 Isaac Newton (1642–1727) lived in a philosophically tumultuous time. He witnessed the end of the Aristotelian dominance of philosophy in Europe, the rise and fall of Cartesianism, the emergence of “experimental philosophy,” and the development of numerous experimental and mathematical methods for the study of nature. Indeed, he helped to develop many of those methods. Newton’s contributions to mathematics—including the co-discovery with G.W. Leibniz of what we now call the calculus—and to what is now called physics, including both its experimental and theoretical aspects, will forever dominate discussions of his lasting influence. His impact on the development of early modern philosophy was also profound; indeed, it is difficult to grasp the history of philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without considering Newton’s role. His engagement with Cartesian ideas and methods early in his life was just as significant to the transformation of philosophy in the seventeenth century as his debates with Leibniz were to the setting of the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth. Obviously, Newton is not part of the traditional philosophy canon of the period. That fact reflects an anachronistic approach to the history of modern philosophy that we have inherited from French and German scholars of the nineteenth century. During the height of the Enlightenment, Newton was always characterized as a canonical philosopher: for instance, he plays a leading role in the very first “modern” history of modern philosophy, Johann Jacob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae of 1744. Every major Enlightenment thinker, from Diderot to D’Alembert to Kant, was influenced by Brucker’s account of modern philosophy. In tandem, numerous works on “Newton’s philosophy” and his “philosophical discoveries” were published throughout the eighteenth century in every major European language. By the early nineteenth century, however, a separation between “science” and “philosophy” had been effectuated, which led to Newton’s shunting into the science canon. Recent scholarship has challenged this conception of the canon. Moreover, Newton engaged with, or influenced, many of the standardly canonical philosophers of the early modern era, including Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant. His influence on early modern philosophy is a rich topic.