Abstract
In the Principia [1] Newton presented the theory of gravitation from the point of view which we nowadays call ‘phenomenological’: he based the whole description of planetary motions on an assumed law of dynamical interaction, and deliberately renounced any attempt at accounting for this particular form of interaction between distant bodies by some mechanism of propagation through an intervening medium. This approach was such an innovation that it was thoroughly misunderstood even by the greatest of the contemporary physicists; Huygens in particular objected to it without apparently realizing that he was himself currently using the same logical procedure in his mechanical investigations, when he justified his postulates by pointing to their empirical origin.
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Bibliography
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Cohen, R.S., Stachel, J.J. (1979). Newton’s Views on Aether and Gravitation [1969c]. In: Cohen, R.S., Stachel, J.J. (eds) Selected Papers of Léon Rosenfeld. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9349-5_10
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