis became in
Newton’s hands deduction of a cause from diagrammatically represented phenomena. Synthesis became deduction
of the phenomena from the cause. Mathematical demonstration of the diagrammatic kind inseparably represented
experimental demonstration. The diagram resides in a public kind of experience. Experiments reside in public
experience. To diagram is practical and to experiment is practical. These practices are beholden to ideals. An
adept, such as Newton, achieves being an example for others. Those who are not similarly adept are no good
examples for others. The mathematical principles of natural philosophy possessed empirical traction from a public
kind of experience. Newton became measurer extraordinaire by both extending classical mathematics yet remaining
within its fold. Preference for classical mathematics was essential to his prowess as physicist, to his way of having
achieved being an example for others.
Leibniz was far different. Analysis in the new guise of his (and Newton’s) symbolically styled calculus Leibniz thought
about not as a measurer but as a logician. Logic is symbolically styled study of the analytic function of reason. Prior
to the seventeenth century, admirers of mathematics and admirers of logic fell mostly into philosophically quite
separate camps. The seventeenth century surge of symbolically styled mathematical analysis began to change this.
Leibniz himself possessed an outright ambition to unite the two camps. Adventurous in new ways in his thinking
about logic, Leibniz also fully expected to comprehend mathematics in terms of what logic can do. Leibniz never
overlooked that reason has not only the analytic function (that logic studies), but also has a synthetic function as well.
However, in Leibniz’s view, mathematics in no way itself depends upon the synthetic function of reason.
Peculiar it is not that Newton opposed this conception. On the contrary, Newton’s reasons for opposing this
conception are profound. Leibniz had followed Descartes toward a conception of experience as private, experience
as but a state of an individual, not as a mode of an individual’s connecting to outer things that are public or shared.
The monads that Leibniz fancies are the ultimate substances in fact are experientially ‘windowless’, Leibniz feels
himself logically driven to opine: experience is, for each, utterly private to itself. The space and time without which
Newton could not mathematically demonstrate things with his hands, Leibniz opines are but phenomenal — well-
founded, but only well-founded, within an ultimate monadic reality that is neither spaced nor (universally) timed.
Leibniz proposes that logic precedes space and time, so that logic conditions significantly more fully than space and
time do what is real. Logic carries us to metaphysical conclusions according to which public space and public time
are not real.
Such philosophical romance had all the currency of Cartesianism and new love of the analytical. To use terminology
that Kant would soon introduce stemming from his own considerable reflections about Leibniz and Newton, for
Leibniz the true metaphysics shuts down whether any truth, mathematical or otherwise, is synthetic. All truth,
mathematical and otherwise, is analytic (in Kant’s sense), in Leibniz’s view. My talk studies the reasons why Newton
went to mighty lengths to slap Leibniz down. How much Newton knew of Leibniz’s metaphysics we can only
surmise. Yet by considering the classical diagrammatic mode of reasoning in mathematics and Newton’s extension of
it, I reveal what of his own ways forward Newton defended, and why. Newton’s preciousness about priority was
passionate. His passion is easily understood to concern what is exemplary, and to rail against what is not.
 When Isaac Newton (1642–1727) reasons out for us the mathematical principles of

natural philosophy, he does so with diagrams. In his Principia, Newton spurns symbolically-

styled algebraic calculation. Why? Towards making sense of Newton, I will treat Newton’s

contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) as foil. Leibniz emphasised the

need to get symbolic language right. Leibniz’s aptitude for choice of especially worthy

symbolism magnified his influence with respect to the calculus in many ways well beyond

Newton’s. Relatedly, Leibniz estimated, wholly presciently, in effect that science would pull

humankind into a computer age.

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 A physical implementation of Leibniz’s design for his Stepped Reckoner

The fact that computation so significantly defines our own intellectual circumstance leads us

to think about mathematics in ways that are not Newton’s ways. Our present-day

circumstance sets up thoroughgoing obstacles to our understanding Newton. Precisely

because Leibniz anticipated our condition, to treat Leibniz as foil can teach us how to

establish for ourselves needed critical distance as it were from ourselves and from our times.

Only when we have established critical distance from what we are like might we begin to

understand Newton well.

An irony about my exercise concerns the fact that in their largely independent invention

of the calculus Newton preceded Leibniz. Newton clearly in himself sufficed as cause of the

calculus.

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 Some calculations by the young Isaac Newton

Yet it is the invention of the calculus that explains why we inhabit a computer age. To make

good the analytic methods of the calculus, mathematicians needed to invent some carefully

considered way to assimilate magnitude in general to number. They needed to understand

continuity numerically. They required a continuum of numbers. To achieve a good theory of

a numerical continuum was very long work, not completed until, if even then, the nineteenth

century. The algebraic turn in mathematics during the seventeenth century had had as its

basis mere promissory gestures towards a continuum of numbers that no-one yet even

remotely knew how to define. When during the nineteenth century something like clarity

concerning a number continuum was achieved, philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

studied the logical form of the reasonings upon which the mathematicians had thereby settled.

Frege thereby produced significantly new understanding of logic itself. The new

understanding of logic swiftly made comprehension possible of computation in its fullest

potentialities. Of such comprehension, implementation followed, so that before many more

decades, powerful computers obtained. In this way the calculus of Newton and Leibniz

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explains why our age is an age of computers. Looking to Newton alone in this connection, we

can remark the following. We are left by one very large effect of Newton’s genius the less able

to comprehend clearly the qualities themselves that that genius possessed. In order to grasp

Newton we must understand both our separation from him and in that, a connection. For

this purpose I here use Leibniz as foil.

Newton and Leibniz appear very differently to historians of philosophy in ways that

generally do philosophers’ estimation of Newton no good and also do philosophy no good.

Truly there is something seriously strange about the difference. Leibniz is received as a

canonical philosopher. Newton is not at all received this way. Newton possesses the

reputation of being for philosophers mostly impossible to understand. Newton seems to

philosophers not much to do their thing. Prose passages from out of Newton’s writings that

most seem to philosophers attempts by Newton to do their thing also seem to most present-

day philosophers uninspiring. Consequently Newton is mostly made out to be a philosophical

dunce. With regard to the climate of regard for Newton among philosophers a sea-change is

by now well begun it is true. But significantly negative regard for Newton as a philosopher

continues to be the norm. One very significant problem is, that philosophy itself has been

shaped by the above-mentioned intellectual vicissitudes. The twentieth century was heyday

for analytic philosophy. Logic and language are for analytic philosophers the starting point.

Yet philosophy of science, which, it is true, helped to pull philosophy quite generally

(especially in English-speaking lands) into its twentieth-century analytic condition, has for fifty

years now exerted quite the opposite pull. Philosophy of science has for five decades or more

been pulling upon philosophy generally to exit its analytic condition. Synthetic philosophical

insights are key for understanding how science is even possible. To reconsider Newton and to

lift Newton into place as one very significant, justly canonical philosopher, is long overdue,

for, all the while that philosophy was in its analytic phase, philosophy has suffered unnecessary

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confusion even concerning how science is possible. One way I propose to treat Leibniz as foil

is to argue that Leibniz precipitates confusion concerning how science is possible. Leibniz

models for us some kinds of confusion that analytic philosophy also suffers. Consequently,

those philosophers who view Leibniz as amenable and Newton as wholly foreign are bound to

be stumped philosophically concerning the very possibility of science. Newton has the far

surer grasp upon pertinent matters of philosophy. We have long needed to consider some

relevant wisdom of his.

So let us then with appreciation take up Leibniz as a foil. An initial highlight concerns

Leibniz’s well known emphasis on language. Alike to present-day analytic philosophers

Leibniz seems happy to consider that logic and language come first. François Viète’s Analytic

Art that had also inspired René Descartes’ bold new algebraic geometry quite seemed to

Leibniz suggestive, while to Leibniz they did also at the same time seem immature. Ever an

intellectual ecumenicalist, Leibniz sought to enhance the symbolically styled art of analysis in

some way that would at the same time vindicate the analytic programme of Viète and

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Descartes. To aim himself this way was to favour symbolically styled reasoning as foundation

for what mathematics can do. Near the end of his life, Leibniz wrote

[There] is an art of analysis more inclusive than mathematics, from which

mathematical science derives its most beautiful methods.

(Leibniz, “Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics”, 1714 or later, in Loemker Gottfried

Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 666.) Leibniz had not yet formulated this art,

and rather he had taken merely some seemingly worthy steps in its direction. Yet Leibniz

never waivered in his conviction that there is such a more inclusive art.

No conviction could be more diametrically opposed to Newton’s. Newton firmly held

that the art in mathematics is precedent to language. Newton looks to mathematics as that is

done by classical diagrammatic demonstration for his very understanding of what good

analysis can be. Once the mathematics comes together you then consider how your language

should be. Newton is actually not terribly fussed to excel in choice of notations. Attempts to

look outside of mathematics for a more general art of analysis, and then to carry that back

into mathematics, seem to Newton stultifying and wrong. Thus, for example, after Newton

had demonstrated by classical geometrical construction the result known as Pappus’s

Theorem, a result that Descartes had proved merely algebraically, Newton wrote

To be sure, their [the ancients’] method is more elegant by far than the Cartesian one.

For he [Descartes] achieved the result by an algebraic calculus which, when transposed

into words would prove to be so tedious and entangled as to provoke nausea, nor might it

be understood. (Newton 1674-1684, in D. T. Whiteside (ed.), The Mathematical Papers of

Isaac Newton, 1964, p. 317).

Or again:

Men of recent times, eager to add to the discoveries of the ancients, have united

specious arithmetic with geometry. Benefitting from that, progress has been broad and

far-reaching if your eye is on the profuseness of the output, but the advance is less of a

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 blessing if you look at the complexity of its conclusions. For these computations,

progressing by means of arithmetical operations alone, very often express in an

intolerably roundabout way quantities which in geometry are designated by the

drawing of a single line. (Newton 1674-1684, in D. T. Whiteside (ed.), The Mathematical

Papers of Isaac Newton, 1964, p. 421).

