Marco Storni

ArgumentIn the last decades, the notion of “economy” has gained a central importance in accounts of early modern experimental culture. Historians of economic science have primarily focused on the repurposing and recycling of materials, namely on thrift as a virtue of the skilled experimenter. In this paper, I propose to consider economy as a quality enacted by technology. As a matter of fact, technology could actualize the principles of economy in its performance, and its “degree of economy” could be measured. I argue that one of the key parameters used to quantify economy was the temporal performance of technology. To ground my view of “time thrift,” I analyze unpublished documents relating to eighteenth-century inventions based on the action of fire (cooking, lighting), scientific reports written by scientists on such inventions, as well as expert assessments on manufacturing activities also connected with the management of heat (distillation).

This paper proposes new ways of characterizing eighteenth-century French Cartesianism. Besides two widely-accepted elements—the belief in “strict mechanism” and the idea that to demonstrate in physics does not involve mathematics, but reference to mechanical models—I add two more, hitherto neglected, features. First, a strong emphasis on experimentalism, namely the view that experiments are crucial to natural-philosophical practice. Second, an epistemological thesis that I call “conjecturalism,” which consists in doubting that natural philosophy would attain an ultimate truth on the nature of things. To explore these facets of Cartesianism, I focus on the works of the Jesuit Noël Regnault.

In this paper, I analyze a momentous change in eighteenth century French life sciences. Whereas in the first half of the century the conception of natural history as the systematic collection of facts had been most successful, at mid-century a new approach emerged. This approach was characterized by an accent on general philosophical themes rather than on observation and experiment. I study the grounds and features of this historical shift through the work of Maupertuis, who published papers in institutional (or Baconian) natural history in his early years, but then adopted a more speculative approach to the life sciences.

Aujourd'hui presque oublié, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) est pourtant une figure majeure de la vie intellectuelle et institutionnelle du siècle des Lumières. Cet ouvrage se propose de renouveler l'image du savant en approfondissant certains aspects saillants de sa vie et de son œuvre, et de lui restituer ainsi la place qu'il mérite dans l'histoire de son siècle. Il s'agit notamment d'interroger la genèse et l'évolution de sa pensée philosophique, en dévoilant l'originalité de son épistémologie et de sa métaphysique. L'identité du « Maupertuis philosophe » se construit en parallèle avec celle de l'« académicien » et du « polémiste ». C'est pourquoi ce volume consacre aussi un large espace à l'étude des milieux académiques où Maupertuis travailla, à Paris comme à Berlin, ainsi qu'aux controverses auxquelles il prit part.

The digester, invented by Denis Papin in the 1680s, was a rudimentary pressure cooker used to soften hard bodies by boiling them at high pressure. In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Papin's work on the digester, arguing that his research was located at the intersection of the chemical laboratory and cooking practice. I then examine cases from the eighteenth-century European circulation of the instrument in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands in order to showcase the different practices in which the digester was embedded, including chemical research, philanthropic projects to feed the destitute, and proposals for the improvement of home cooking. The digester's history represents a key episode for demonstrating the intertwined nature of natural-philosophical research and the practice of economy or ‘thrift’. All users of the digester engaged in a rationalization of its functions through quantification, not only to fulfil a concern for precision but also to display the device's potential to reform practical daily life. The digester could save time and fuel, reduce material waste, make cooking easier and foster collective meal preparation for the needy.

The perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey is best known as a populariser of Christian Wolff’s doctrines. As of Formey’s activity in the Berlin Academy, scholars have mostly emphasized his role in the controversy over monads with Leonhard Euler, while overlooking other interesting contributions Formey presented in the “speculative philosophy” class of the Academy. In this paper, I analyse two articles Formey published in 1747 on the Mémoires de l’Académie de Berlin, namely the Preuves de l’existence de Dieu, ramenées aux notions communes and the Examen de la preuve qu’on tire des fins de la nature, pour établir l’existence de Dieu. In these texts, Formey presents some of Wolff’s methodological and metaphysical ideas, in an implicit dialogue with other members of the Academy – in particular, with the president Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis – who were also interested in metaphysics and the philosophical method. Formey reworks the Wolffian arguments as to make them more accessible, in order to promote an open confrontation over core philosophical questions. Far from adopting a controversial tone, Formey’s attitude is rather conciliatory: any disagreement, as he thinks, can be easily settled once the true method for philosophizing is made available to everybody.

Yves Simonin, a rather obscure professor of hydrography in Bayonne, submitted five scientific papers to the Paris Academy of Sciences between 1738 and 1740, which only survive in the original manuscript versions. The topics Simonin deals with in these texts are essentially three: the rectification of navigation charts of the Southern Sea, the shape of the Earth, and the heliocentric theory. Far from acknowledging Simonin's contribution to the ongoing academic debate as a valuable one, the institution systematically rejected his work. In this paper, I first provide a critical analysis of Simonin's manuscripts. As I argue, their originality lies in the adoption of the perspective of a practitioner of and expert in navigational techniques. I then investigate the reasons behind the Academy's negative reception of Simonin's papers, casting light on the expertise required to participate in academic debates in the mid-18th century, and on the limits set by the institution to the possibility of external intervention.

One of the greatest philosophical controversies of the eighteenth century was the competition organized in 1746 by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Although the specific object of the competition was the theory of monads, this particular question nevertheless referred to a deeper and more radical opposition between the two contending parties, Newtonians and Wolffians. In this contribution, we will first focus on the reasons for Newtonian opposition to Wolff’s philosophy. In this context, particular attention will be paid to the positions of Euler and Maupertuis. We will then proceed to a comparison between the positions of Wolff and Maupertuis on the crucial question of the relationship between mathematical and philosophical method. Our analysis will attempt to show the existence, in Maupertuis’s thought, of an effort to apply the mathematical method to disciplines other than mathematics itself, which will allow us to determine his opposition to Wolffian philosophy. Finally, we will clarify the affinities and divergences between Wolff and Maupertuis, trying to show that the real reasons for their opposition should be sought in their respective epistemologies and metaphysics.

The Enlightenment critique of the esprit de système and its tendency towards eclecticism have often been interpreted as symptoms of speculative shallowness. The article analyses the origins of this prejudice, with special reference to the early French Enlightenment (1700-1750). It then attempts to counter such a preconception by providing a relevant counterexample. The case study presented is that of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, usually considered a typical instance of the anti-systematic proto-positivist philosophe. In discussing his philosophy, epistemological and cosmological issues in particular are emphasized, showing how Maupertuis’ thoroughly empiricist theory of knowledge led him to apply mathematics to all domains of human knowledge in order to reduce their uncertainty. It is concluded that Maupertuis is the author of a rich and interesting work, which brings some novelty to the philosophical scene of his own times, if not to the whole history of modern philosophy.

Historians have constantly neglected Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s (1698-1759) first academic work, On the Shape of the Musical Instruments (1724). This is all the more surprising if we consider the issues it raises from both an historical and a theoretical point of view. In order to solve such issues, in this paper we will give a thorough analysis of the main stages of Maupertuis’s intellectual apprenticeship, and of the possible sources of some of his doctrines as well. We are well aware that such an operation will yield nothing absolutely certain. In the worst case, however, we will have sketched an historical-philosophical framework within which the Breton savant took his first steps: a pre-history of Maupertuis’s scientific activity, which remains still largely unknown.