ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Lexicon to Consensus: Tracing Newtonianism in the Encyclopedic Public Sphere

• In Event: Spaces of Science in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

This paper investigates how Newtonianism—initially a contested philosophical system—became a normalized epistemic framework through its codification in eighteenth-century encyclopedias. By tracing the linguistic and conceptual shifts surrounding Newtonian vocabulary across five major reference works—Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1732–1754), Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772), the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1771), and Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1802–1820)—the project reconstructs the process by which Newtonian natural philosophy was domesticated into Enlightenment common sense.
The analysis draws on a digital humanities methodology, combining close reading of key entries (e.g., Newtonianism, Gravity, Aether, Optics) with corpus-based techniques such as keyword-in-context searches, term frequency, collocation mapping, and topic modeling (LDA). These methods allow for a structural comparison of how Newtonian and anti-Newtonian vocabularies circulated across languages and decades.
Framed within Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, the paper argues that encyclopedias served as crucial communicative infrastructures mediating between learned science and public discourse. The fading of overtly polemical categories—“Cartesian,” “vortices,” “vis viva”—and the disappearance of “Newtonianism” as an explicit headword by the late eighteenth century can be read as the linguistic signature of consensus formation within the scientific public sphere.
The project thus provides both an empirical and theoretical contribution: it uses digital tools to visualize the Enlightenment’s epistemic transformations and reconceptualizes encyclopedias as active agents in the creation of scientific authority. The paper concludes by proposing how this European lexical model might inform comparative studies of Newtonian reception in non-European encyclopedic and educational contexts.
Keywords
Newtonianism; Encyclopedias; Enlightenment; Public Sphere; Digital Humanities; Diderot; Chambers; Zedler; Encyclopaedia Britannica
This paper would fit sessions on:
• Digital Approaches to the History of Science
• Enlightenment Knowledge Networks
• The Circulation and Codification of Scientific Language

Authors

• DERYA GURSES TARBUCK, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul

• ATABEY KAYGUN, ITU