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Troy Winfrey
@twinfrey
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
The main problem here is that the question is inevitably framed in terms of post-Enlightenment scientism and empiricism, not a framing a serious alchemist of the period would have accepted or even understood. "Alchemy was pre-science" story dates ~1930s? as far as I can tell.
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Neil Hacker
@_neilhacker
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
I'm curious if they would have been more important in an indirect sense. As in maybe they didn't help inform his ideas that much directly but the kind of person to come up with calculus may have had to have a pretty unusual mind and so these are epiphenomena of that
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Neil Hacker
@_neilhacker
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago." - Keynes
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