Henry Pemberton, who was closely connected to Newton in Newton’s last years and who

became Newton’s first biographer, understood Newton sharply on these points. Pemberton

wrote:

I have often heard him [Newton] censure the handling of geometrical subjects by

algebraic calculations … and speak with regret of his mistake at the beginning of his

mathematical studies, in applying himself to the works of Des Cartes and other

algebraic writers before he had considered the elements of Euclide with that attention

which so excellent a writer deserves. (A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy 1728,

Preface)

In other words Newton returned himself to the philosophy of mathematics of the

ancients. Recall that in ancient times admirers of logic and admirers of mathematics

significantly fell into two quite different camps. For example, while Aristotle admired logic

and significantly scorned the notion that mathematics has much to teach us concerning

nature, Plato admired mathematics and showed significant disdain for any mode of

investigation that makes language come first. The whole of Plato’s dialogue Cratylus for

example invites its readers to consider that only by perfecting practice does wisdom become

possible, among other things about how words are best used. In his Republic, 527a–b, Plato

has Socrates say that no-one who has the least experience doing geometrical demonstration

— no-one who ‘practises’ (or more literally, who has to hand or who manufactures) this

science — can be in doubt that

this very science (episteme) is far other than [mere] careful speech.

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 How so? he said.
For to speak at all is both especially ludicrous and yet also necessary: their
words direct their actions (praxis), so they say ‘square’ and ‘apply’ and ‘add’, and
bray [make animal noises] on and on this way. Whereas the whole discipline
(mathema) is [in fact] pursued for the sake of wisdom (gnosis).
Indeed, in every way, he said.
Furthermore, there is something we must yet agree upon?
What is that?
That knowledge is of what always is, and not of that which at one time is
becoming and (at another) is passing away.
This is agreed upon, he said: for geometry is the knowledge (gnosis) of what
always is.
Therefore, noble one, it [geometrical demonstration] would attract the soul
towards truth and would produce a philosophical disposition directing upwards
those (faculties) which are now downturned.
This as such is especially true, he said.

Plato invites us to consider that motion precedes conception — a point that is evidenced

among other ways by the fact that to draw diagrams can instruct one concerning what one’s

concepts even should be. Yet only after worthy concepts already obtain can language or

logically constrained symbolism gain purchase. During the course of development of

knowledge language may (along the way) play a role in expressing imperatives and so in

directing action. The point, however, of the whole effort, is to achieve a kind of timeless

wisdom about the practice. Towards a neophyte — that is, towards one who lacks the

wisdom — speech is necessary, namely, the ‘braying’ of imperatives so as to coach better

action. But to one possessed of the wisdom the very usefulness of mere words melts away.

As God is geometer, He is also synthesiser. Not by logic but rather synthetically, there is

timeless form to how the world goes. Newton significantly comes to agree with this

philosophy of Plato’s. It is true that in Principia Newton not only deploys classical, diagrams-

based geometry. He also augments its practices. In a new, very novel flourish, Newton draws

out what is momentary about motion. Then Newton is able to reason geometrically about

ways that bodies move. This inclusion of motion under geometrical reckoning redounds not

to the detriment but rather to the reinforcement of Plato’s view of time as but “the moving

image of eternity” (Timaeus 37 c–e). To diagram the momentary Newton conceives is to delve

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not just down towards the exactitude of which God alone is capable (although it is that). Also

it is to delve down towards what may be the actual on-going work of God. To explore to such

depths is not a linguistic exercise.

The epitome of Leibniz’s contrary persuasion is Leibniz’s conviction that logic precedes

geometry and determines it. (The epitome of Newton’s persuasion is Newton’s conviction

that, apart from God, space and time come absolutely first.) To take up Leibniz as foil, I will

initially consider what would need to have unfolded in mathematics before Leibniz’s

expectations could seem at all vindicated. I then will question whether they are in fact

vindicated by this history. This will be a condensed history of more than 2000 years in

mathematics. It is appropriate for me to attend significantly to Newton in the course of my

discussing this history.

What classical geometers do with their straightedge and their compass references an

ideal. As an ideal for us, that which can be “ideally constructed” by straightedge and compass

connects our mathematical understanding directly with human capabilities in manual

practice, or in other words, with what, with these instruments, we can accomplish with our

hands. Yet as an ideal for us, that which can be “ideally constructed” is in some ways risen

above possible human accomplishment. Geometers are, for example, beholden to an ideal for

describing lines according to which lines intersect punctually. This limits them away from

ever themselves describing lines perfectly. For, were there truly punctual intersections to

contend with, then it would be infinitely involving to set a straightedge exactly against or set

down a compass exactly at that true point. And equally it would not be possible truly to draw

or thence at all to see the lines that were thus breadthless. Consequently geometry as exact

science obtains only when a grossness of actual manual practice is in various pertinent respects

idealized away. Connection to manual practice is maintained, but the grossness is idealized

away. Otherwise geometry could not be an exact science.

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 The arc of discovery that proceeded once this approach to knowledge was in place is

amazing. Within centuries of the first blossoming of such study, a mature-seeming science

obtained. Euclid (fl. c. 300 B.C.E.) creatively compiled for us in his thirteen-book

masterpiece, The Elements, all the results that had been discovered by Euclid’s day. The

Elements represent a science so mature in itself that mathematicians in later antiquity mostly

struggled to proceed much further. Among the various exceptions to this generalisation are

Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 – c. 212 B.C.E.) and Apollonius of Perga (c. 262 – c. 190

B.C.E.) who in the very next generations took some wholly new steps. Most others who were

at all original reasoned about the science that was already extant, critically engaging with

Euclid, elucidating subtleties and improving upon Euclid’s presentation in specific respects.

Pappus of Alexandria (c. 290 – c. 350 C.E.) is one significant such commentator.

In his Principia, Newton conducts his thinking roundly within the diagrams-based mode

of reasoning of Euclid. He adds, however, something new, to the purposes of such

geometrical rumination, by, as I have mentioned, his drawing out, into diagrams, what is

momentary about motion. To Newton’s own satisfaction, this facet of his Principia publicly

inaugurates “mathematical analysis” — the mathematical study of continuous motion or

change. (To some degree in fact Archimedes was an antecedent.) Newton’s “mathematical

analysis” enforces a significant further phase of growth of the already mature-seeming science

of Euclid.

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 Newton’s diagrams

In the present day, the term ‘mathematical analysis’ mostly brings to mind the calculus,

of which Newton is one chief inventor. Moreover, orthodoxy supposes that the question of

the legitimacy of the infinitesimal is for Newton’s calculus a heavy thing, eventually sorted out

perhaps (initially, in the nineteenth century, by eliminating infinitesimals in favour of limits,

later, in the twentieth century, by actually vindicating infinitesimals), but all not until long

after Newton’s own day.

Orthodoxy supposes then that mathematical analysis is in Newton’s hands as yet not

well warranted. One key problem for orthodoxy, however, is that the calculus is not used in

Principia. What is used resembles “geometrical analysis”, in the sense of “analysis” that the

late antique Greek geometer, Pappus, explores.

The advance concerning analysis that Newton makes over Pappus is strictly that

Newton draws out what is momentary about motion, and thus brings motion under

geometrical rumination. Otherwise, the understanding of “analysis” is the same. Pappus, and

consequently Newton, means by “analysis” not a calculative, taking-apart, logically-based

effort, but rather a creative practical production of a new insight — a practical mode of

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discovery, of the starting point from which synthetic demonstration can then proceed. All the

reasoning is essentially diagrammatic.

Newton is himself keenly aware what rigour relating to this kind of geometrical analysis

must come to. Moreover, Newton shows how such rigour obtains, even when geometrical

analysis is generalized by him into mathematical analysis of continuous motion or change.

About the symbolically-styled calculus Newton also, wisely, by contrast, demurs. As the

calculus treats all magnitudes as numerical quantities it begs the question whether there can

be a continuum of numbers. Concerning whether there can be a continuum of numbers

Newton thinks it rationally appropriate to show caution. (Hence Newton’s jibe about

“specious arithmetic” in a quotation from him that I read to you earlier.)

In short, neither what mathematical analysis is, nor how it may be supposed to possess

rigour, are, for Newton, remotely the questions that subsequent history shaped them to

become. Why Newton mathematically confronts a topic (physical motion) that is far more

specific than that of interdependencies between quantities in general, concerns his reasons to

distrust the assimilation of magnitudes to numerical quantities (of which one instance is the

rendering of geometry into algebra by Viète and Descartes). Newton’s calculus does itself

require, it is true, just such sweeping assimilation, but Newton on that account is cautious both

within the calculus, and about it. Within the calculus he parameterises all dependency as time-

dependency, thereby returning attention from number back onto the practical varying of real

magnitudes (such as lengths of line segments) in time. About his own calculus he demurs when,

by learning to treat of motion geometrically, he achieves a method of analysis that stems not

from algebra but from geometry: it generalizes (to motion) the diagrammatic method of

analysis of the ancients.

To repeat, Newton’s allegiance, by the time that he writes Principia, completely shifts,

from use of the calculus, to geometrical treatment of motion. Over against the usual gloss that

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Newton, about rigour, is seriously at sea, we need to consider closely his own good

understanding of rigour. As it relates to diagrammatic methods of analysis not the calculus,

Newton answers the question of rigour commandingly.

To see this we need to consider the classical constructive way that magnitude was

considered in mathematics, a way that did not assimilate magnitude in general to number.

Quite without conceptualising number further than in terms of counting, or in the least way

considering magnitude itself as numerical, Greek geometers managed to produce a general

theory of proportion, that is set out by Euclid in Elements Book V. The Greek mathematician

Theaetetus (c.414 – c.369 B.C.E.), a contemporary of Plato’s (c. 428 – c. 348 B.C.E.) whose

work sets him into an important relation to the nineteenth century mathematician Dedekind

(1831–1916), successfully showed how one can comprehend together the practices of counting

and measuring. That is to say, Theaetetus developed a comprehensive theory of proportion.

And this was no mean feat, because of a challenging problem that was well known in

Theaetetus’s day which suggests, falsely, that there is no way to comprehend together the

practices of counting and measuring. I need to discuss with you the problem, the solution,

and the eventual broadening by synthetically practical steps, of what number would

eventually be conceptualised even to be. Much of the development unfolds two centuries after

Newton. The impact after the nineteenth century upon people’s understanding of logic I have

already discussed. We are enormously affected in our thinking about mathematics by the final

century of this story, all long after Newton. There is much concerning how we now think that

we must achieve critical distance from, if we are properly to understand Newton as I seek here

to do.

