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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 4
Lesson 2: Early modern- Early Modern: Locke on Personal Identity, Part 1
- Early Modern: Locke on Personal Identity, Part 2
- Early Modern: Locke on Personal Identity, Part 3
- Early Modern: Descartes' Cogito Argument
- Early Modern: Émilie du Châtelet, Part 1
- Early Modern: Émilie du Châtelet, Part 2
- Early Modern: Margaret Cavendish, Part 1
- Early Modern: Margaret Cavendish, Part 2
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Early Modern: Émilie du Châtelet, Part 2
In part 2, Andrew Janiak (Duke) further introduces Emilie Du Chatelet, a French philosopher, and her contribution to the debate about the principle of sufficient reason. This video is a part of a series of videos coming from Project Vox (Duke), a project recovering the lost voices of women philosophers.
Speaker: Dr. Andrew Janiak, Creed C. Black Associate Professor of Philosophy, Duke University.
Speaker: Dr. Andrew Janiak, Creed C. Black Associate Professor of Philosophy, Duke University.
Want to join the conversation?
- Both this video and the one before it introduce Newtonian and Leibnizian philosophy, and hardly mention Émilie du Châtelet. I don't think they represent her work very well.(5 votes)
- Hello! Your video was insightful but I would like to say that Emile was much more a philosopher which was presented here in the video. I would strongly advise you to watch the equally insightful and fascinating documentary. Here's a link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4vDGTYTCLo). Thanks for putting together such a great video, Andrew.(2 votes)
- Is philosophy cosidered a science?(1 vote)
Video transcript
(intro music) This is Andrew Janiak from Duke
University and Project Vox. This is part two to our discussion
of Madame du Chatelet. As we heard in part one, the
most interesting aspect of Madame du Chatelet's
Foundations of Physics is that she decided she would be neither a a pure Newtonian nor a pure
Leibnizian philosopher. Rather, she would forge her own path. Madame du Chatelet was fully convinced
that there was one important missing element in the Newtonian approach
to thinking about philosophy. Before we can understand it, however,
there's one thing we have to keep in mind. Isaac Newton, to us today,
was a great scientist. But in the eighteenth century,
everyone understood that Newton and his followers stood for an
approach to understanding nature. They stood for the idea, for example,
that there are forces of nature that human beings can come to understand, that these forces might act across
very, very great distances. They stood for the use of
observation and experiment. This approach to understanding nature was very different from what
we found in Descartes in the seventeenth century,
or what would be found in Newton's greatest rival, Leibniz, in the
beginning of the eighteenth century. So with that background,
let's think more about Madame du Chatelet's view about what
was missing in the Newtonian system. Although Newton was correct in saying
that there is a universal force of gravity that maintains
the planetary orbits, and although he was also correct in saying
that there are three laws of motion along the lines that a physics student
would recognize today, she also thought that the Newtonians
were wrong to accept certain aspects of nature as what
we would now call "brute facts." That is, they were willing to accept
various features of the natural world as having no deeper explanation. And Madame du Chatelet believed that
Leibniz and his followers were correct in saying that we couldn't
accept brute facts. She thought we had to have some deeper explanation of the natural
world and its phenomena, along the lines required by the
principle of sufficient reason So the most important aspect of Madame
du Chatelet's Foundations of Physics is trying to find a way to use the
principle of sufficient reason to provide a deep explanation
for natural phenomena, of a kind that is missing in
the Newtonian in world. You might wonder why someone like Clarke
was missing this deeper explanation, since, in his letters to Leibniz, he did endorse the principle of sufficient reason. But from Madame du
Chatelet's point of view, he has the wrong interpretation of it,
as Leibniz had already suggested, and as a result, he really doesn't provide
a deep explanation for natural phenomena. He simply says that, well, the explanation
is they are due to the Divine Will. But the Divine Will remains inscrutable
from a Leibnizian point of view, and Madame du Chatelet
held a Leibnizian view of the principle of sufficient reason. She thought, therefore, that merely referring to the Divine
Will was not sufficient. We had to have a deeper understanding
of natural phenomena, one that would explain the reason even that God would choose to make
certain things the case. In this way, Madame du Chatelet
forged an intriguing middle path between the Leibnizian view
and the Newtonian view that was prominent in her day. And most intriguingly, finally,
in that way she actually prefigured some of the work that we would associate with Kant later
in the eighteenth century. Subtitles by the Amara.org community