 If we attempt to understand Newton’s work from an historical point of view, however, a more complex conception emerges. When Newton published his principal works, he was not contributing to a well-established field, he was helping to create modern mathematical physics. This meant that few of his ideas, methods, or approaches, whether in mathematics or in experimental physics, could be taken for granted. From his first papers in the early 1670s, on optics, until his last days working on the third and final edition of his magnum opus the Principia decades later, philosophers, mathematicians and experimenters challenged Newton’s approach. This frequently upset Newton, who had a famous, lifelong aversion to intellectual debate and controversy. But in a sense, it helped to ensure the importance of Newton’s ideas for philosophy. Obviously, Newton never wrote a philosophical text on the order of Descartes’s Meditations, Locke’s Essay, or Spinoza’s Ethics. He never produced what the lumières who studied him would have called a “system” of philosophy. But the intense controversies produced by his mathematical, empirical and philosophical methods and ideas continually prompted him to broach philosophical topics (Janiak 2015). As a result, he was widely considered a leading philosopher throughout the Enlightenment. In the first modern history of philosophy, Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, Newton plays a central role in discussions of the modern era (Volume 4.2: 639-55). He is also a central figure in D’Alembert’s discussion of the emergence of modern science and philosophy: Newton is listed along with Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz as a key figure in the Preliminary Discourse (80-83).