 The history of eighteenth-century philosophy cannot be written without extensive discussion of Newton’s own views and of his influence on the views of other figures both in England and on the Continent. As we have seen, when Newton was a young student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Cartesian views in natural philosophy and much else besides had replaced the ideas and methods of Aristotle and his followers as the most important subject for discussion amongst philosophers. In many ways, Newton eventually succeeded in convincing philosophers that his own ideas and methods were superior to those of the Cartesians—especially when it came to thinking about motion and its causes—but this historical fact did not mean that Newtonianism, even broadly construed, became the dominant trend in natural philosophy during Newton’s lifetime. On the contrary, Newton’s views continued to be the subject of intense scrutiny and debate. As we have seen, this was true amongst Leibniz and his followers (such as Christiaan Wolff) and among fellow mechanists (such as Huygens). Indeed, a late-seventeenth-century debate between Cartesian and Newtonian ideas was supplanted by an early eighteenth century debate between Leibnizian and Newtonian views; the latter debate would continue in one form or another for the rest of the century. But even amongst leading Continental mathematicians, some of Newton’s most basic ideas, for instance concerning the forces of nature, remained the subject of dispute until well into the eighteenth century. To give just one prominent example that influenced the development of philosophy, D’Alembert and Euler, two of the greatest mathematicians of the Enlightenment, had opposite reactions to Newton’s idea that the mass of an object could also be referred to by the “very significant name” of the vis inertiae, or force of inertia (Newton 1999, 404—see below for details). These discussions, along with numerous other debates about space, time, motion were a driving force during the French Enlightenment. They remained a powerful stimulant to philosophical theorizing in the 1770s and 1780s, when Kant forged his magisterial “critical” system of philosophy, an approach that almost single-handedly set the philosophical agenda of the early nineteenth century. Hence Newton’s influence on the eighteenth century did not take the form of a single philosophical program or movement; instead, it was the controversial nature of his ideas and methodology that drove much of the philosophical discussion.