February 2023

Dynamics and Reason: A Workshop on Du Châtelet and Kant, 9-10 February, 2023

This two-day workshop organised at Paderborn University in Germany, by the Centre for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists and the Harvard History of Philosophy Workshop, focused on the work of Du Châtelet and Kant and on historical and conceptual links between them.

I was lucky to have participated in this fascinating workshop, which offered me a lot of insights and ideas in the context of what Kant has theorised as 'enlarged thought':

While the following maxims of common human understanding do not properly come in here, as constituent parts of the critique of taste, they may serve to elucidate its fundamental propositions. They are these: (1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of every one else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought; the second that of enlarged thought; the third of consistent thought. (Kant 1991, 152)

Following Kant's maxims of 'common human understanding', I therefore thought a lot about the epistolary aspects of Du Châtelet's scientific writings, well beyond her letters, in terms of their dialogic and paedagogical traits. Indeed,  Du Châtelet wrote with real and imaginary audiences in her mind, and her major opus Institutions de Physique was written in support of her son’s education: ‘I have always thought that the most sacred duty of men was to give their children an education that prevented them at a more advanced age from regretting their youth, the only time when one can truly gain instruction’. (Du Châtelet 2009, 116)

And yet, the seemingly humble task of guiding her son’s understanding in physics, turned out to be a much more ambitious epistemological and pedagogical project:  ‘We rise to the knowledge of the truth, like those giants who climbed up to the skies by standing on the shoulders of one another’ (ibid. 118-19) she wrote, while preparing the grounds of explicating Descartes, Newton and Leibniz and at the same time pointing to the weaknesses of their respective theories. This was not a problem for du Châtelet’s philosophy of knowledge: ‘Each philosopher has seen something, and none has seen all; no book is so bad that nothing can be learned from it, and no book is so good that one might not improve it’. (ibid. 122) Science education in this light could only advance through hypotheses, experiments and gradual understanding, a long process in the development of scientific methods, but also an adventure in speculative philosophy, when physics and metaphysics inevitably met: ‘there are probably some truths not made to be perceived by the eyes of our mind, just as there are objects, that those of our body will never perceive’. (ibid. 120)