Émilie Du Châtelet against fatalism

ZORRILLA, NATALIA LORENA

Seminario; International Society of Intellectual History Online Seminar: Women in Intellectual History 22-23; 2022

International Society of Intellectual History

Émilie Du Châtelet’s (1706-1749) interest in the philosophical problems surrounding the concept of freedom is displayed not only in her correspondence but also in her essay Sur la liberté / De la liberté, whose authorship had been previously attributed to Voltaire. In it, she seeks to refute various fatalist objections in order to show that we are free and that we have an incontrovertible inner feeling of said freedom. My aim in this paper is to explore Du Châtelet’s concept of freedom in De la liberté and specifically the reconstruction and refutation she offers of the objections of her philosophical rivals: the fatalists. I argue that this reconstruction is at least partially inspired in a clandestine manuscript, attributed to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, titled Traité de la liberté [de l’âme], and that her De la liberté can be understood as a critical response to this text. Comparing key passages from both works, I examine the way in which Du Châtelet targets the Traité de la liberté’s fatalist arguments, some of which employ Pyrrhonian strategies to undermine our confidence in our inner feeling of freedom and to present it as inherently deceptive. Fontenelle’s objective in this text is to defend a form of materialist determinism and to argue that God’s prescience is incompatible with the existence of free actions. In my presentation, I reflect on the reasons why Du Châtelet sought to distance herself from this form of materialist fatalism and why she decided to exclude De la liberté from her Institutions de physique. I believe exploring the different intellectual circuits where Du Châtelet intervened, and specifically her engagement with clandestine philosophical literature, can help us understand her philosophical position on freedom and the mind-body problem at this particular stage of her intellectual production and also contrast it with her later works.