William R Newman

Biographic Data

ID952811
NAMEWilliam R Newman
GIVEN NAMESWilliam R
FAMILY NAMENewman
SIGNATURENEWMAN W R
AFFILIATIONSIndiana University Bloomington
ORCID0009-0007-6723-5452
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS45
TOTAL CITATIONS60
AUTHOR COUNT42
EDITOR COUNT3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1983
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX4

  • Traditions of Analysis and Synthesis

    Open AccessWilliam R Newman, Jutta SchickoreBOOKArchimedes2025

    This Open Access book explores the ways in which multiple disciplines are understood by using analysis and synthesis as experimental and conceptual tools

  • Daniel Sennert’s Evolving Views on Transmutation: An Assortment of Puzzles

    William R NewmanARTICLEEarly Science and Medicine2025

    Daniel Sennert’s views on the metallic transmutation promised by alchemy developed over time, shifting from the skeptical position of his earliest writings to a confirmed belief that he acquired by the 1610s. Despite a shrinking pool of empirical support after the publication of his De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu in 1619, the mature Sennert never abandoned his belief in the chrysopoeia or metallic metamorphosis …

  • A Reply to the Four Reviewers

    William R NewmanARTICLEEarly Science and Medicine2021

  • T ara N ummedal . Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany

    Open AccessWilliam R NewmanARTICLEThe American Historical Review2021

    In this masterful study, Tara Nummedal exposes a previously vilified figure of local German history to sympathetic new scrutiny and in the process, opens a window onto the fantastic worldview of her subject. Anna Zieglerin, known to more modern audiences as Schlüter Ilsche or Schlüterliese, was executed by fire in Wolfenbüttel in the winter of 1575. Five of her associates met an equally grisly death that included breaking on the wheel, beheading,…

  • Newton the Alchemist

    Open AccessWilliam R Newman, William NewmanBOOKNewton the Alchemist2018

    When Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, the legendary physicist suddenly became “the last of the magicians.” This book unlocks the secrets of Newton's alchemical quest, providing a radically new understanding of the uncommon genius who probed nature at its deepest levels in pursuit of e…

  • Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire"

    Open AccessWilliam R Newman, William NewmanBOOKNewton the Alchemist2018

  • Johann de Monte-Snyders in Newton’s Alchemy

    Open AccessWilliam R NewmanCHAPTERNewton the Alchemist2018

    This chapter focuses on self-proclaimed adept Johann de Monte-Snyders or “Snyders” as Newton usually calls him, who increasingly influenced Newton from the mid-1680s onward. More than any other figure, Snyders fits the picture of a wandering adept who would drift into town, perform a transmutation or two, and then mysteriously disappear. In order to illustrate the way in which Newton tailored the writings of Snyders to fit his own conception of t…

  • Robert Boyle, Transmutation, and the History of Chemistry before Lavoisier: A Response to Kuhn

    William R NewmanARTICLEOsiris2014

    In an influential article of 1952, Thomas Kuhn argued that Robert Boyle had little or no influence on the subsequent development of chemistry. This essay challenges Kuhn's view on two fronts. First, it shows that Johann Joachim Becher developed his hierarchical matter theory under the influence of Boyle and then transmitted it to the founder of the phlogiston theory, G. E. Stahl. Second, this essay argues that transmutational matter theories were…

  • An Introduction toChemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

    Matthew Daniel Eddy, Seymour H Mauskopf et al.ARTICLEOsiris2014References: 10

    The essays in this volume collectively cover the development of chemistry in the “early modern world,” that is to say, from the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century. Until comparatively recently, this period was of less interest to historians of chemistry than the succeeding era of the emergence of “modern” chemistry, with its familiar chemical elements, compounds, and equations. But recent research, exemplified by the essays of this …

  • What Have We Learned from the Recent Historiography of Alchemy

    William R NewmanARTICLEIsis2011Cited by: 7References: 12

    Over the last two decades a new scholarship on alchemy has emerged, leading to a fundamental reformulation of knowledge about alchemists and their activities. We now know that medieval and early modern alchemists employed experiment in concert with theory to demonstrate the existence of stable "chymical atoms," which were thought to combine with one another according to a hierarchical theory of matter. Employing laboratory-based analysis and synt…

  • Eloge: John Murdoch, 10 May 1927-16 September 2010

    William R Newman, William NewmanARTICLEIsis2011

  • How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: A reply to Chalmers

    Open AccessWilliam R NewmanARTICLEStudies in History and Philosophy…2010Cited by: 5