The problem that confronted Theaetetus is this. In a half-square triangle,

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 B A

with sides A, A, and (diagonal) B, the magnitudes A and B are “incommensurable”. That is to

say, no amount of counting off that one could do would allow us to lay length A end-to-end

with itself a definite number, say m, times, and lay length B end-to-end with itself a definite

number, say n, times, to result in the m A’s exactly matching the length of the n B’s. The

modern way to prove this fact (a fact which was known to the Pythagoreans) would be to

establish that there is no numerical ratio of whole numbers, i.e. no rational number, which is

equal to the square root of two. That is to say, the modern way to prove this fact would

involve establishing that the square root of two is an irrational number. But this is not how

the Greeks presented these ideas. For, the Greeks reserved their conception of number for the

practical activity of counting. They had no further concept of a number n than that of

counting up to n.

Theaetetus tacitly assumes a property of magnitudes that later is called “Archimedean”.

This is, that for any two magnitudes A and B, there is some finite count m such that m A’s end-

to-end are longer than B, and there is some finite count n such that n B’s end-to-end are longer

than A. In other words, Theaetetus tacitly assumes that no magnitude can be infinitesimal

compared with another. While it is possible to generalise Theaetetus’s treatment by

abstracting away from this requirement, and while it is the case that Newton sets up his

algebraic calculus to look actually non-Archimedean, at the same time, very significantly,

Newton’s diagrammatic mode for reasoning about motion liberates him from non-

Archimedean commitments. Truly there is no problem of infinitesimal magnitudes

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concerning Newton’s diagrammatic mode of reasoning about motion. A little later, I will

share with you Newton’s remarks concerning this that show this to be so. I will thereby

demonstrate that Newton in no way depended upon some later vindication of or replacement

of infinitesimals, to warrant that his own methods of mathematical analysis could be rigorous.

Newton answered the question of rigour himself, completely commandingly.

In Theatetus’s own context, of which this tacit “Archimedean” assumption was one

element, the question for Theaetetus was as follows. When is one pair of magnitudes, whether

incommensurable or otherwise, “analogous” to another pair of magnitudes, whether

incommensurable or otherwise? The question is a general one concerning any magnitudes A,

B, C, and D. Theaetetus showed how one can use the known practice of counting to state

utterly general conditions under which an analogy A:B::C:D holds. His solution was to

demand that for any count m of A’s or C’s and any count n of B’s or D’s,

if mA = nB, then mC = nD

and if mA > nB, then mC > nD

and if mA < nB, then mC < nD.

Then and only then does A:B::C:D.

If you reflect a moment you can see why Theaetetus’s condition is adequate. Consider,

for example, one half-square triangle as above with sides A, A, and (diagonal) B, and another

slightly larger half-square triangle with sides C, C, and (diagonal) D. For these four

magnitudes A, B, C and D, the analogy A:B::C:D clearly holds, not by virtue of the equality

condition (for neither the antecedent mA = nB nor the consequent mC = nD hold for any m or

n, and for this reason the equality conditional holds for every m and n and so fixes nothing),

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 B A For any count m of A’s or C’s
and any count n of B’s or D’s,
if mA = nB (vacuous), then mC = nD
and if mA > nB, then mC > nD
A and if mA < nB, then mC < nD

D C

but rather by virtue of the way that the inequality conditions work. There are counts m, n for

which m As exceed n Bs in length, and there are counts m, n for which the opposite is true, but

any comparison of m As with n Bs will yield the same result as the analogous comparison of m

Cs with n Ds. Consequently there is no practical way to give content to the idea of any

disanalogy between A:B and C:D. Intuitively, this clearly suffices for the analogy A:B::C:D to

hold.

When Theaetetus stated this condition (which was later taken up by Euclid — Elements

Book V definition 5), he addressed himself directly to the following synthetical question: under

what conditions does one have a coherent, general way of working with the very idea of the

analogy of magnitudes? His answer to this question involved his connecting in a rationally

systematic way the practices of counting and measuring. And Theaetetus’s above-stated

insight was simply excellent. It does confer rational integrity on an embracing way to think

about magnitudes.

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 Present-day mathematicians remark a kind of connection that there is between

Theaetetus’s discovery on the one hand and on the other hand the modern idea of a

“Dedekind cut”. In the nineteenth century, Dedekind took what he and his contemporaries

viewed as the “system of rational numbers” and introduced his idea of “cuts” in this system in

order to give an exhaustive treatment of the fuller idea of real numbers. “Dedekind cuts” in

the rationals exhaustively reintroduce rationals in a new way and they also exhaustively

introduce irrationals. The combined system has a completeness that was requisite for the

numerical representation of continuity. If one wants to think about magnitudes numerically,

and one accepts that magnitudes can vary continuously, then one needs to possess the whole

system of the real numbers, and this is what Dedekind proposed to give.

There is much truth in the suggestion that Dedekind’s idea connects to Theaetetus’s.

But the overall purpose of the two contributions nonetheless differs. Theaetetus had, in terms

of counting, addressed himself synthetically to the general practice of measuring and

comparing measurements, not analytically to the question what numbers there are.

Dedekind’s work was, by contrast, precisely towards a perfecting of symbolically-styled

mathematical analysis. Dedekind’s work made for commitments that seemingly concerned

new basic elements for mathematics, new elements for completing the system of numbers.

Theaetetus looked not in this way down to what must be admitted as basic or elementary, but

rather up, in a successful effort to discover embracing conditions for comprehending together

in a rationally unitary way the disparate practices of counting and measuring. In Newton’s

day, this synthetic orientation was rightly considered surer.

Yet mathematics burgeons much because synthesis and analysis are each propaedeutic

to the other. Clearly (as one can see from Dedekind) the perfection of Theaetetus’s synthetic

contribution steps us towards just such analytic clarity as obtains today within our present-day

theory of the real number system. A kind of consolidation of Theaetetus’s synthetic

  18
contribution issues out in the analytic clarity of Dedekind, which consolidation indeed

removes from analytic geometry its former impurity, just as it helps vindicate similarly the

calculus. Indeed the analytic clarity it possesses alone allows true synthetic integrity to be

brought to the algebraic methods of the calculus.

Yet in place of space itself in which one may move one’s hands about in the use of one’s

straightedge and compass, Dedekind can offer up to us only the set of real-number triples

structured by the natural “Pythagorean” metric. (To call this metric “Pythagorean” is a

stretch, since for Pythagoras magnitudes were not considered numerical.) Although this

structured set duly convincingly possesses the full geometry of Euclid, the set and its structure

are our invention. They are not our world. Humans found their way to the real number

system quite by being in the world, by their being engaged in practices (specifically measuring

and counting) and by their synthetically seeking to harmonise these practices within

themselves and one with the other. As starting point what Dedekind offers is as perfectly

unhistorical as it is abstract.

When their mode of inquiry privileged synthesis, mathematicians were at home within

their own rational accomplishment. That their rational accomplishment was mathematical

concerned its signal harmony. There was no question of applying mathematics to the world,

because no separation obtained between the mathematical and mathematicians’ being in the

world. To deal mathematically by contrast with the abstraction ℝ×ℝ×ℝ = ℝ! structured by

the natural “Pythagorean” metric, invites the question whether or in what ways our

reasonings might “apply” to the physical world.

  19
 ℝ! as if that were the world

The very concepts of pure and applied mathematics for the first time gained currency only

when mathematics transitioned from its former synthetic vein to an analytic vein. This

development was very recent. Indeed the concepts of pure versus applied mathematics are

roughly the same age as the real number system — invented within the last 150 years. (I owe

this historical insight to Sarah Kattau, whose 1999 PhD thesis at the University of Leeds

concerns it.)

Strangely Leibniz in his own time anticipated just such rendering of separation between

mathematics and world. Leibniz considered mathematics a language. Although our terms

‘pure’ and ‘applied’ were not yet available to Leibniz, in effect Leibniz surrendered himself to

the conception that the applicability of mathematics as a language is moot. Why is a long

story, but the nub of it is that Leibniz discounts the purchase of mathematics in respect of

what is ultimately real. Every inch a philosophical ecumenicalist, Leibniz seeks to climb

above the opposition between Plato, who asserts that the purchase in the world of

mathematics is very nearly ultimate, and Aristotle, who asserts that it is logic not mathematics

whose purchase is most ultimate. Leibniz believes he can marry these seemingly opposed

  20
views together, and at the same time secure from Plato and Aristotle a needed understanding

of natural activity, an understanding of which Descartes had evacuated his mechanical

philosophy much to its detriment. That is, Leibniz seeks to harmonise Plato, Aristotle and the

modern mechanical philosophy, reintroducing final causation to the world conception despite

Descartes’ banishing it, and creating new scope thereby to consider matter (insofar as matter is

real) as possessed of dynamical affections including a “well founded” form of efficient-cause

mechanical material activity. For many reasons, the actual ultimate unreality of matter is key

to Leibniz’s system, just as it is key that space and (universal) time are not ultimately real.

World for Leibniz is ultimately monadic, and monads, in whom or in which action is all by

final causation, are both without extension and windowless (causally wholly aloof from one

another) as well as in themselves neither spaced nor (universally) timed. Mathematics has

purchase only relatively to the phenomena that may be regarded as well founded, that is, only

relatively to what is not ultimately real, but rather somehow definable in terms of qualities that

the ultimately real monadic realm possesses. Mathematics has truly no good purchase

relatively to the ultimately real monadic realm, however. About the so-called phenomena,

that are merely well-founded, mathematics is apposite quite for logical reasons. Space, time

and matter are all merely phenomenal. They all are merely “well founded” in the relevant

sense. Mathematics has purchase upon them chiefly because of how logic determines what

monads even are and what “well foundedness” itself amounts to. Logic precedes mathematics

in Leibniz’s vastly revisionary metaphysics.

Incidentally Leibniz advances an ontology–semantics–epistemology ordering of topics in

his philosophy. In order to understand what knowledge is, Leibniz considers that his first task

is to sort out his metaphysics. Then he sorts out his philosophy of language. Then he expects

that epistemology will largely take care of itself. A good many recent Australian philosophers

of high standing including some well known Australian philosophers of science advance an

  21
ordering of topics in their philosophies that is entirely the same. The appreciation for Newton

after which I seek argues that this kind of approach is mistaken. I believe it is very much

mistaken.

