Life and Work
Buffon has a somewhat paradoxical place in the history of science as well as in the history of philosophy: on the one hand, his relevance can hardly be contested, given the wide circulation of his work until the end of the nineteenth century, the variety of topics he addressed, and the multiplicity of ideas and new notions he introduced. On the other hand, his reputation as a scholar was soon overshadowed by the literary dimension of his work, which earned him fame as a talented scientific communicator, and by his taste for speculative systems whose influence was seen as non-existent. In recent decades, however, historians have gained a better, more exact appreciation of Buffon’s role in Enlightenment thought.
Born in Montbard (Burgundy) on September 7, 1707, in a family of magistrates, Buffon soon showed a precocious interest in mathematics, notably for probability and calculus. His first works in this area (including his well-known solution to the problem that became...
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Schmitt, S. (2021). Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707–1788). In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_634-1
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