Physics and figuration in Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique

Abstract

For philosophers and scientists as well as the non-specialist reading public, Newtonian science presented a model of conceptual clarity and methodological purity. Even if Newton's prestige was not enough to save the word “systeme” from its negative connotations, for d'Alembert, Newton “gave Philosophy the form it should preserve.” To the notion that Newton had brought philosophy to definitive perfection one can frame several sorts of replies, and for a number of commentators, aspects of his method and textual practice are problematic, especially as they intersect with specific historical circumstances and institutions. Margaret C. Jacobs goes so far as to assert that “the Newtonian version of the Enlightenment looks increasingly like a vast holding operation against a far more dangerous rendering of Enlightenment ideals.” In France, Newton's experimentalism achieved high prestige, but other emphases shifted. French thinkers tended to adopt Newton's insights in mechanics and optics, but tried to fit them into other conceptual frameworks. One can find the effect of what I. B. Cohen calls “the Newtonian style,” or mathematicization of the natural world, in Condillac and d'Alembert, but the lingering influence of Descartes, among other factors, prompted a greater tolerance for hypothetical thinking and a continuing concern with explanatory principles in natural philosophy, as opposed to an acceptance of the inexplicable functioning of phenomena. There are few philosophical “purists” in eighteenth-century France.