  • Evidence and Interpretation in Studies on Early Science and Medicine

    Edith Dudley Sylla, John Emery Murdoch et al.BOOKEvidence and interpretation in…2009

    For Renaissance Aristotelian natural philosophers, ideally knowledge was certain and based on syllogistic demonstration. Many Italian scholars, such as Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pomponazzi, and Niccolò Cabeo, considered this ideal as inapplicable to the field of meteorology. Rather, because of the accidental nature of meteorological phenomena and the inherent irregularity of the weather, they believed that causal explanations of meteorology were larg…

  • Evidence and Interpretation in Studies on Early Science and Medicine: Essays in Honor of John E. Murdoch

    Edith Sylla, John Emery Murdoch et al.BOOKEvidence and Interpretation in…2009

  • "The Significance of "Chymical Atomism

    William R Newman, William G NewmanARTICLEEarly Science and Medicine2009Cited by: 1

    The historical treatment of atomism and the mechanical philosophy largely neglects what I call "chymical atomism," namely a type of pre-Daltonian corpuscular matter theory that postulated particles of matter which were operationally indivisible. From the Middle Ages onwards, alchemists influenced by Aristotle's Meteorology, De caelo, and De generatione et corruptione argued for the existence of robust corpuscles of matter that resisted analysis b…

  • The Chemical Revolution and its Chymical Antecedents

    William R Newman, William G NewmanARTICLEEarly Science and Medicine2008

    In 1989, the late Frederic L. Holmes published an important cor rective to the history of eighteenth-century chemistry. In the bril liantly succinct 144 pages of his Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise, Holmes argued that historians have tradi tionally placed far too much emphasis on Antoine-Laurent Lavoi sier's resounding defeat of the phlogiston theory and indeed on the chemistry of airs more generally. Such radically di…

  • Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567–1625)

    Open AccessWilliam R Newman, William NewmanARTICLERenaissance Quarterly2008

    Didier Kahn. Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567–1625).Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance 80. Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2007. x + 806 pp. index. tbls. bibl. $108. ISBN: 978–2–600–00688–0. - Volume 61 Issue 4

  • The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity

    Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, William R NewmanBOOKArtificial and the Natural2007

    Notions of nature and art as they have been defined and redefined in Western culture, from the Hippocratic writers and Aristotle of Ancient Greece to nineteenth-century chemistry and twenty-first century biomimetics. Genetically modified food, art in the form of a phosphorescent rabbit implanted with jellyfish DNA, and robots that simulate human emotion would seem to be evidence for the blurring boundary between the natural and the artificial. Ye…

  • Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity

    Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Dennis Des Chene et al.BOOKArtificial and the Natural2007

  • A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540-1602)

    William R Newman, William G NewmanARTICLEEarly Science and Medicine2007Cited by: 1

  • From Alchemy to “Chymistry”

    Open AccessWilliam R NewmanCHAPTERThe Cambridge History of Science2006

    Between the High Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline of alchemy underwent a succession of remarkable changes, both in its internal configuration and in its outward dispersion. In a word, alchemy moved from a rather marginal position as a discipline concerned mainly with mineralogy, metallurgy, and the products of chemical technology to the center of the European stage, where it became the basis for a comprehensive t…

  • Turning Up The Mould, In Search Of The Gold

    Open AccessWilliam R Newman, Pamela H Smith et al.ARTICLEMetascience2006

  • The Alchemy of Alchemy

    Walter W Woodward, William R Newman et al.ARTICLEThe William and Mary Quarterly2003

    Perhaps we have reached the point where it is time to reconsider yet again provincial society's character, the nature of the Revolution (even revisiting the old argument about its revolutionary character may be in order), and, as Downes has tried to do, unpack what is meant by democracy. We need to begin to explain how so much of the old survived and was repackaged to fit new realities. For if we asked a historian unfamiliar with the field to loo…

  • Corpuscular alchemy and the tradition of Aristotle's Meteorology, with special reference to Daniel Sennert

    William R NewmanARTICLEInternational Studies in the…2001

    (2001). Corpuscular alchemy and the tradition of Aristotle's Meteorology, with special reference to Daniel Sennert. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 145-153.

  • Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories

    Christoph Luthy, John E Murdoch et al.BOOKLate Medieval and Early Modern…2001