Emilie du Chatelet's Metaphysics of Substance

Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (3):477-496 (2018)
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Abstract

Much early modern metaphysics grew with an eye to the new science of its time, but few figures took it as seriously as Emilie du Châtelet. Happily, her oeuvre is now attracting close, renewed attention, and so the time is ripe for looking into her metaphysical foundation for empirical theory. Accordingly, I move here to do just that. I establish two conclusions. First, du Châtelet's basic metaphysics is a robust realism. Idealist strands, while they exist, are confined to non-basic regimes. Second, her substance realism seems internally coherent, so her foundational project appears successful.I have two aims in this paper. Historically, I show that du Châtelet's main source of inspiration was Christian...

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Marius Stan
Boston College

Citations of this work

Du Châtelet's Causal Idealism.Fatema Amijee - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-22.
Science and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Du Châtelet contra Wolff.Aaron Wells - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):24–53.
Du Châtelet on Sufficient Reason and Empirical Explanation.Aaron Wells - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):629-655.
Du Châtelet on the Need for Mathematics in Physics.Aaron Wells - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):1137-1148.
Du Châtelet, Induction, and Newton’s Rules for Reasoning.Aaron Wells - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):1033-1048.

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