The College Record 2022

Credit: John Cairns
The Sedleian Professors of Natural Philosophy
and Queen’s
Dr Christopher Hollings, Clifford Norton Senior
Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics
The Sedleian Professorship of Natural Philosophy is one of
Oxford’s oldest Chairs. It was founded in 1619 thanks to
a bequest to the University from the barrister and Kentish
landowner Sir William Sedley (c.1558–1618). Like the other professorships that were
founded around this time (most notably, the Savilian Professorships of Geometry and
Astronomy), the purpose of the Sedleian Chair was to provide centrally-organized
lectures in an advanced subject that was not usually covered by college teaching:
in this case, nature and the physical world. The early statutes required the professor
to lecture specifically on Aristotle’s Physics.
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Starting with the first Sedleian Professor, Edward Lapworth (1574–1636), the early
incumbents of the Chair were all physicians, who devoted the greater part of their
time to private medical practice, and have left little trace of their teaching activities.
The notable exception is Thomas Willis (1621–1675). An important figure in the
development of the understanding of the brain and nervous system, Willis ignored
the requirement to teach Aristotle, and instead lectured on his own specialism.
With the turn of the eighteenth century, the Sedleian Chair became more sinecure
than actively occupied post. The first new professor of that century, James Fayrer
(c.1655–1719), was even accused of having rigged his election. Some natural
philosophy was taught by the Savilian Professors during this period, but the
Sedleians are barely visible in University records. Among them was Joseph Browne
(1700–1767), who was Provost of Queen’s from 1756. Like the other eighteenthcentury
Sedleians, however, he had no obvious credentials in natural philosophy.
The election of the astronomer Thomas Hornsby (1733–1810) to the Sedleian Chair
in 1782 gave the post its first scientifically active occupant for almost a century.
Hornsby was a pluralist who also held the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy,
among other positions. He oversaw the establishment of the Radcliffe Observatory
in the final decades of the century.
During the years that sinecurists held the Sedleian Chair, the teaching of natural
philosophy in Oxford began to take a different turn in the hands of others. James
Bradley (1692–1762), Hornsby’s predecessor in the astronomy chair, introduced the
teaching of material from Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and by the beginning of
the nineteenth century, ‘natural philosophy’ had become a much more Newtonian
than Aristotelian subject, concerning the mathematical study of the physical universe.
When Hornsby died in 1810, the duties set out for his successor were to lecture ‘in
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