Let me bring you back into the material world. Suppose that you are at Plato’s

Academy and you are the first to ask yourself how, by straightedge and compass methods, you

might construct the square that is equal in area to any given rectangle. And suppose further

that after some rather directionless initial toying with the problem you achieve all on your

own the crucial insight. (Today we can of course consult Euclid for help. In order to acquire

the insight from Euclid, we would need to work our way beyond Book V of The Elements. The

needed insight is very sophisticated.) Before the insight you have but a very partial grasp of

what you are about with your straightedge and compass and this rectangle in front of you and

a square that you wish to construct that is its equal in area. After the insight it is intuitive to

you how it is that, given any rectangle, you are to construct by straightedge and compass the

square that is its equal in area. The insight itself that you achieve resides in this newly found

intuitive certainty. It resides in the purpose that you now grasp of each of a sequence of

necessary steps of action. You now fully know what you are about in connection with

squaring rectangles. And this is precisely how your geometrical knowledge has just increased.

The increase in your knowledge is not from outside of you. You will mistake its very

character if you look for a way it has as it were been delivered into you. To the extent that

you possess new knowledge, it is intuitive, inside knowledge that you possess. You possess a

new way for your being an insider to ways of the world.

One way of viewing the new or better knowledge that you have is propositionally.

However, a proposition need not be the content of a declarative sentence. A proposition can

instead be something that it is proposed to do. Interestingly, all the “problem” propositions in

Euclid’s Elements are like this. They state something that it is proposed to do, e.g. “Given any

  22
rectangle, to construct the square that is its equal in area”. (A great many propositions in

Newton’s Principia are similarly “problem” propositions.) Obviously any proposition in this

sense introduces to our attention weaker but related propositions in the sense of the content of

a declarative sentence, for example “Given any rectangle we can construct the square that is

its equal in area” or still more weakly “Given any rectangle there is a square that is its equal in

area”. You know that either of these latter propositions is true with the same certainty as you

know how the construction must be done. The knowledge how is intuitive. So, so in this case is

the corresponding knowledge that.

Plato will congratulate you for this newfound intuitive knowledge that you have. To

perform the ruler-and-compass construction of the square that is equal in area to a given

rectangle is to illustrate nearly perfectly, if also very narrowly, that quality of action or way of

being which rationalists like Plato bid us to achieve in life generally. When we perform a

geometrical construction insightfully, reason commends every step as necessary, and so

determines the action’s overall form. A quality of the whole situation — the form of space

itself — determines what is the best or most beautiful way for us to achieve an end. Insight

illustrates the perfection of true synthesis. To Plato it seemed unutterably wonderful that

mathematical demonstrations are at once ramified, practical, and temporal, and yet also

holistic, rational, and timeless. Plato actually advocated systematic instruction of young

people in mathematics precisely because he expected that the practice at mathematics would

reinforce reason in them and thus lead them to become wiser in themselves.

Plato developed a general conception of knowledge according to which the connection

in mathematics between reason and practice is quite utterly tight. Without time, and thus

without the possibility of any of the practical demonstrations that mathematicians can

perform, space itself would just be formless. (Perhaps that is why Plato’s creation story in the

Timaeus suggests that the original chaos upon which the demiurge is to impose time and form

  23
is, while manifold and therefore extended, in its atemporality quite without any geometry. To

the extent that the demiurge can impose perfection on the chaos and thus link matter with

eternity, this requires time [cf Timaeus 37d]. How matter is made to sustain geometrical form

is precisely by the demiurge’s imposing ultimate and all-embracing conditions upon the

dynamics of matter’s being in time, i.e. utterly general ordering conditions on how material

things, enduring over time, can act.) There is a geometry of space at all only because of time.

This reflects the way that geometry as a theoretical science depends on the possibility of

practice, of which time is of course a necessary and indeed first condition.

Time, in Plato’s view, is a condition of the possibility of a geometry of space. But

equally, in Plato’s view, the geometry of space is timeless. In some way that, by our reason,

we grasp all at once, the performance of a mathematical construction, temporally extended

though it is, possesses timelessly an inner rational necessity. We must grasp this inner rational

necessity as one whole, or we have not fully thought through the mathematical principle

which we mean to demonstrate. The more truly we possess the mathematical thought, the

more strongly it connects to what is timeless and unitary. The quality of our insight depends

on the degree to which our consciousness in thinking it takes on an odd relation to time.

For Plato [cf Republic 509d ff.] mathematical insight depends crucially not so much

upon the analytical function of reason but rather upon the synthetical function. There is no

way fully to analyse true insight in his view, nor therefore any way to express it discursively [cf

Cratylus passim], for insight is perforce intuitive. To be together in practical ways is necessary

first, before one can have any meaningful, pertinent mathematical things to say. Indeed the

insights of mathematicians are a somewhat fallen cousin of the higher insights gained when

ethical comprehension is achieved through dialectic. And (as Plato points out very many

times in his dialogues) we surely do not expect ethical comprehension to be governed by

concepts linguistically coded and already in place.

  24
 Since logic is the study of the analytical function of reason, Plato implied some disdain

for it. Ethics, depending as it does on dialectical rationality, concerns instead the synthetical

function of reason. In Plato’s view, this function is the highest. In fact, so thoroughly

synthetical did Plato take reason to be that he recognised in every act of theoretical thought an

ambition for an all-things-considered, rationally best-systematised way of being and thinking.

Plato sought to understand what it might mean in general for such an ambition to make sense,

and his vision put intuitive practical rationality, not logic, to the fore. To the extent that he

successfully drew support from mathematics for his vision of knowledge, Plato revealed to us

how the mathematics of his day was in its way more fully systematised by synthetic, practical,

intuitive rationality than it was by analytic logicality.

For Plato, mathematical insight represents just about the closest approach to knowledge

of which humans are capable. To have true knowledge you need to be, so to speak, totally an

insider rather than an outsider within some sphere of practice. And to do this you need to

confer rational perfection on that practice. The ideal in question is, in Plato’s view, ethical.

Like Socrates before him, Plato’s ideal for agency concerned rationally necessitated action, a

coming together of ‘rationally commends’ and ‘rationally commands’. (There can be no more

truly spontaneous act than a knowing one, an act that is commanded by reason.) And in

Plato’s view, mathematics (better than almost any other human accomplishment), allows us to

glimpse what it would be like to have achieved knowledge.

From the very opening words of Principia onwards, Newton attends to the following

parallelism. Geometrical structure concerns constraints upon possible motions. Mechanics

concerns constraints upon possible motions. Note how this parallelism disappears when you

consider geometrical structure as wrought by the “Pythagorean” metric upon ℝ! . For within

the logic of that formal structuring of ℝ! there neither is action at all nor therefore anything

that stands out sharply as a constraint upon motion. Yet the history of mathematics that I

  25
have canvassed does make clear that geometrical structure concerns constraints upon possible

motions. You learn just such constraints when you discover what it is with straightedge and

compass to construct the square that is equal in area to any given rectangle.

Newton begins his Principia by discussing how geometry and mechanics are related. I

have supplied the opening paragraph of Newton’s Principia as a handout that we can discuss.

On the handout there are line numbers, to help direct us to the various very pithy

announcements of Newton’s therein. I emphasize however that you can’t understand Newton

unless you consider how classical geometers achieved knowledge. But that requires one to

adopt ways of thinking about mathematical knowledge of which scarcely a trace remains in

the present day.

So let us consider what Newton learns from Pappus of Alexandria, generalizes, and

himself so much prefers to algebraic reasoning (including even his own in the calculus).

Pappus famously writes in his Mathematical Collection (c. 340 C.E.) as follows about analysis and

synthesis:1

Analysis … takes that which is sought as if it were admitted and passes from it through

its successive consequences to something which is admitted as the result of synthesis:

for in analysis we admit that which is sought as if it were already done and we inquire

what it is from which this results, and again what is the antecedent cause of the latter,

and so on, until by so retracing our steps we come upon something already known or

belonging to the class of first principles, and such a method we call analysis as being

solution backwards.

But in synthesis, reversing the process, we take as already done that which was last

arrived at in the analysis and, by arranging in their natural order as consequences

                                                        
1Quoted, as it (very commonly) is quoted, as in Heath’s Euclid [1956], volume 1, p. 138. For more, see Pappus of
Alexandria [1986], pp. 82 ff.

  26
 what before were antecedents, and successively connecting them one with another, we

arrive finally at the construction of what was sought; and this we call synthesis.

Today thinkers consider with some bewilderment what Pappus could possibly have

meant by these words, but in the context of diagrammatic reasoning his meaning becomes

plain. In this connection, the way in which, to our ears, ‘analysis’ links with the logical,

calculative, algebraic, or symbolical, becomes spurious. Bearing in mind that in Pappus’s day

algebra was not yet invented and so had in no way been brought to geometry, it is essential for

us to think that Pappus means by ‘analysis’ neither more nor less than he says he means by it.

Analysis concerns diagrams. To consider Pappus’s meaning, here is an illustration:

The illustration is the simplest that I can think of to make Pappus’s meaning clear, and

concerns the Euclidean demonstration (Elements I.32) that the internal angles of a triangle sum

to a straight line. Synthetically the proposition is demonstrated for a given triangle by

“producing” one of the sides and constructing the parallel to another, as above, observing

then the equality of the exterior angle with the sum of the two opposite internal angles and

thus that the sum of the three internal angles is a straight line.

By analysis however one could discover more or less directly how such a synthesis

should be accomplished. The trick, as Pappus says, is “to take that which is sought as if it

  27
were admitted” i.e. to assume that the exterior angle is the sum of the opposite internal angles

so that the three internal angles will sum to a straight line:

One then quickly finds oneself inserting the parallel to the opposite side, and then the needed

synthesis becomes clear.2 One might even say that from the phenomenon that the internal

angles of triangles do sum to a straight line, by analysis one deduces the cause of that’s being

necessarily so. (Pappus himself in the above quotation even introduces causal talk to us this

way.)

