Du Châtelet on Sufficient Reason and Empirical Explanation

Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):629-655 (2021)
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Abstract

For Émilie Du Châtelet, I argue, a central role of the principle of sufficient reason is to discriminate between better and worse explanations. Her principle of sufficient reason does not play this role for just any conceivable intellect: it specifically enables understanding for minds like ours. She develops this idea in terms of two criteria for the success of our explanations: “understanding how” and “understanding why.” These criteria can respectively be connected to the determinateness and contrastivity of explanations. The crucial role Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason plays in identifying good explanations is often overlooked in the literature, or else run together with questions about the justification and likelihood of explanations. An auxiliary goal of the article is to situate Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason with respect to some of the general epistemological and metaphysical commitments of her Institutions de Physique, clarifying how it fits into the broader project of that work.

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Aaron Wells
Metropolitan State University of Denver

Citations of this work

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.
Principle of Sufficient Reason.Yitzhak Melamed & Martin Lin - unknown - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Du Châtelet's Causal Idealism.Fatema Amijee - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-22.
Du Châtelet, Induction, and Newton’s Rules for Reasoning.Aaron Wells - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):1033-1048.
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References found in this work

Rationality Through Reasoning.John Broome (ed.) - 2013 - Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Understanding Why.Alison Hills - 2015 - Noûs 49 (2):661-688.

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