# Space and Emilie du Chatelet

## February 24th, 2020

- Pre-class scribblings:

        How brilliant the blues and seas
        The copper bronze and trees
        So green the void itself slept
        And I slept the yellow sick

        Off from my soul; we rise
        To take the tide and cast
        The colors over all, remind
        The gray world of the auburn skies

        But in the fever, the light it all
        Seems sunbled up and wrong
        and yet
        The mended soul sees them collapse
        From demons into God's old chaps
        The purple, yellow, gold and green
        Gilding the seen and unseen

- So, there's no class on Wednesday; instead, I'll post 2 things on Canvas for you to look at
- Next week, we'll start reading Hume; read section I-IV for that
    - The 2nd blog posts have been graded; argument analyses, again, have been going slow due to personal issues but you'll get it back before the midterm
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- Okay; today, we read Emilie du Chatelet, and it's the 1st time I'm teaching this particular essay of hers!
    - Before we talk about her, we need to cover some stuff from Leibniz and Newton and Locke that we *didn't* read to understand where she's coming from
    - "Chatelet is fascinating; she's a French aristocrat in the mid-1700s who gets a very good formal education, marries an older husband, has an affair with Voltaire (which her husband was apparently fine with?) and tragically dies fairly young in childbirth"
        - While raising kids *and* having a super-famous relationship with Voltaire, she's also writing philosophy papers for fun - and she translated Newton's entire "Principia" into French so she could teach it to her son, and wrote a textbook for him about it - and excerpts from that are what we're reading now!
        - She also translated a famous English political philosopher (Mandeville), along with a ton of other stuff
    - "du Chatelet is especially known for trying to synthesize Newton's physics and Leibniz's metaphysics, and in doing so she criticizes Newton and Locke"

- So, let's talk about some John Locke background
    - He says that "simple ideas" come directly from our senses (we can't choose not to have them)
        - In Book II, chpt. 4, par. 2, he says the simple idea of solidity and resistance leads to the idea that bodies take up space, and then introduces his idea of "pure space" (the space where no body is)
    - We then construct complex ideas from these, either by combining them, comparing them, or "abstracting" them - we only talked about the 1st one
        - In II. 13, Locke says space is one of these ideas, and sees it as similar to Newton's "absolute space," the objective receptacle holding all matter that *actually exists in itself*
    - "The important part here is that Locke thinks we get an idea of space empirically"

- Leibniz tries to argue against this in his 3rd letter to Clarke, saying that, by the PSR, there's no reason for the grid to be in a particular place - and that arbitrariness conflicts with the PSR!
    - This may seem abstract - "why does this matter?" - but it has *deep* implications for thinking about reality; Newton thinks the universe's position can be arbitrary, while Leibniz thinks it needs a reason
    - In his 4th letter, Leibniz sums this up in his idea of the "identity of indiscernibles," saying that nothing in the universe is exactly identical; things always have to differ somehow in position, chemical makeup, etc.
        - Leibniz says the reason 2 things are different is at least in part because they occupy different spaces relative to each other
            - We won't read it, but Leibniz wrote a book called "Monadology" where monads are the basic building blocks of reality (and essentially are his version of Spinoza's substances, with slight differences)
            - Leibniz believes every individual monad is affected by *every* other monad in existence - and location relative to the rest of the monads is a part of this!
                - In this sense, he believes the entire universe could be derived from a single monad if we fully understood all the causes acting upon it
    - So, Leibniz gives relative positioning as an alternative to absolute space

- Alright, let's turn to du Chatelet
    - In the preface, she tries to argue that science *needs* hypotheses as a sort of "scaffolding" that we build off of to make progress in science
    - In chapter 1, she states the there are some principles that must be innate, like the PSR, the identity of indiscernibles, and the principle of non-contradiction
        - Locke thinks these are only abstractions from experience, but du Chatelet thinks we instead need these principles to gain knowledge in the first place
    - In chapter 5, she then begins to attack absolute space; in section 74 she uses Leibniz's same argument, using the PSR - and she claims we know this reality not from our experience, but by applying these basic principles
        - The point is that we get the concept of space empirically, and it's useful as a hypothesis, but it contradicts the PSR that we know to actually be true

- Okay, time to go! Don't come to class on Wednesday, and goodbye!