Ruth Hagengruber (ed.): Emilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton (2012)

Emilie du Châtelet was one of the most influential woman philosophers of the Enlightenment. Her writings on natural philosophy, physics, and mechanics had a decisive impact on important scientific debates of the 18th century. Particularly, she took an innovative and outstanding position in the controversy between Newton and Leibniz, one of the fundamental scientific discourses of that time.

The contributions in this volume focus on this “Leibnitian turn”. They analyze the nature and motivation of Emilie du Châtelet’s synthesis of Newtonian and Leibnitian philosophy. Apart from the Institutions Physiques they deal with Emilie du Châtelet’s annotated translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia.

The chapters presented here collectively demonstrate that her work was an essential contribution to the mediation between empiricist and rationalist positions in the history of science.

This is the first publication on this particular aspect of Châtelet studies: Founding Physics in Metaphysics – against Newton und Maupertuis’s empiricism, as well as the first publication on a woman philosopher, physicist and mathematician of the 18th century.

Publisher Springer, 2012
Volume 205 of International Archives of the History of Ideas
ISBN 9400720939, 9789400720930
253 pages

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Stephen Toulmin: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990/1992)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

Originally published by Free Press, New York, a division of Macmillan, 1990
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1992
ISBN 0226808386, 9780226808383
240 pages

review (Quentin Skinner, The New York Review of Books)

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Terry Castle: The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995)

The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times “always engaging…consistently fascinating,” has helped to revolutionize thinking about lesbian studies and eighteenth-century literature. Reenvisioning the era as peculiarly alive with complexity, in which gender, sexuality, and culture are in constant flux, she offers provocative new theories on culture and sexual identity.

This collection offers several of Castle’s liveliest essays on female identity from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle’s work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression, and sexual ambiguity. Like the mythical thermometer of the title, which was purported to measure female lasciviousness, literature is filled with devices for quantifying elements of women’s nature and sexuality which are hard to define–or uncomfortable to confront. Looking at images that mask or mystify female nature, like the masquerade or ghosts, these essays offer a challenging look at a fascinating range of issues involved in the exploration of gender studies.

The inaugural volume in Oxford’s Ideologies of Desire, The Female Thermometer foreshadows the thought-provoking and forward-looking nature of the books that will make up the series. Its revisionist version of eighteenth-century life will intrigue all those concerned with cultural studies and issues of gender relations throughout history.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1995
Ideologies of Desire series
ISBN 019508098X, 9780195080988
288 pages

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