Academic Program

On Newton

A conversation with St. John's students, conducted in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 1, 2003:

On the benefit of working through the detailed mathematics of the Principia
I got into an argument about how we do math and science at the college with a friend who goes to another college. He was arguing that we should just learn facts. To him, the time we spent working through problems from Newton was ridiculous because Newton was archaic. But I don't think I'm studying Newton, or the other books in the program, purely for the facts that I draw from them. I think the reason we are working through the problems in this book is for the process. Because when you learn how Newton arrived at his ideas, not just the conclusions, the experience is priceless. It's like apprenticing to a genius. It's certainly not useless. - Ms. Coleman

I think the idea is that we're getting inside different great thinkers' heads - thinkers who have thought very rigorously about a certain topic. And if you can learn to see an issue from the perspective of several different people who have thought very intensively about a particular topic, you can switch viewpoints on a particular issue. Then when you come to some novel issue in life, you can say, "the ancients really thought about this issue like this," and "Adam Smith thinks about it like that." You're not constrained to the one possible answer of our own time. - Mr. Laux

I don't believe the point is simply of appreciate Newton as a genius, or consider ourselves apprentices to him. Rather, it's important that we learn how to judge the text's value and whether the text achieved something or not in relation to the other people that we read. It's important to learn to criticize well, with a foundation for your criticism, rather than just throwing an idea out without any valid basis. It's difficult to criticize well and judge well, but that's one thing we learn through the program. - Ms. Finck

For me, examining Newton's Principia in close detail was actually a way to get outside the idea of gravity. The theory of gravity is something we grow up with. It is introduced to us as a fact when we're children, like the grass being green. It is really valuable to be able to understand that gravity is not simply a fact that exists, but it is somebody's idea. And that person had that idea and made a case for it. And people consented to that idea. It is really valuable to look at this idea and any other idea that your society is based on as someone's idea, not just facts that we can't question. - Mr. White

Along that line, I think it's interesting to think about our whole enterprise, and reading Newton in particular, as a process of building knowledge. I mean here the difference between knowledge that is genuinely arrived at and opinion. When you grow up, and hear that the moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the sun, you only hold these idea as opinions When you can examine the argument for yourself, and use your own judgment, that's when you being to acquire knowledge. - Mr. Hofer

I don't think you can divorce this idea of having well-grounded ideas from the responsibilities of being a good citizen. In a good society, the thought patterns we are talking about are desirable. Someone who examines the first principles of things and doesn't simply take things on trust is necessary for a just civil society. - Mr. White


Participants:
Rebekah Coleman, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Matthew White, Annapolis, Maryland
Alexandra de Steiguer, Seattle, Washington
Peter Tzannes, New York, NY
Britt Hofer, Victoria, British Columbia
Katrin Finck, Neubrandenburg, Germany
Jeff Laux, Austin, Texas
Emily Graves, Plainview, Texas
Laura Manion, Olney, Maryland
Annette Prapasiri, Las Cruces, New Mexico
Victoria Mora, tutor

Note - In St. John's seminars, students and tutors address each other by their last names to maintain constant level of decorum in a tightly knit community.

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