Three French Newtonians and Their Leibnizian Background

Abstract

At the end of seventeenth century, a scholar was called a Newtonian when he followed the intentions of Isaac Newton’s paradigm of thinking. This paradigm emerged as a counterargument to the Cartesian tradition of philosophy and science (Leibniz included), and it was first restricted to the English islands. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Newtonians were also spoken of on the European continent, among them Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Voltaire and Émilie Du Châtelet. In the following article, I will analyze how the expansion of Newtonianism changed the meaning of the term Newtonian. For this purpose, I will examine the influence of Leibniz on the three scholars and demonstrate that their most distinctive ideas resulted from an intensive and original study of Leibniz’s system. As the subject of the analysis, I will focus on the problem of Newton’s attractive force, and describe the ideas of Maupertuis, Voltaire and Du Châtelet as contributions to bridging the primary gap between Leibniz and Newton. I will argue for an understanding of this process as an overarching movement that encompasses both physics and metaphysics. In the subject of physics, the Newtonians paved the way for a development of Newton’s physics toward what is referred to as Newtonian physics or classical mechanics. In metaphysics, they prepared the Copernican turn of Immanuel Kant.