Every phase of analysis in Newton’s Principia can be thought of as deducing-from-a-

phenomenon-its-cause. The converse phase of discussion, synthesis, deduces from-a-cause-

the-resulting-phenomenon. Principia contains in spades both these phases. To illustrate this,

let us consider the very first propositions of Book 1 of Principia, Propositions 1 and 2 (which are

converses of one another, and so respectively consider the converse phases of synthesis and

analysis). These propositions and their accompanying diagram are perhaps more often

discussed than any others of Newton’s. Yet our present purpose is to link them to Pappus and

that purpose is novel. We need the Pappus distinction between analysis and synthesis in order

to understand Newton fairly. Newton writes:

                                                        
2 Admittedly, how quickly depends on whether it is as a first or second step that one inserts the angles as

depicted, which ordering alone is helpful towards the discovery of the starting point for synthesis.

  28
 • Proposition 1 The areas which bodies made to move in orbits describe by radii drawn to an

unmoving centre of force lie in unmoving planes and are proportional to the times.

• Proposition 2 Every body that moves in some curved line described in a plane and, by a radius

drawn to a point, either unmoving or moving uniformly forward with a rectilinear motion,

describes areas around that point proportional to the times, is urged by a centripetal force tending

toward that same point.

Newton reasons to these conclusions in the following diagrammatic fashion:

Consider first the degenerate case where the sun-centred (S-directed) accelerative force is zero.

This, degenerately, remains one way that an accelerative force could obtain in the direction of

S — the force in question is simply zero in magnitude. In that case a body (a planet, say) that

begins at A and sweeps to B across an initial moment will carry on inertially and sweep to c in

a second equal moment. Notice that in this reasoning we are led to draw out for ourselves

what is momentary about motion. We reason that AB and Bc are equal, the motion of a body

from A to B and then from B to c across successive moments being an inertial one. We

thereby draw into connection with the momentary significant geometrical structure.3

                                                        
3 We give effect, in other words, to a transcendentalist faith. By a drawing out for ourselves, grossly, of
something in fact infinitely finer than we can draw, we admit the grossness of our practical powers and the
finitude of our intellect. Yet we assume that nevertheless, by our reason we are made in the image of God. Just

  29
Proceeding as discussed within the present diagram, we readily recognise the equality of the

areas swept out about S during the two successive moments of time. For triangles SAB and

SBc can be made out as having equal bases (viz., AB and Bc) from each of which the

perpendicular height to S is the same. Therefore, triangles SAB and SBc are equal in area.

Yet on next considering what will happen if from one moment to the next the planetary body

is deflected by the sun (at S) — say from B not to c, but rather to C — we then make out

geometrically the following. The planetary body, thus deflected, will sweep out in the second

moment an area equal to that swept out in the first moment, if and only if the triangles SBC

and SBc are equal in area. For, we already know that the area of triangle SBc is identical to

that of triangle SAB. And yet as the triangles SBC and SBc share the base SB, they are equal

in area if and only if they are constructed between parallel lines, that is to say, if and only if Cc

parallels SB. But this will hold if and only if the deflection that the planetary body has

suffered is in the direction of S, the sun.

Thereby, in one fell diagrammatic swoop, Newton convinces us, on the one hand, that if

— or to the extent that — Kepler’s Second Law (the law that planets sweep out equal areas in

equal times) is true, then the planets participate in an acceleration always directed to the sun,

and thus are subjected continually to a sun-centred force; and, on the other hand, that by

being subject to a sun-centred force, the planets are required to sweep out equal areas in equal

times about the sun, and thus satisfy Kepler’s Second Law. The first phase of this is analysis:

it deduces from a phenomenon (that of Kepler’s Second Law holding) its cause (the force

upon the planets being sun-centred). The second phase is synthesis: it deduces from the cause

(the force upon the planets being sun-centred) the phenomenon to be explained (that Kepler’s

Second Law holds).

                                                                                                                                                                             
as an unavoidable human grossness means that we can only ever deal approximately with breadthless lines or
dimensionless points, so also, when we draw out what is momentary about motion, we do so grossly. The
expectation however is that the ideal to which we are beholden in these practices can itself be innocent of this
grossness of ours. The ideal itself can be risen higher than any possible accomplishment by us.

  30
 Newton’s Deductions from Phenomena — Examples

(1) Newton establishes geometrically that a moving point A is accelerated always towards
another point B if and only if the line segment BA sweeps out equal areas in equal times
about B.
From Kepler’s Second Law — the law of areas — Newton deduces the sun-centredness
of the force acting on each of the planets.
Summary:
areas law ! force on planets is sun-centred

N.B. Newton demonstrates not only (by synthesis) the ‘"’ part, that if the forces on the
planets are sun-centred, then the areas law will hold, but also (by analysis) the ‘#’ part,
its converse: that given that the areas law holds, then necessarily the forces are indeed
sun-centred.

Synthetic reasoning was traditionally received as mathematically superior, in as much as

synthetic understanding is the endpoint. Perhaps this is why Newton orders synthesis first (as

Proposition 1). Be that as it may however, Newton is notably completely up-front about

delivering within Principia the analytic phase (as Proposition 2), not only the synthetic one (as

Proposition 1). Newton does not hide the analysis, but simply performs it diagrammatically.

Newton makes diagrammatic performance essential to the reasoning itself. Present-day

mathematicians and philosophers struggle to comprehend that this is possible. They consider

diagrams to represent mere visualization. Diagrams seem to them at best of pedagogical or

heuristic value. This perspective reflects their commitment to symbolical reasoning.

Formalism or logicism as one’s philosophy of mathematics are pinnacle expressions of this

commitment. The age of computers just is an age of formalising and logicising and to that

extent of formalism and logicism. This is not to say that such philosophies pan out. We

contemporaries need in any case to recall that our perspective is new and even rather

peculiar. At one time the practice of mathematics made diagrams or diagrammatic

  31
performances essential to the reasoning itself.4 And to participants in mathematical inquiry

back then, diagrams certainly did not seem a mere form of visualization. Those

mathematicians were abundantly aware of ways that cognitively, the visual pales compared

with the practical.

To do geometry classically as Newton does obliterates any surprise that mechanics in

some ways so closely relates to geometry that even to distinguish the two is artificial.

Mechanics is, true enough, the broader study. Can I scratch my ear with my toe? No, not as

I stand here before you, nor at any other time, either: I cannot scratch my ear with my toe.

This fact mechanics necessitates, but geometry does not necessitate. The relevant constraints

concern limits, beyond which there will have been mechanical failure, of what my bones and

joints and muscles can do. These biological constraints have their basis in mechanics, even

though there is no purely geometrical reason why I cannot scratch my ear with my toe. So

mechanics is the broader study than geometry, yet, nevertheless, which out of geometry and

mechanics is precedent to which is not even a valid question. A different example can

illustrate this. Suppose that my wife and I are at home and our daughter is visiting. This

daughter is in the lounge and she approaches me in the kitchen via the intervening dining

room. Then, standing next to me, she comes up in her full height to midway between my

shoulder and the top of my head. Suppose then that the same daughter who starts in the

lounge instead had approached me by a different route. Suppose that she had exited the glass

sliding doors, circumambulated the house, and lastly re-entered through the laundry door, so

that in the end she were to stand next to me in the kitchen just as before. Then in standing

next to me still she would come up in her full height to midway between my shoulder and the

top of my head. This is from the way bodies move. It is from the mechanics of bodily

motion. Yet if things were otherwise then geometrical concepts such as either heights, or

                                                        
4 Catton and Montelle 2012 marshals the case for this contention.

  32
lengths, areas, and volumes, would be of little use. It is a matter of geometry whether lengths,

areas and volumes are determinate concepts and equally this is a matter of mechanics. We

can even consider that there are certain minimal conditions upon the mechanics of materials

that must be satisfied in order that the spaced way may objectively obtain that is requisite for

material things to stand outside and alongside one another and add up to make a world. Via

the mechanics of materials, certain limiting qualities not only of statics but also thence of

dynamics can be considered necessary conditions for the very possibility of geometry. And if

statics and dynamics are thus kindred with geometry, kinematics and geometry are still more

roundly one.

The two thinkers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whom I am

considering, Newton and Leibniz, thought deeply yet also very differently about the

relationship of geometry and mechanics. Each was intent upon better thinking-through than

Descartes had done the relevant issues concerning space, time and matter. Each had by his

own efforts come to understand that the Cartesian mechanical philosophy with its singular

and singularly unintelligible proclamation that matter is extension and many other demerits is

an incoherent intellectual mess. Yet Leibniz, ever the philosophical ecumenicalist, conceived

his own proferred intellectual repair of Cartesianism to further Descartes’ intellectual

programme, whereas Newton conceived that his work showed a completely different and

better way than Descrates’ for knowledge to be made or more truly achieved. In the event,

Newton and Leibniz produced sharply incompatible ways of thinking about knowledge as well

as sharply incompatible ways of thinking about the world.

Many people assume that we see in the correspondence between Leibniz on the one

hand and Newton’s disciple Clarke on the other hand a good reflection of what

philosophically was at issue between Leibniz and Newton. In fact the Leibniz-Clarke

correspondence scarcely begins to reflect the position that either Leibniz or Newton truly

  33
held, nor does this correspondence tell us more than a tiny fraction of what there is to

consider concerning the incompatibility of their philosophies.

Even on the specific topics of philosophy of space and time, neither Leibniz’s nor

Newton’s most deeply considered positions reflect themselves well or fully in the Leibniz-

Clarke correspondence. To discuss Newton on time briefly is pertinent so I do this next.

Consider, if you will, just the metrical aspect of temporality, the aspect we call ‘duration’. As

events unfold, they do so over a certain interval of time. The first and last events in any such

series are separated by a certain duration. To be literal minded concerning time is

rationalistically to expect that any such duration is somehow universally significant. Literal-

mindedness sets our thinking concerning duration into connection with an exacting,

rationalistic ideal. For we are disposed to seek some practical, material measure for duration,

the adoption of which as the standard for duration is consistent with the following universal

understanding: that every process whatsoever should be found, relatively to that standard of

duration, to speed up or slow down only ever for a reason, a reason that can be found within

material conditions. Otherwise we are disposed to think that the chosen material measure for

duration is faulty and that we therefore need to seek a better one.

