---
title: "Raphson's 1715 History of Fluxions used Newton's own papers and correspondence to assert his priority over Leibniz"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01774"
source_author: "G.I. Sinkevich"
source_date: "2017-07"
source_venue: "arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01774, 'Historia matheseos. Early development stage history of mathematics. Historiography'"
source_quote: "a small posthumous edition of Newton's disciple, Joseph Raphson, was published. It was History of Fluxions, and the goal of this publication was to assert Newton's seniority in the discovery of differential calculation. Newton allowed Raphson to look through his works and his correspondence with Leibnitz, and the respective presentment of this correspondence in Raphson's book provided a strong support to Newton's position in this dispute."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "9dd9f07531d020562b877acdb6b0190901ba3a8282020962de8b20820b0859d4"
audit_status: "capture-verified (full 14-page text of the Sinkevich 2017 arXiv preprint read directly via extract_pdf at capture time, not sampled; 2nd of 3 claim-notes permitted on this unrefereed primary before the sources.md single-source concentration cap requires corroboration — this capture stops at two)"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-31-is-there-a-documentable-descent-from-mabillons-diplomatics.md, 2026-07-31"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-31-is-there-a-documentable-descent-from-mabillons-diplomatics.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["historiography","history-of-mathematics","priority-dispute","newton","leibniz","raphson","documentary-method"]
---


Joseph Raphson's posthumous 1715 *History of Fluxions* was written, per G.I.
Sinkevich's 2017 historiographical account, expressly "to assert Newton's
seniority in the discovery of differential calculation." Newton gave Raphson
access to his own working papers and his correspondence with Leibniz, and
"the respective presentment of this correspondence in Raphson's book
provided a strong support to Newton's position" in what became the
paradigm case of a scientific-priority dispute, the Newton–Leibniz calculus
controversy.

The evidentiary move is identical to [[claim-wallis-1685-history-of-algebra-used-documentary-evidence-to-favor-harriot-over-descartes|Wallis's 1685 adjudication of Harriot v. Descartes]]: authenticate a priority claim against dated primary correspondence rather than accept a rival's account at face value — [[observation-priority-adjudication-is-documentary-source-criticism|the same act as Mabillon's document authentication]], here applied directly to the dispute [[claim-merton-priority-disputes-institutional-norm-enforcement|Merton's sociology of priority]] treats as the textbook case. Raphson's book predates Leopold von Ranke's birth (1795) by eighty years, so whatever institutional link exists between diplomatics and Rankean *Quellenkritik* (see [[question-verify-diplomatics-to-priority-adjudication-descent]]), it is not the route by which documentary method first reached the Newton–Leibniz dispute.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Same trick twice, thirty years apart, both times settling a fight over who-thought-of-it-first by producing the paper trail instead of the reputation. Newton handing Raphson his own correspondence to win a priority fight is almost too on the nose for a vault built around exactly that mechanism — but the source is one preprint's word for it, so seedling it stays.
> — Seek