Thomas Reid was an intellectual polymath interested in all aspects of Enlightenment thought. Paul Wood reconstructs Reid's career as a mathematician and natural philosopher and shows how he grappled with Sir Isaac Newton's scientific legacy.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the life and scientific work of Laura Bassi, the first female member of the influential Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna and also the first woman to be appointed a university professor in physics, or universal philosophy as it was then termed. The book describes Laura Bassi’s research activities and achievements, explaining the influence of Newton, her role in promoting Newtonian experimental physics in Bologna, and her work as an experimentalist, including on electricity. Much attention is paid to the context in which Bassi developed her career. The very considerable difficulties faced by a woman surrounded by male university teachers and members of the Academy are discussed, casting light on the constraints that led Bassi to set up the first experimental physics laboratory in her home, complete with the many instruments required for experimentation and private teaching. The aim is to provide a rounded and well-documented account of the scientific endeavors and achievements of a too often overlooked scientist who struggled to overcome the prejudices of her age.

Joseph Priestley (1733&–1804) is one of the major figures of the English Enlightenment. A contemporary and friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he exceeded even these polymaths in the breadth of his curiosity and learning. Yet no one has attempted an all-inclusive biography of Priestley, probably because he was simply too many persons for anyone easily to comprehend in a single study. Robert Schofield has devoted a lifetime of scholarship to this task. The result is a magisterial book, covering the life and works of Priestley during the critical first forty years of his life. Although Priestley is best known as a chemist, this book is considerably more than a study in the history of science. As any good biographer must, Schofield has thoroughly studied the many activities in which Priestley was engaged. Among them are theology, electricity, chemistry, politics, English grammar, rhetoric, and educational philosophy. Schofield situates Priestley, the provincial dissenter, within the social, political, and intellectual contexts of his day and examines all the works Priestley wrote and published during this period. Schofield singles out the first forty years of Priestley's life because these were the years of preparation and trial during which Priestley qualified for the achievements that were to make him famous. The discovery of oxygen, the defenses of Unitarianism, and the political liberalism that characterize the mature Priestley&—all are foreshadowed in the young Priestley. A brief epilogue looks ahead to the next thirty years when Priestley was forced out of England and settled in Pennsylvania, the subject of Schofield's next book. But this volume stands alone as the definitive study of the making of Joseph Priestley.

The publication of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1689 marked an epoch in the history of science. Newton's work came to be seen as a new paradigm for science-not only the solution to the problem of planetary motion, but also a theory of mechanics and, perhaps more importantly, a new method for approaching a wide range of scientific problems. However, as scholars created what came to be known as Newtonianism, they faced the problem of presenting it to students. Newton's own book was rather forbidding, and as an astronomical text, it lacked a discussion of many other important aspects of experimental philosophy. Richard Helsham (1682-1738) faced this problem in his course of lectures at Trinity College in Dublin in the early decades of the eighteenth century. As a youth, Helsham had been a contemporary of George Berkeley at Kilkenny College and shared his interest in the new science. Helsham then became a medical doctor. Jonathan Swift described him in affectionate terms several times in his writings, calling him "the most eminent physician in this city and kingdom." Helsham saw Newton's method as the key to progress in all areas of science. Having lectured on natural philosophy since the opening of the medical laboratory at Trinity College in 1711, he was appointed professor of natural and experimental philosophy in 1724 and in 1733 added the position of professor of physick (medicine). Helsham's lectures on natural philosophy were so well received that they were published just after his death. With its intuitive explanations and its coverage of all the major topics of physic, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy was reprinted at least seven times from 1739 to 1818 and was used as a standard work in the course at Trinity College in Dublin up until 1850. One of the very first textbooks on Newtonian physics, the book provides a remarkable window into the early development of Newtonian physics in a very readable contemporary form. An appealing aspect of A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy is its familiarity to modern students of physics. Treated in much the same way as a modern introductory course in physics, 23 lectures cover topics such as gravitation, central forces, the composition of motion, collision, simple machines, friction, motion down an inclined plane, projectile motion, hydrostatics, pneumatics, sound, and light. The emphasis is on conveying the ideas and describing the experimental evidence while keeping mathematics to a minimum by concentrating only on simple geometry and algebra. With eleven plates of illustrations, the book contains four appendices that investigate problems, including non-elastic collisions, motion through a resisting medium, and the motion of water through pipes. This edition includes a preface by the editors, setting the book in the context of the Newtonian revolution in physics and the history of Trinity College.

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia was read, interpreted and remodelled for a variety of readerships in eighteenth-century Europe. The editors, Mordechai Feingold and Elizabethanne Boran, have brought together papers which explore how, when, where and why the Principia was appropriated by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. Particular focus is laid on the methods of transmission of Newtonian ideas via university textbooks and popular works written for educated laymen and women. At the same time, challenges to the Newtonian consensus are explored by writers such as Marius Stan and Catherine Abou-Nemeh who examine Cartesian and Leibnizian responses to the Principia. Eighteenth-century attempts to remodel Newton as a heretic are explored by Feingold, while William R. Newman draws attention to vital new sources highlighting the importance of alchemy to Newton. Contributors are: Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Claudia Addabbo, Elizabethanne Boran, Steffen Ducheyne, Moredechai Feingold, Sarah Hutton, Juan Navarro-Loidi, William R. Newman, Luc Peterschmitt, Anna Marie Roos, Marius Stan, and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt.

The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.