Thus, for example, when the Romans adopted as their fundamental measure of

duration the time from sunrise to sunset (one twelfth of which was called a ‘daylight hour’),

they were not at first significantly inconvenienced by this choice, living at the latitude of

Rome. But at the latitude of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, the Romans had to concede that

soldiers marched a great deal further per daylight hour in the summer than in the winter, with

no sufficient material reason why this was so. Similarly, with a ‘night hour’ one twelfth of the

time from sunset to sunrise, candles were found to burn a whole lot faster per night hour in

the winter than in the summer, with no sufficient material reason why this was so. So those

were reasons to seek a better standard of duration. Romans are less noted than, say, Greeks

  34
for their dedication to inquiry, but it was within the reach of what they did for them to

discover the imperfection of their own official measure of duration. To be on the look out at

all for such a measure was to be really very concertedly rationalistic.

Rationalism enforces upon time an outright ideality. An ideal clock would measure

perfectly a universal time, so that by its lights all material processes whatsoever would only

ever speed up or slow down for a reason that could be discovered in those material processes

themselves. The rationalistic orientation to such an ideal presupposes that material processes

all are exquisitely well attuned to one another, so that they are all coherently embraced within

a single truly universal temporal order. To frame in the first place such a conception of time

is to embrace the concept of nature or the natural, or thus of cosmos, that is, of an All that is at

the same time a unitary Order.

The disposition to think literally concerning among other things time clearly concerns

the practical bearing of a people. For example, a people has become rationalistic in the way

requisite for literal-mindedness that sets out to establish for duration some measure, and then

studies carefully whether the measure in question satisfies the above-mentioned ideal. Their

rationalism can be remarked not so much in the open-ended quality of their practical search

for a satisfactory measure for duration, as in the limiting ideal that informs just such practical

inquiry.

Astronomy provides many different candidate measures for duration, but also discovers

to us the disturbing fact that none of these measures coheres fully with any of the others.

Thus, for example, astronomy discovers to us that a (24-hour) solar day is better not measured

as the time from, say, sunrise to sunrise, an interval that is very variable across the seasons. It

is considerably better to measure such a day as the time from the sun’s crossing the meridian

(the line in the sky through zenith that runs directly north-to-south) to its next crossing the

meridian. Yet even this measure is to a certain extent variable across the seasons. Astronomy

  35
discovers to us this variability partly by comparing the solar day to the sidereal day — a

sidereal day being the time it takes a star, such as Sirius, to run about from meridian to

meridian. Because of the sun’s daily progression along the zodiac, the two measures differ in

length by an amount (of roughly four minutes) that, as the Babylonians discovered, itself varies

seasonally, in a way that is necessitated by the fact that the number of days (of either sort)

from vernal equinox (when the sun is on one side of the zodiac) to autumnal equinox (when

the sun is on diametrically the opposite side) differs considerably from the number of days

from autumnal equinox to vernal equinox. In the face of this astronomical fact, astronomers

long ago adopted the duration that a solar day averages relatively to the sidereal day, itself

regarded as constant, as defining a 24-hour period. Notice how very much concerning the

astronomical motions needed to be learned before this measure could even be defined let

alone adopted. Because of all the uses of measurement in the acquisition of those

astronomical understandings, the work in question illustrates quite handsomely what I choose

to call ‘the pursuit of a measured understanding’. Newton is a very special adept in such

pursuit. This pursuit concerning time encountered an obstacle which I shall next discuss, an

obstacle that people could not pass until Newton.

The imperfections as a standard of duration of the 24-hour measure of duration that is

referenced to a sidereal day are so slight that people could not possibly detect them in their

experience say of humans marching or of candles burning. But looking to other astronomical

phenomena, the constancy or otherwise of this measure was moot. Measures of time by the

moon’s motion are various, and each varies appreciably relatively to one another and to the

standardised 24-hour day. Thus we may consider the time from full moon to the next full

moon, or the time it takes for the moon to run once around the zodiac, or the time it takes for

the moon to move in effect from one perigee (point of closest approach to the earth) to the

next (which we remark by the variation in how angularly fast the moon moves per day against

  36
the background of the stars). These measures are notably inconstant both relatively to one

another and to the standardised 24-hour day. There are complexities in what a ‘year’ is also

— is it the time for the sun to progress once around the zodiac, or is it the time from, say,

vernal equinox to the next vernal equinox? The choice of neither measure as a standard for

duration turns out to be fully coherent with the other, nor either with the choice of days or

months (however defined) as such a standard.

Ultimately astronomers realised that they needed a theory of the physics that underlies

the motion of the heavenly bodies. In its light alone could they hope to determine which

astronomical motions are subject to variation and are on that account inadequate as the

standard for temporal duration. The researcher who first provided a thoroughgoing physics

of the astronomical system was Newton. Newton articulated, defended and ably employed

the three laws of motion (sc. the law of inertia, the law that F = ma, and the law of the equality

of action and reaction) plus the law of universal gravitation. These laws proved to be very

telling about the motions of the heavenly bodies. In particular, they accounted not only for

why Kepler’s laws about the motion of the heavenly bodies are approximately true, but they

also accounted in amazingly accurate quantitative detail for some tiny departures that there

are from Keplerian motions in the true motions of the heavenly bodies. Indeed by assuming

the Keplerian motions to be approximately true, and by assuming also both the three laws of

motion and that Euclidean geometry holds at the scale of the heavenly motions, Newton

actually outright deduced the form of the law of gravitation.

So in light of this impressive, impressively cogently argued physical knowledge, was

Newton in a position to point at last to an ideal yet material measure of time? That is, could

Newton point to a material measure of time, the adoption of which as a standard for duration

would mean that every other process in nature only ever speeds up or slows down for a

reason? The fact is that Newton did not. Moreover, he knew that he could not. For, his

  37
three laws of motion, together with the law of universal gravitation, imply that there is no

material process whatsoever that runs thus absolutely smoothly. For example, the sidereal

day, although quite highly constant, is bound not to be absolutely constant, because it will be

subject to variation owing to tidal friction upon the earth from the moon, the sun and other

bodies. The sidereal year will be affected by the tidal influence on the earth-sun system of

other bodies, chiefly Jupiter. And so on.

Newton realised therefore that it would be disastrous for our theorising if we were to fix

the meaning of temporal duration by choosing an actual material process and stipulating that

it shall serve as our standard for duration. Newton contended that the adoption of any such

‘sensible measure’ as a standard for duration would ‘defile the purity’ of the known laws of

motion, that is, of the laws that reveal to us the fundamental dynamic of the system of matter.

In other words, if you adopt any actual material process as the standard for duration, then you

cannot contend that Newton’s laws hold perfectly true. For if you adopt any actual material

process as the standard for duration then you would have to say that other processes speed up

and slow down for no material reason. This would make a nonsense of Newton’s dynamical

laws.

Yet Newton was disposed to think that it is at least possibly the case that his laws of

motion are literally true. If it is at least possibly the case that they are literally true then we

must not rule out that they are, which we would do were we to wantonly adopt some sensible

measure of duration as our standard of time. Thus Newton cleaved to the rationalist ideal

concerning time even though no material measure could possibly exist for duration. Newton

insisted that relatively to true time all material processes whatsoever only ever speed up or slow

down for a reason, a reason that can be discovered in the material conditions themselves.

This insistence emblematises his literal-mindedness, among other things about his own

principles of physics.

  38
 The very idea of such universal, ideal or ‘absolute’ time concerns embracing harmony in

the world. Similarly the world must be vastly harmonious for my wife’s and my daughter to

possess her quite definite height. This quite definite height that our daughter possesses sets

her into definite relationship with every last other thing in the universe, just as each such other

thing possesses an equally definite size relationship with each thing other than it.

Recall that classically we get geometry as exact science only when a grossness of actual

manual practice is in various pertinent respects idealized away. Connection to manual

practice is maintained but the grossness is idealized away. The actual grossness of some

manual practice can be more or less, just as the imperfection as standard of duration of an

actual sensible measure for duration can be more or less. When we idealise the measure of

duration and conceive of absolute time we satisfy a necessary condition for mechanics to be

exact science. Similarly when we idealise straightedge and compass practice we satisfy a

necessary condition for geometry to be exact science. These points converge somewhat when

in his profound extension of classical geometry Newton draws out for us what is momentary

about motion. Of course Newton accepts as inevitable that there is grossness in his diagrams.

By diagramming what in a motion would be in the momentary Newton mobilises geometrical

insight yet at the same time redoubles the ideality of such insight. For, Newton compounds

the ways in which the referenced ideal is risen above possible human accomplishment. Just as

there is no grossness of the breadth of a true geometrical line there is no grossness in time of a

true moment. While the diagram possesses a redoubled ideality still (indeed, on that account)

it produces an insight of exact science.

In Newton’s anonymous “Account” of himself (written during the dispute with Leibniz

over priority in invention of the calculus) Newton wrote:

Mr Newton considers not quantities as composed of indivisibles but as generated by

local motion, after the manner used by the Ancients. They considered rectangles as

  39
 generated by drawing one side into the other, that is by moving one side upon the other

to describe the area of the rectangle: & in like manner Mr Newton considers the areas of

curves as generated by drawing the Ordinate into the Abscissa, & all indeterminate

quantities he considers as generated by continual increase. And from the flowing of

time & the moments thereof, he gives the name of flowing quantities to all quantities

wch increase in time, & that of fluxions to the velocities of their increase. He considers

time as flowing uniformly, & exposes or represents it by any other quantity wch is

considered as flowing uniformly & its fluxion by an unit. And the moments of time or of

its exponent he considers as equal to one another, & represents such a moment by the

Letter o or by any other mark drawn into an unit. The other flowing quantities he

represents by any letters or marks & most commonly by the letters at the end of the

alphabet. Their fluxions he represents by any other letter or marks, or by the same

letters in a different form or magnitude or otherwise distinguished. And their moments

he represents by their fluxions drawn in to a moment of time. Fluxions are not

moments but finite quantities of other kind. They are motions… . When Mr Newton is

demonstrating any Proposition he considers the moment of time in the sense of the

vulgar as indefinitely small but not infinitely small, & by that means performs the whole

work in finite figures or schemes by the Geometry of Euclid & Apollonius exactly

without any approximation: And when he has brought the work to an equation &

reduced the equation to the simplest form, he supposes the moment [o] to decrease &

vanish, & from the terms wch remain, he deduces the demonstration. … But when he is

only investigating any truth or the solution of any Problem he supposes the moment of

time to be infinitely little in the sense of Philosophers, & uses works in figures or

schemes infinitely small & uses any approximations wch he conceives will make no error

in the conclusion, as by putting the arc, chord, sine and tangent equal to one another, &

for the greater dispatch he neglects to write down the moment o. … By this means [Mr

Newton] performed all his computations in this method wthout any other infinitely

small quantity than the moment o.

