Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant

This extended new edition offers a multifaceted insight into a period of intellectual history in the West in which the balance between speculative theories and experiential science was reset. As is well known, the interrelationship between philosophy and science underwent a profound change in the early modern period, in the course of which the sciences freed themselves from the conceptual framework of traditional metaphysics. The contributions of the volume focus on the eighteenth century, the critical and quite contradictory final phase of this process.

The volume distinguishes itself by tracing this transition process not only in the obvious case of the new mechanics - Newtonianism and analytic mechanics - but also by addressing new speculative philosophies of nature - early modern atomism or imponderable physics - and new metaphysical controversies such as the body-mind problem (Can matter think?) as well as developments in special scientific fields such as cosmology/astronomy and natural history.

The volume is written by historians of philosophy and the sciences of the early modern period and is intended primarily for specialists and students in these fields of knowledge. However, it is certainly also interesting and useful for cultural historians working on this period.

Extended edition of the book "Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant", first published in 2001 Discusses structure and dynamics of linkage between philosophy and sciences in the age of Leibniz, Newton and Kant Highlights developments in philosophy and transformation of different branches of sciences in the early modern period

Auteur
Wolfgang Lefèvre taught philosophy in connection with history of science at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 1994 Senior Scholar and now Emeritus scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. His research is focused on the interrelations of technological and scientific knowledge in the early modern period. Recent publication: »Minerva meets Vulcan: Scientific and Technological Literature - 1450-1750 (2021).

Contenu

Introduction.- 1. Disciplinary Transformations in the Age of Newton: The Case of Metaphysics (Alan Gabbey).- 2. Leibniz' Concept of Possible Worlds and the Analysis of Motion in Eighteenth-Century Physics (Hartmut Hecht).- 3. The Limits of Intelligibility: The Status of Physical Sciences in d'Alemberts Philosophy (François De Gandt).- 4. In Nature as in Geometry: Du Châtelet and the Post-Newtonian Debate on the Physical Significance of Mathematical Objects (Aaron Wells).- 5. Order of Nature and Order of Science (Helmut Pulte).- 6. Samuel Clarke's Annotations in Jacques Rohault's Traité de Physique, and How They Contributed to Popularising Newton's Physics (Volkmar Schüller).- 7. "Feigning Hypotheses: non-Newtonian Approaches to Gravitation - Euler and Le Sage (Maria de Paz).- 8. Kant on Extension and Force: Critical Appropriations of Leibniz and Newton (Eric Watkins).- 9. Enlightenment Scotland's Philosophico-Chemical Physics (David Wilson ).- 10. Materialistic Theories ofMind and Brain (Ann Thomson ).- 11. Kant's Second Paralogism in Context: The Critique of Pure Reason on Whether Matter Can Think (Falk Wunderlich ).- 12. Cosmological Constellations: Varieties of Cosmology Available to Kant in 1755 (Stephen Howard).- 13. Natural or Artificial Systems? The Eighteenth-Century Controversy on Classification and its Philosophical Contexts (Wolfgang Lefèvre ).- 14. Beyond Newton, Leibniz, and Kant: Constrained Motion and New Conceptual Foundations, 1740-1800 (Marius Stan).- Appendix 1.Newton's scholia from David Gregory's Estate on the Propositions IV trough IX Book III of his Principia.- Appendix 2. The Concepts of Immanuel Kant's Natural Philosophy (1747-1780): A Database Rendering their Explicit and Implicit Networks.