Émilie Du Châtelet on Hypotheses

Today[aut]Hagengruber, Ruth Edith, hypothesesHypothesis, hypotheses determine our scientificScience, scientific activity, and no one doubts that hypotheses are an essentialEssence, essential tool of scienceScience, scientific. This was not always the case, on the contrary. Rather, the recognition of hypotheses as a crucial element for innovation in science marked a radical change when Émilie Du Châtelet proposed hypothesesHypothesis, hypotheses as the relevant research tool, to replace by the search for causesReason. It was not only the status of hypotheses and their function that were contested. The defense of the hypothetical conjecture served to change the idea of scienceScience, scientific and consequently the idea of science’s architectureArchitecture. The epistemicEpistemic importance of principlesPrinciple, principles and observationObservation was relativized and became a control instrument for the power of imagination. Du Châtelet equates her epistemological turn with that of Copernicus[aut]Copernicus when he reversed the perspective of how to see the universe. For all these reasonsReason, the fourth chapter in the InstitutionsInstitution physiques is a core chapter of Du Châtelet’s methodology. No wonder, Du Châtelet’s chapter on hypothesesHypothesis, hypotheses was influential and found its way into the writings of d’Alembert, Condillac, Euler and Kant, and its influence continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though her authorship was faded out.