  40
 Here Newton explains the way that at its best or most careful his reasoning when he

has drawn out what is momentary about motion is in no way non-Archimedean. He assumes

the infinite brevity of a moment it is true just as geometers classically assume the infinite

narrowness of a line. But no need arises thence to consider spatial magnitudes as non-

Archimedean. The grossness of his drawn-out figure is nothing worse than the grossness of a

drawn line or a drawn circle. We can idealise such grossness away, in the case of the drawn-

out moment by considering this just as a gross version of what the drawing out would come to

within the infinitely brief moment o of time. Such a drawing out is no further beyond human

capability than is the describing of a true line or a true circle. Nor is such a drawing out any

less beyond human capability. This is to say that if Theaetetus produced rigorous exact

science in his theory of proportion so also does Newton produce rigorous exact science in his

theory of mechanics. The opening paragraph of the Preface to Newton’s Principia that I have

handed out to you appeals to us to accept this very point.

Because Newton’s opening paragraph that I have handed out to you so emphatically

considers motion and synthetic mathematical activity as possessed of an independence from

language, for the consideration of my foil Leibniz I next consider a specific issue in mechanics

relatively to his aspirations to produce good mathematics by perfecting language. The perfect

language that Leibniz envisaged he termed ‘universal characteristic’. His ambitions for it are

clear in the following:

If this is done [if a characteristica universalis is formulated], whenever controversies [of

whatever kind] arise … it will suffice to take the pens into the hand and to sit down by

the abacus, saying … Let us calculate. (Leibniz, as translated by Wolfgang Lenzen from

C. I. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz 1849 vol. 7, p. 200.)

Present-day civil engineering arguably illustrates what Leibniz was driving for. Consider a

four-storey building, such as the one that my wife and I live in, in earthquake-prone

Wellington, New Zealand. Suppose that its frame is in steel, and suppose furthermore that

  41
without much loss of mechanical verisimilitude its every storey can be considered just in terms

of mechanical contributions by the frame elements, 10 columns, 10 beams, 30 joists or purlins.

Then there are 200 elements to consider in the structure as a whole. Looking to Leibniz, we

might hope for algebra that will consider how static loadings would reshape the structure, for

this would inform us what static loadings are acceptable and what are not, just as, if loadings

are known, this would inform us whether the structure is duly strong enough. Or we might be

interested in dynamical behavior of the structure, where what is of interest to us is how it

would perform given the pattern of ground accelerations in some known earthquake of which

we have a record. Given just such shaking of the ground, what accelerations would be

experienced on the various floors? Which deflections from the equilibrium positions would be

greatest, of which elements, with what assurance that there would not be mechanical failure,

and with what degree if any of material damage or permanent deformation? Remarkably the

algebra that you can mobilize in order to answer such questions itself references forms of

freedom, forms of freedom for elements within the structure to move. To each element some

portion of the following 12 × 12 matrix is required, how large a portion depending upon

  42
what varieties of freedom to move can be discounted (that is, safely considered negligible in

comparison with others) given the mechanical nature of the connections. With our 200

structural elements we are liable to have upwards of two thousand by two thousand matrix

dimensions to consider, implying the need for a four-million element matrix. For the

answering of our questions in statics we would at least expect to compute the matrix inverse

and prosecute various further kinds of matrix algebra using that inverse. Such requests would

tie up processors that perform billions of elementary operations per second for perhaps several

seconds, or if we are lucky for about a second. On the other hand, to answer dynamical

questions concerning a system with 2000 degrees of freedom can tie up similar processors for

hours, days, or even weeks. In Leibniz’s offering to us his vignette of two humans taking pens

in hand and sitting down next to the abacus, Leibniz does in some ways sense the direction

along which science could proceed, but on the other hand he vastly underestimates the level

  43
of computational complexity that even relatively highly simplified physical analysis by algebra

would entail.

Moreover, just as it would seem to Newton artificial to put algebra in the driver’s seat,

so we may by our own ruminations concerning the present (merely hinted at) reach of present-

day structural analysis see that truly not just timeless logical ways of numerical variables

interrelating but rather actually physical questions of freedom-to-move are ultimately in

charge here. Matrices with their specific algebra essentially code up as simultaneous the

conditions individually determining the various elements of the building frame. The algebra

needs to reflect the requirement that in the various elements’ pressing upon and thereby

slightly deforming others the various elements also must behave compatibly with one another

at their connections. It’s beautiful how the language of matrices so ably assists calculation,

but, for understanding, one needs to track how the mechanics conditions the algebra rather

than conversely. Relatively to the static analysis of the structure, a variety of methods exist for

solving for deflections from given loadings and conditions of compatibility or conversely for

solving for loadings from given deflections and conditions of compatibility, and a student

develops confidence in the matrix method only by tracing up from other methods to an

understanding (that is humanly impossible to reach except for very simple systems) of why the

matrix methods work.

The civil engineers who teach me these various methods of structural analysis always

simply invoke ℝ! with the Pythagorean metric, and they then use the calculus very much in

the symbolism of Leibniz thence to articulate their theory of structures. Let me briefly

introduce you to the most elementary reach of the theory. You must agree to make one

simplifying assumption, specifically that the materials under study will behave linear

elastically, i.e. in a Hooke’s-Law, spring-like fashion, as is their tendency to do, ever the more

exactly the smaller are any deformations. This assumption always holds good if the structure

  44
is stiff enough or if the loadings upon it are small enough. Then with this assumption in place

ever so much of the physical theory proceeds directly out of analytic geometry, augmented by

Leibniz’s calculus. For if for convenience we position our x-axis along an element, and then,

looking in the x-direction along the element, we consider the y-direction deflections of that

element away from its equilibrium configuration, then if the element is long relatively to its

breadth and depth so that bending dominates over shear as the element’s mode of

!"
deformation, we will have that !" closely approximates the angle �(�) of deflection away from

!!!
the equilibrium direction, just as closely approximates the elements curvature at �, �(�),
!! !

!
where � � =   ! if � is the radius of curvature. But then, by Hooke’s law, the bending

moment � � = ���(�), where �� is the member’s flexural rigidity, can be obtained from

!!!
the geometry, � � = �� !! ! . � is itself a purely geometrical measure called the second

moment of area (concerning the member’s cross-section), and � is Young’s modulus,

effectively the constant of proportionality in Hooke’s Law. And then simply by further

differentiation we obtain further physical information, specifically, information not only

!"(!) !!!
concerning shear along the element, � � =   = �� , but even concerning the static
!" !! !

!"(!) !!!
loading along the element, � � =   !"
= ��
!! !
. In this way what seems a very physical

magnitude, the static force or loading that is applied (in the �-direction) along the member,

emerges from the geometry itself. That is to say, the geometry of how each member deforms

expresses the static force or loading that is applied. We consider forms of freedom by

elements to deform, and then, under an assumption of linearity, the geometry itself yields us

significant physics. From the geometry we may even glean information concerning energy

(specifically, the ‘strain energy’) and some methods of solving ‘statically indeterminate’

structures exploit this by deploying variational methods and the concept of virtual work. The

energy in question is that required for the deformation of the member despite is degree of

  45
rigidity. Since energy is the principle of the animation of matter, it is remarkable that we

meet with this principle already in statics.

Fuller significance of the intimate interconnection here discussed between geometry and

mechanics emerges if we literally step back from this four-storey frame structure that we are

considering. I am an experiencing subject; I reside within the world; and when I experience

the four-storey frame structure, the same relatedness of freedom to act with spatial form that

there is in the building frame expresses itself in me, as the intimate interconnection that there

is for any experiencing subject between perception and conception, or thus between

receptivity which is a passive capability and thought or understanding which is an activity. I

am at last reaching the point in my talk where I seek to explain why motion precedes

conception. In what is perceptually afforded to me say in this scene comprising the four-

storey steel building, structure obtains that is in significant ways precedent to (even as it also

anticipates) my deploying concepts concerning what I see. That is to say, even if I neglect the

constitutive influence upon my experience of the concepts “girder”, “column”, “beam”, and

“building frame”, and of other concepts such as “material entity”, “on”, “behind”, etc., which

I would naturally bring to bear upon this scene, the very fact that my construction-site

percepts are spaced thickens what their being present to me amounts to. With the being spaced

of these percepts nothing acquaints me quite so well as my power to change or move my

perspective upon the scene. If I move my head, first this way and then that, then, in contrast

to the static relationships among colour patches that would obtain upon a photograph, the

construction-site colour-patch relationships change, not in any higgledy-piggledy, swimming

sort of way, but rather in smooth structured accord with the way I move my head. Higher-

order invariances obtain quite within how they change. If I and my head move steadily to the

left, then moment by moment what is perceptually afforded me by the construction site

changes in regular ways. Some colour patches move quickly and maintain themselves while

  46
others, more slowly moving, approach and then are occluded by the more quickly moving

ones, shortly afterward to reappear and continue their same slow steady motion. Using

concepts, we might say that as I move my head, closer bits of the building frame line up with

and occlude farther away bits, or that some particular column, nearer to me than some other

column, briefly lines up with the further away column and blocks it from my view. The point

is, however, that the way I detect edges, recognise changing patterns of occlusion or

perceptual visibility, and prepare myself to bust up my sensory manifold not into its elements

(if it has those) but rather into discrete enduring objects (beams, columns, purlins, joists, each

synthetically unitary in its own manifoldness), partly precedes my having concepts at all. The

intentionality or aboutness of experience, that is to say, my attention’s directedness to the

outside of me, begins preconceptually, in ways that are crucial for how my almost every

concept can form in the first place.

With respect to my wagging of my head at the building frame, two kinds of question

meet, one concerning the nature of cognition and another concerning the nature of the world.

