The certain and the probable in Émilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de physique
Type de matériel :
96
This paper highlights the stakes of the conceptualization of certainty in physics based on the analysis of the epistemic situation of the knowing subject. We first consider uncertainty as our epistemic condition and view it less as a constitutive failure than as the identity of any knowing subject. The paper then tries to show how Émilie du Châtelet works at the heart of the Leibnizian conceptual distinction between certainty and probability to elaborate a new regime of certainty.
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