Professor Robert Iliffe
Professor of the History of Science
Linacre College
Rob Iliffe is Professor of History of Science at Oxford, Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and a General Editor of the Newton Project. He is the author of A Very Short Introduction to Newton (OUP 2007) and Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton, (OUP 2017), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Isaac Newton, 2nd ed. (CUP, 2016). He was editor of History of Science from 2001-8 and is currently co-editor of Annals of Science. He has published widely on topics in the history of early modern and Enlightenment science, and particularly on historical interactions between science and religion, scientific voyages of discovery, the life and work of Isaac Newton, the development of ideas about scientific genius and scientific creativity, and the role of scientific instruments in scientific innovation.
At Oxford he teaches general Undergraduate course on history of science and technology courses as well as more specialized courses on the Scientific Revolution, the history of modern physics, and the history of scientific racism and eugenics. At Postgraduate level he teaches courses on the Scientific Revolution and on Evolution and Neo-Malthusianism from 1840 to 1970.
Topics being studied by Professor Iliffe's current DPhil students include the circulation of utopian ideas within Europe from 1500-1700; Samuel Hartlib and English colonialism; the chronological research of Isaac Newton; the scientific and religious thought of Kang Youwei; the geological and ceramic projects of Alexandre Brongniart; the development of Virtual Reality technology in the United States 1965-2005.
Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (OUP, September 2017)
Newton's unusual — or even downright heretical — religious opinions were well known to a number of his contemporaries. For over two centuries the exact nature of his religious beliefs was a matter of intense debate, but by the middle of the nineteenth century it was public knowledge that he had held highly unorthodox conceptions of the Trinity. Until the early 1970s, very few of Newton's private theological researches had been made publicly available, and scholars did not determine his views with any precision. However, in the last few years millions of words from his previously unpublished religious writings have become publicly available, making it possible to offer a considered account of their content, and to assess what they tell us about the man.
In Priest of Nature, Newton scholar Rob Iliffe does just that. Tracing Newton's life from his birth though his years as a Cambridge don, his tenure as Warden and Master of the Mint, and his twenty-four years as President of the Royal Society, up to his death in 1727, Iliffe examines how Newton managed the complex boundaries between private and public professions of belief. While previous scholars and biographers have attempted to find coherence in his intellectual pursuits, Iliffe shows how wide-ranging and catholic Newton's views and interests in fact were, and in that takes issue with those who have attempted to underestimate their range and complexity.
Arguing that there is no simplistic coherence between Newton's philosophical and religious views, Priest of Nature delves into the religious writings Newton produced during his life, from his account of the sexually depraved lives of the early monks to his views about the creation of the world and the Apocalypse, and his commitment to a simple (anti-Trinitarian) doctrine that he believed had been corrupted in the first centuries of Christianity. Iliffe argues that religious commitments lay at the heart of Newton's earliest scientific research, and shows how his analysis of the techniques he used to prosecute corrupters of Christian doctrine were identical to those he used when dealing with his scientific enemies. Ultimately, Priest of Nature asserts, Newton's ambitious engagement with a tradition central to Western thought displays the same creative energy visible in his mathematical and scientific work, and despite his reluctance to follow any specific sect, he should be seen as a devout layman who made independence of thought a core virtue.
Offering novel insights into the spiritual life of Newton, Priest of Nature is both a scholarly work and a vibrant biography of one of the most influential scientists in history.