(In between as well are some transitional questions.) Whether I cannot even possess a perspective

without my possessing at the same time the freedom to change that perspective signals, in an especially

rudimentary way, larger and more involving questions: whether the being of any one perspective

depends upon the possibility of other perspectives besides that one; whether my being a subject depends upon my

being an agent; whether public or intersubjective space precedes the possibility of there being for me any space

even for my subjective imaginings; whether my being a subject depends upon there being (or at least upon there

having been) other subjects besides myself; whether intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity; whether cognition as

such is conditioned not just by what is personal but more originally by an impersonal ideal; whether cognition

possesses a dual source in sensibility and understanding (so that concept without percept is empty and percept

without concept is blind). You are hearing me correctly if you imagine that I would answer all

these questions with a ‘Yes’, and that I contend that answering them otherwise, while logically

  47
consistent, is, for all of that, not a rationally coherent option. Then there are questions

transitional between self and world: whether, were there no things possessed of their spatial ways to be

outside and alongside one another adding up to be a world, it would in the least way be possible for me to be a

self; whether other spaced things’ temporally enduring conditions the possibility of my own temporal endurance

and so conditions the very possibility of the being that I possess both as agent and therefore as subject; whether I

am necessarily myself bodily within the world, so that not only as animal, but even strictly as cogniser, my being

embodied is essential to my being at all. Again I would answer all these questions with a ‘Yes’, and I

contend that answering them otherwise, while logically consistent, is, for all of that, not a

rationally coherent option. Beyond these transitional questions are questions concerning the

world in its own right, for within the world the interrelatedness of space and agency asserts

itself all the more originally. Whether there must in the order of things be invariances relatively to

perspectival change —that is to say, timeless forms of sameness relatively to difference that is merely due to

motion concerns kinematics; but kinematics quite necessarily interrelates with statics and

dynamics. Their interrelation is alike to that between sensibility and understanding and is

more original than it is.

All the points that I raise here (as ones that I wish to defend) tell, if they are true, not

only that the monadology of Leibniz is indefensible and wrong but equally strongly why

Newton rightly considers the empirical connections of theories of natural philosophy to be

practical and public and shaped by intersubjective ideals, exactly as diagrammatic reasoning

in mathematics is practical and public and shaped by intersubjective ideals. Immanuel Kant,

a philosopher who lived two generations later than Newton and Leibniz, and who began

Leibnizian, and yet ended up quite a profound philosopher of Newtonian science, duly

defends all the points that I here raise as ones that I wish to defend. In every case Kant’s

defence deploys what Kant calls a transcendental argument. The form of a transcendental

argument is: B is actual, A is necessary for the very possibility of B, so A is actual. Kant

  48
learned about transcendental arguments by studying Newton’s deductions from phenomena.

Every Newtonian deduction from phenomena can be considered a transcendental argument.

In particular those that I discussed above can be considered this way, with geometry and the

three laws of motion helping to inform the necessary judgments concerning what is necessary

for the possibility of what. Kant, like Newton, pursued the most-measured understanding of

whatever he considered. Measurement-making in general discovers from something

practically discernible what is deeper. Every measurement deduces from a phenomenon its

cause. Measurement itself is a transcendental argument in the way it considers what is

necessary for the very possibility of some fact, a fact which some practical intervention has

made known. To deploy considerations concerning what is necessary for the possibility of

what is the way to discover from something known something deeper. Measurement is of

course fallible, in among other ways because it relies upon fallible considerations concerning

what is necessary for the possibility of what. Nevertheless, measurement represents a

synthetically pregnant way to make evidence bear upon theory. No relationship between

evidence and theory that analytic philosophy can bring into view is similarly apposite.

Analytic philosophy can form no better understanding of measurement than that by it one is

able to test a theory. This negative analytic conception of measurement completely misses

that there is a positive synthetic function for measurement in science. No wonder that

analytic philosophy then stumbles over what it terms “paradoxes” in epistemology of science,

such as the paradoxes of hypothetico-deductive confirmation, which basically show that there

is no such thing as hypothetico-deductive confirmation, and that hypothetico-deductivists,

which is pretty well all analytic philosophers of science, have grasped altogether the wrong

end of the stick. Yet analytic philosophy turns this dilemma for itself on its head and

altogether deprecates Newton for his holding that there can be deductions from phenomena.

That Newton held that there can be deductions from phenomena is supposed to epitomise

how Newton is a philosophical dunce. Deduction is logical, analytic philosophy insists, and

  49
logic can work only for inferring from theory an empirical prediction. Analytic philosophy

insists that there is no logical path along which for you to move oppositely, as Newton

proposes to do. Never mind that every telling measurement that science makes gives the lie to

these views of analytic philosophers of science. Similarly Newton is supposed by them to be

but a dunce to spurn algebraic mathematics. Newton proposes instead to reason

diagrammatically, but how ever could reasoning be diagrammatic? A diagram is but an

instance, and reasoning concerns generalities. Analytic philosophy says No to diagrammatic

reasoning quite identically to why it says No to deductions from phenomena.

Why Newton says Yes to both these things concerns his intimately knowing the

synthetic function that reason has. This function is more original than the analytic function

(that logic studies). Diagrammatic reasoners naturally prize synthesis as highest. Newtonian

deduction from phenomena aims identically. The very possibility of experimental,

measurement-oriented science begins with what analytic philosophers make themselves

without the capability to understand. Leibniz has been my foil and I say that his was not a

most-measured philosophy and indeed was the very opposite. I am convinced that Newton

became as brittle as he did relatively to Leibniz mostly because such big epistemological issues

ride for Newton on the question how mathematics should be conceived. How much Newton

knew of Leibniz’s metaphysics is significantly unknown, but we would more likely err if we

estimate little, than if we accept that talk was likely in the air back then and had reached

Newton, concerning some of the more remarkable intellectual dispositions that Leibniz

possessed. Leibniz was, after all, celebrated, and doubtless special; and the intellectual

dispositions of his that are reflected in his metaphysics are singular. Yet almost any aspect of

Leibniz’s metaphysics that Newton knew of would have troubled Newton fiercely.

Leibniz had no other account of truth than predicate-in-subject, so in Leibniz’s view all

truths are analytic, in Kant’s sense of that word; but in Leibniz’s view mathematics is

  50
distinguished from contingent knowledge by the finiteness of the explication that is required,

in order to discover how the predicate inheres in the subject. Leibniz was well ahead of his

time to argue (mistakenly, as subsequent generations followed a long road in order to discover)

that logic is sufficient foundation for mathematics, and thus that mathematics is not

conceptually creative but explicative. Yet this view of Leibniz’s was contrary to Newton’s

whole sense of going-deeper. It was inimical to Newton’s whole accomplishment in the

Principia, that is, to Newton’s especially cogent reasoning out of the mathematical principles of

natural philosophy. If Leibniz were correct about the nature of mathematics, this would

impugn Newton’s whole way of making new knowledge.

Mathematical demonstration best happens, in Newton’s view, diagrammatically, in

public space, by practice that, in its exemplariness, is public or leaderly, an example to all.

Leibniz expected that proof in mathematics reduces to logical demonstration, the sort of

unfolding of a concept that can happen in an individual mind. Leibniz felt led by logical

reasons to say that for any substance there is a complete concept, that reflects the whole world

from a point of view. Leibniz felt led by logical reasons to understand that these complete

concepts essentially are the monads and that monads are windowless. Logic induced Leibniz

to give himself over to the conception that experience is a state of a subject, not a mode of the

subject’s connecting to an outer, public world. Newton’s emphasis on measurement concerns

experience as a mode of connection to an outer, public world. That Newton was aghast at the

example that would be paraded as appropriate for others to follow if Leibniz were accorded

pre-eminence, I think perhaps helps explain why Newton was so brittle relatively to Leibniz

about mathematical invention in that day. I think Newton wanted that people should follow

Newton himself, in some ways away from the calculus: let it be clear that the true originator

also cleaved in the end (in his very great works) to a richer understanding of mathematical

analysis than enters upon any symbolically driven calculus however nifty and fruitful.

  51
 Kant carries us by transcendental arguments away from all the main convictions of the

monadology. In this philosophical work Kant foreswears the very idea of complete concepts.

In any kind of cognition that can be recognised as cognition by us, no concept is complete in

Leibniz’s sense, Kant came to believe. In consequence Kant rejects Leibniz’s whole

predicate-in-subject account of the nature of truth. Kant consequently needed to explain

truth in some new way. The way forward opened the analytic-synthetic distinction that he

famously introduces in the Preface of his Critique of Pure Reason. I hazard that Newton’s Preface

to his Principia is significant inspiration for this Preface of Kant’s. Kant’s task was not merely

to explain as he famously does how synthetic a priori truth is possible, for he required of

himself something far larger than that. Kant’s task was to explain the possibility of synthetic

truth quite generally. What on earth is truth if Leibniz had quite misunderstood what it is? I

think that Kant’s opposition to Leibniz’s view of mathematics is significant chiefly in relation

to this larger project, of making out quite generally how synthetic truth is possible. To obtain

a better theory of truth Kant quite rejects Leibniz’s ontology – semantics – epistemology

ordering of topics in philosophy. Newton here shows Kant the way, in my

view. Mathematics, Kant concludes (against Leibniz) does absolutely need to be understood

in the classical way. According to the classical way to understand mathematics, by work that

had been called ‘analysis’, conceptual creativity is exercised, that is crucial for what had been

called ‘synthesis’. Mathematical reasoning is by no means merely logical reasoning. Unlike

logic, mathematics increases concepts. Conceptual increase is a matter of going deeper, and it

is precisely this, our ability to go deeper and discover new possibilities of synthesis, that

informs Kant’s construal of synthetic truth quite generally. I do think that Newton shows

Kant the very path that Kant takes. I believe Newton reasons transcendentally at almost

every analytical phase of his work, and this includes many fine experimental inferences in

optics and alchemy as well as the physics of motion and the turning of astronomy into

experimental investigation, albeit accepting the set-up as God-given. Yet the reasoning by

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Newton that especially arrested Kant was that to conclusions concerning space and time, by

arguments that concerned what is necessary for the possibility of the three laws of motion. I

think Kant helps Newton and knows that he helps Newton when Kant himself argues

transcendentally, to such anti-autistic conclusions as that experience is no mere state of the

subject, but necessarily connects a subject with other subjects and with their world. It is clear

that Kant thought that this conception of experience is necessary in any worth philosophy of

Newtonian science. To advance it is of course to enact a rejection of Leibniz’s whole

philosophy.

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