Historical-critical digital edition of the manuscript version of Émilie Du Châtelet's Institutions de physique (Ms 12.265)

The Genesis of Émilie Du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique:

From the Paris Manuscript (1738–40) to the Printed Editions (1740, 1742)

The online edition can be read here.

It is widely agreed that in the Institutions de Physique, Du Châtelet innovatively combines metaphysics and physics, creating a work that is not merely a textbook on natural philosophy, but makes important contributions to the philosophy of science. Moreover, the considerable influence of this work on later Enlightenment thinkers, both in France and abroad, is well documented. Nevertheless, no historical-critical edition of this work as yet exists. The DFG-funded online historical-critical edition of the Paris manuscripts of the Institutions de Physique will fill this gap, making early and alternative versions of this important text freely available to the public.

Through precise text-critical analysis of the complex layers of revision in the manuscript, as well as in the ensuing printed editions of 1740 and 1742, the edition reveals significant additions and alterations in content, as well as illuminating Du Châtelet’s methods and ways of working. Each major stage in the complex revision of individual chapters appears in the critical edition as a separate version, while finer-grained revisions are represented in a variant apparatus. Because the Institutions frequently refers to texts and authors that are no longer well known, the edition includes a concise substantive commentary aimed at providing useful historical information to better enable working with the text. In sum, the edition makes manifest Du Châtelet’s evolving theoretical position, which conjoins metaphysics, epistemology, physics, and the philosophy of science. And it allows readers to retrace how she gradually worked out the relationship of her own independent views to the ideas of predecessors such as Leibniz, Newton, and Wolff.

Our aim is to make the products of our editorial work in progress accessible as soon as possible. The semi-diplomatic transcriptions (see below: Textual Criticism and Transcription Conventions) and the variants will thus be published online step by step and chapter by chapter, so that the scholarly community will be able to refer to them even at an early stage of our editorial work. This will hopefully encourage further scholarly discussion. A reader-friendly version of the edition, adapted to modern French, will be provided at a later stage of the project.

This edition is funded for two years, at the end of which the complete Institutions de Physique, from the manuscript versions to the printed publications (1740, 1742), will have been fully edited in a thorough and accurate historical-critical edition. Apart from the online publication of the edition, a printed publication will be provided as well.

Further information on Émilie du Châtelet can be found here.