Among other issues in fundamental physics, she took strong positions (that partially accord with Leibniz) on the nature of space, time, and creation: Ostensibly seeking to provide instruction in physics to her three children, du Châtelet penned her magnum opus, the Foundations of Physics, which summarizes her philosophical views. (Voltaire apparently did not appreciate it when du Châtelet sided with Leibniz in their disagreements.)

She devoted herself to philosophical, mathematical, and scientific study, discoursing on physics and “natural philosophy” with Voltaire (who was her lover) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749)Īccording to the philosopher Ruth Hagengruber, Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, was concerned with no less than “the re-examination of the Bible, the rewriting of Newtonian physics, and also with outlining a new methodology for philosophy and science.” An aristocrat married off to a marquis at the age of eighteen, du Châtelet was one of the few women schooled in calculus. Read a review of one definitive English translation of Conway’s deeply metaphysical text here. Thus, every spirit has its own body and every body has its own spirit. This image, this spirit, is retained in some body which is the seed of our brain, and that is how a certain spiritual generation-as it were a spiritual giving-birth-occurs in us. Thus, when we remember something, we see within ourselves its image, which is the spirit that came from it when we looked at it from the outside. Similarly, memory requires a body in order to retain the spirit of the thought otherwise it vanishes, as a mirror-image vanishes when the object is removed. Why not? Because all reflection depends on a certain darkness, and that’s the body. If our thoughts didn’t have body, we couldn’t retain them or reflect on them. These thoughts are our inner children, and they divide into masculine and feminine-i.e.

Some philosophers have said that thoughts are not mental substances but merely states of or events in minds, which are substances but I contend that thoughts are genuine creatures, each of its own kind, and that they have a true substance appropriate to themselves. Capturing Conway’s frustrations with Cartesian dualism, this treatise, originally published in Latin, describes a unique metaphysics that sees mind and body as inextricably commingled, with differences between them emerging only gradually or incrementally. Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy is a highly original work and one well ahead of its time.

Mary wollstonecraft philosophy