Electronic Issue "Scientific Research"

It was shown that the great representative of the Enlightenment movement Voltaire popularized Newtonianism as a new world¬view and, as a result, made philosophy and hu¬manities acquain¬tanced with Newtonian science. This course was the reason why in the following time there were long dis¬cus¬sions on Newtonian mechanics and its concept of gravity - discussions which con¬tinue till to¬day among non-physi¬cists. According to his enlightening aim, Voltaire had interpreted mechanics as a science on the whole world and, as a re¬sult of this, he had misinterpreted or even had falsified it. Simultane¬ously popularization of Newtonian mechanics as a new worldview had pre¬pared the intellectual ground, promoting the work of such physicists like D'Alembert, Laplace and Lagrange and pro¬viding them with a response; it prepared the ground which allowed to elaborate mechanics as a phys¬ical the¬ory. Distortions of mechanics made by the mechanistic worldview are perceptible till to¬day. Thus there is the prejudice that mechanics is mechanistic,. But this was as in¬accu¬rate as the belief that mechanistic worldview could be eliminated simply by founding a new the¬ory in the natural sci¬ences. There are also mechanizations of modern science. By elaborating his mechanics Newton founded physics in the Modern-Age under¬stand¬ing, and in so doing it triggered the need to investigate what, in the terms of this new science, the phys¬i¬cal means; and this has to be done in contrast to natural philoso¬phy, on the one hand, and to mathe¬ma¬tics, on the other. By impli¬ca¬tion, Newton had created an entirely new meaning for the concept of the physical, physi¬cal law and the re¬lationship between bodies and motion. He had provided these concepts with a new cat¬e¬gorial constitution: the body-motion question was no longer framed by the categorial re¬la¬tionship thing - property, but by the new categorial rela¬tion¬ship object - be¬havior. This cate¬gorial change inherent in Newton's con¬cept of grav¬ity is the physical expres¬sion of a new thought principle, a principle which has been aptly described as functional thought (Funk¬tions¬denken), by contradis¬tinction to the sub¬stantial thought (Substanz¬denken) of the Classical world and the Middle Ages. This prin¬ciple is obliged to the de¬vice: the acting determines the being, a device that was not seen by the mecha¬nistic world¬view, al¬though Modern-Age science could only be founded on this basis.

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