Du Chatelet and Kant

This book offers the first full-length consideration of Émilie du Châtelet and Immanuel Kant. Connections between these two figures have thus far been neglected despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in Du Châtelet and her work. This book explores Kant’s direct engagement with Du Châtelet in his first published work and examines the extent to which Kant was influenced by key features of Du Châtelet’s work, such as her theory of space and time, her distinctive version of idealism, and her account of mathematical objects as partly dependent on our faculty of imagination. By putting these philosophers in dialogue on such topics as fire and subtle matter; the nature of causation; scientific hypotheses; the constitution of matter; mathematical truth; and time and change, this book becomes a must-read for those interested in the history and philosophy of science.