Ruth Hagengruber (ed.): Emilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, enlightenment, history of science, mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, physics, science
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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