Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe: love as an existential and creative force in Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article the author considers the letters of Émilie Du Châtelet, an eighteenth-century woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist. The central argument of the paper is that Du Châtelet’s letters leave traces of the process of becoming a femme philosophe, while also throwing light in her involvement in the scientific, philosophical and cultural formations of the early modern period. In this context Du Châtelet’s personal letters carry inscriptions of love as a creative force of life and are tightly intertwined with her ‘laboratory letters’, her correspondence with important mathematicians and scientists of her times. In thus making connections between ‘the personal’ and the ‘scientific’ in Du Châtelet’s correspondence, the paper sketches a feminist critical perspective on a plane of thinking around love as an existential force in its interrelation with mathematics, science and philosophy.