Émilie Du Châtelet

Émilie Du Châtelet made diverse contributions to physics and natural philosophy. An accomplished polyglot and sharp interlocutor, her translation of Newton's Principia remains the gold standard for translations into French more than 270 years after it was first published. Her Institutions physiques covers natural scientific and metaphysical topics in deep dialogue with both Newton and Leibniz. Her Dissertation on the Nature and the Propagation of Fire was the first work by a woman published by the French Royal Academy of Science. Her original work is widely varied and was groundbreaking at the time. She deserves to be more closely studied.

Reading Group

In order to bring Émilie Du Châtelet's works to a wider audience and increase philosophical discussion of them, TEMPO will be hosting a reading group to work through some selections of her work.

We aim to nurture a community that is engaged with du Châtelet's works, both in the hopes that participants might find an interested and informed audience at this year's conference, and with the hope that they might submit papers/panels to future iterations of the conference.

The reading group will meet once per month on Zoom from January through April to discuss selections from du Châtelet's corpus, facilitated by Domenica Romagni (Colorado State University), and Virginia Sharpe (Rutgers).

We will read selections from Zinsser and Bour's collection of Du Châtelet's writings—available from bookshop.org, Amazon, and elsewhere on the web—supplemented by Katherine Brading's translations of the Institutions physiques, available freely online.

To register for the reading group, use this form.

We'll convey more information to participants in early January, when we'll start selecting dates for the particular meetings and gauge interest in particular readings.

Please get in touch with any questions.