Newtonianism and the physics of du Châtelet's Institutions de physique

In Anna Marie Roos & Gideon Manning (eds.), Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar: Essays in Honor of Mordechai Feingold. Springer. pp. 277-97 (2022)
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Abstract

Much scholarship has claimed the physics of Emilie du Châtelet’s treatise, Institutions de physique, is Newtonian. I argue against that idea. To do so, I distinguish three strands of meaning for the category ‘Newtonian science,’ and I examine her book against them. I conclude that her physics is not Newtonian in any useful or informative sense. To capture what is specific about it, we need better interpretive categories.

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Marius Stan
Boston College

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