The Reception of Émilie Du Châtelet in the German Enlightenment

Émilie Du Châtelet casts a long and largely overlooked shadow on the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. For example, many entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie make a quite liberal and unacknowledged use of Du Châtelet’s opus magnum, the Institutions de physique (1740/42). My study focuses not on this French context, but on the largely unknown reception of Du Châtelet in the German Enlightenment against the background on the prize essay question on monads proposed by the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1745. I argue that a deeper look at Du Chatelet’s theory of matter in motion deepens our understanding of the controversy over monads, which culminated in the controversy about the principle of least action and prepared the ground for Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism.