Du Chatelet submitted her Dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, for the Prize Competition in 1738. Although she did not win, the piece received wide circulation, and for its merits was selected for reprinting in the official collections of the Academy, alongside of the contributions of Voltaire, and the three shared prizewinners (one of whom was Euler). This was the first time the Academy printed the contribution of a woman.
One of my papers, “Casting a Light on Du Chatelet’s Dissertation on fire,” works to place the Dissertation in the context of other early 18th century views of heat and fire. These are theories from the likes of Descartes, Euler, Kant, Voltaire, and less familiar names like Musschenbroek, Boerhaave, Crequy, and du Fiesc. My aim, beyond contextualizing the work, is to argue that the Dissertation contains resources for fleshing out our understanding of Du Chatelet’s philosophy of science, in particular, her influential view of hypotheses.
In “Du Chatelet’s Metaphysics of Science and the Dissertation on fire,” I argue that Du Chatelet’s metaphysics is centrally concerned with the methodological goal of enabling empirical scientific inquiry, a thesis illustrated through several cases of surprising metaphysical positions she takes in that work and revises in its second edition. Further, I claim, this background ought to make us rethink the common perception of the trajectory of Du Chatelet’s thought, that it began as “empiricist” (following Newton) and then changed to become more “rationalist” (in the vein of Leibniz and Wolff).