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Isaac Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man’s death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt’s by a millennium. This book tells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe’s learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. The book reveals the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton’s earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton’s unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, the book reconciles Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.

This book examines the transfer of alchemical culture to America by John Winthrop, Jr., one of English colonization's early giants. Winthrop participated in a pan-European network of natural philosophers who believed alchemy could improve the human condition and hasten Christ's Second Coming. The book demonstrates the influence of Winthrop and his philosophy on New England's cultural formation: its settlement, economy, religious toleration, Indian relations, medical practice, witchcraft prosecution, and imperial diplomacy. It reconceptualizes the significance of early modern science in shaping New England hand in hand with Puritanism and politics.

This book is a biography of William Hyde Wollaston, a trained physician who became one of Britain’s leading natural philosophers in the early nineteenth century. During his lifetime he achieved an international reputation in chemistry, linear optics and mineralogy and was judged to be one of the most acute experimental philosophers of his age. He is best known for the preparation and commercial sale of malleable platinum, but he was also an active scientific entrepreneur who prepared and sold organic chemicals to the textile manufacturers of Manchester, and patented two optical devices. He moved effortlessly between endeavours we now distinguish as pure and applied science, and was criticized by some for such versatility. Wollaston made an astonishing number of original observations and discoveries, such as (in approximate chronological order) the fungal cause of grass circles known as fairy rings, the identity of common and voltaic electricity, the dark lines in the solar spectrum, the existence of ultraviolet light, the chemical elements palladium and rhodium, the amino acid cystine, multiple combining proportions, high frequency hearing loss, and just missed out on isomorphism and electromagnetic rotation. He also introduced several novel instruments and devices, such as a refractometer, the camera lucida, the reflective goniometer, the scale of chemical equivalents, and is eponymously remembered by Wollaston wire and the Wollaston doublet. He lived in the period of astonishing social change known as the English Industrial Revolution and is a paradigmatic example of the individualism that so invigorated British society in Georgian times.

This book presents a new interpretation of a famous text in early Greek philosophy: Parmenides’ Way of Truth, the most important philosophical treatise before the work of Plato and Aristotle. It contains the first extended philosophical argument in the Western tradition. That argument decrees that there can be no motion, change, growth, coming to be, or destruction; and indeed that there can be only one thing. These severe metaphysical theses are established by a series of deductions, which in turn rest on the fundamental claim that it is impossible that there be something that is not. This claim is itself established by what this book calls the Governing Deduction. The book offers a rigorous reconstruction of the Governing Deduction and shows how it is used in the arguments that establish Parmenides’ severe metaphysical theses (what are called the Corollaries of the Governing Deduction). The book also responds to those commentators who find Parmenides’ arguments to be shot through with logical fallacies. Finally, the book turns to the currently fashionable reading of Parmenides, according to which he continues the tradition of the Ionian natural philosophers. The arguments for the Ionian Interpretation fail badly. What is left, then, is simply Parmenides’ argument, and here there is no substitute for rigorous logical reconstruction. So read, the argument of the Way of Truth leads to a Parmenides who is indeed a severe arbiter of philosophical discourse and who brings to a precipitous halt the entire enterprise of natural explanation in the Ionian tradition.