José Celestino Mutis and Newtonianism in New Granada, 1762–1808

Basing his monograph on newly discovered documents, Molina-Betancur compels us to appreciate the plurality of meanings that the term ‘Newtonianism’ could take. He achieves this by looking at the reception of Newton’s ideas from the vantage point of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, rather than from a European perspective. This book not only sheds new light upon Celestino Mutis’s intellectual world, but it is also an eye-opening contribution on rather broad issues concerning the relationships between science and empire.

Niccolò Guicciardini, University of Milan, Italy
This book presents the process of circulation and adoption of Newtonianism in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia) in the eighteenth century by examining José Celestino Mutis’s lectures at the Colegio del Rosario between the 1760s and 1770s. Mostly famous for his botanical activities as director of the botanical expedition, Mutis lectured the first course of mathematics ever created in New Granada on his arrival in Bogota in 1762, in which he included several lectures on physics that encompassed multiple aspects of his interpretation of Newton’s experimental physics.
Sebastián Molina-Betancur is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy) where he studies the circulation of science in the Spanish colonies between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. He has been lecturer of history of science and history of philosophy at the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia).