Why was Newtons “Rules of Philosophizing” chosen rather than Descartes Discourse on Method?
(Cassirer E. 1951. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. pp.7-9.) The attempt to solve the central problem of philosophic method involves recourse to Newton’s ‘Rules of Philosophizing’ rather than to Descartes’ Discourse on Method, with the result that philosophy presently takes an entirely new direction. For Newton’s method is not that of pure deduction, but that of analysis. He does not begin by setting up certain principles, certain general concepts and axioms, in order, by virtue of abstract inferences, to pave the way to the knowledge of the particular, the ‘factual.’ Newton’s approach moves in just the opposite direction. His phenomena are the data of experience; his principles are the goal of his investigation. If the latter are first according to nature, then the former must always be first to us. Hence the true method of physics can never consist in proceeding from any arbitrary a priori starting-point, from a hypothesis, and in comple
