DU CHÂTELET, Émilie.

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Institutions de physique. First edition of the author's elegantly printed magnum opus, which adroitly synthesized the physics of Newton with the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff. This copy is in a smart contemporary binding.The mathematician and philosopher Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) began drafting Institutions de physique around 1736. She worked from her estate, the Château de Cirey, where she had established an impressive laboratory and library. Voltaire, her lover and lifelong intellectual companion, worked with her at Cirey and published his own Newtonian commentary in 1738. Du Châtelet's superior mathematical training resulted in the more innovative Institutions de physique, published anonymously two years later. Dedicated to her son, it was "ostensibly a textbook in physics, but in reality a highly original work in natural philosophy" (SEP). Du Châtelet cautioned the scientific establishment against total acceptance of Cartesian physics and demonstrated that Newtonian physics could be integrated within a larger philosophical framework. The allegorical frontispiece depicts a female figure ascending a cloud-like stairway towards Truth; the putti above hold three cameo portraits of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, and the muses of the sciences watch from below.Institutions de physique received largely favourable reviews but caused an open controversy over the theory of forces with Dortous de Mairan, the influential secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences. Still, D

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