Brading Katherine - Émilie du Châtelet and the foundations of physical science

milie Du Chtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science

The centerpiece of milie Du Chtelets philosophy of science is her Foundations of Physics, first published in 1740. The Foundations contains epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, mechanics, and physics, including such pressing issues of the time as whether there are atoms, the appropriate roles of God and of hypotheses in scientific theorizing, how (if at all) bodies are capable of acting on one another, and whether gravity is an action-at-a-distance force. Du Chtelet sought to resolve these issues within a single philosophical framework that builds on her critique and appraisal of all the leading alternatives (Cartesian, Newtonian, Leibnizian, and so forth) of the period. The text is remarkable for being the first to attempt such a synthetic project, and even more so for the accessibility and clarity of the writing. This book argues that Du Chtelet put her finger on the central problems that lay at the intersection of physics and metaphysics at the time, and tackled them drawing on the most up-to-date resources available. It will be a useful source for students and scholars interested in the history and philosophy of science, and in the impact of women philosophers in the early modern period.

Katherine Brading is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. She works primarily on philosophy of physics from the late 16th century to the present day. She is coeditor of Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections (2003).

Routledge Focus on Philosophy

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Forthcoming titles:

Human Kinds

A Philosophical Defence

Marion Godman

Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-Being

Richard Kim

The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment

John Michael

milie Du Chtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science

Katherine Brading

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Katherine Brading

First published 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brading, Katherine, 1970 author.

Title: milie du Chtelet and the foundations of physical science / Katherine Brading.

Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge focus on philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051315 | ISBN 9781138351653 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Du Chtelet, Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise, 17061749. | Women physicistsFranceBiography. | PhysicistsFranceBiography. | Women mathematiciansFranceBiography. | MathematiciansFranceBiography. | PhysicsEarly works to 1800. | MathematicsEarly works to 1800. | Du Chtelet, Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise, 17061749. Institutions de physique.

Classification: LCC QC16.D86 B73 2019 | DDC 530.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051315

ISBN: 978-1-138-35165-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43517-1 (ebk)

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by codeMantra

To my family Mark, Thomas, and Matthew Peter, Penelope, and Liz

In the spring of 2014, as I pondered the philosophical problems left unsolved in the wake of Newtons Principia, I picked up the Institutions de Physique of Gabrielle milie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Chtelet. There, I found a text that addressed exactly the questions I was interested in. Within a few weeks, a group of interested students and I had formed, including graduate students in the History and Philosophy of Science Program and the Philosophy Department, as well as a graduate student in French and an undergraduate student in French and History, at the University of Notre Dame. We set ourselves up as an official graduate seminar, with the goal of translating and reading the Institutions chapter by chapter, week by week. It was an exciting semester of adventure and discovery. By the end of it, we had a rough translation of almost all the chapters and sections not already translated by Isabel Bour and Judith Zinsser, and had read the entirety of the text cover to cover. We knew enough to know that this is an important text in the history of philosophy.

The seminar participants were Bohang Chen, Jamee Elder, John Hanson, Lynn Joy, Lauren (LaMore) Montes, Anne Seul, Phillip R. Sloan, Monica Solomon, Jeremy Steeger, Eric Watkins, and Aaron Wells, and we had visits from Andrew Janiak, Michela Massimi, Lydia Patton, and Marius Stan. We were excited to learn about Janiaks joint project on Du Chtelet with Karen Detlefsen and his plans for the as-yet unnamed Project Vox website. Something was in the air, and the moment seemed right. In April 2015, we followed up on the work of the previous semester with a workshop, to which we invited Judith Zinsser. I am grateful to Judith for her unstinting support from that event onwards. Fittingly, we concluded the April workshop by attending a Notre Dame production of Voltaires Candide. By this time, evidence of wider interest in recovering Du Chtelet as a philosopher in her own right was growing, with workshops and conferences beginning to appear. When a moment such as this arises, we should seize it, and we should remember that such moments cannot arise without all the work that has gone before. Particularly important for Du Chtelets philosophy in her Institutions is the pioneering work of Carolyn Iltis (1977) and Linda Gardiner Janik (1982) as well as more recent work by, among others, Sarah Hutton; Anne-Lise Rey; Karen Detlefsen; and Ruth Hagengruber, along with those who contributed to her edited volume (Hagengruber 2012). In addition, the first venues to welcome and promote scholarship on Du Chtelet were those which explicitly sought to recover lost female voices in the history of philosophy. I am grateful to all those who labored against the current, without whom there would have been neither the foundation on which to build todays Du Chtelet scholarship nor the venues at which to present it.