A Gross Misrepresentation"?:Du Châtelet, Clairaut, and the Inverse-square Proportion in Newton's Law of Universal Gravity

Du Châtelet's commentary accompanying her French translation of Newton's Principia is a crucial text for studying the reception of the Principia in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, compared to her magnum opus, Foundations of Physics (1740, 1742), her commentary has received far less attention in Anglophone scholarship. In this paper, l examine Du Châtelet's presentation of Newton's theory of gravity in the commentary by situating it vis-à-vis the history of attempts to solve the problem of the lunar apse. I argue that her position was shaped by one of the most dramatic shifts in the early reception of Newton's law: Alexis Clairaut's 1747 proposal to modify the inverse-square proportion by adding a fourth-power term to the denominator, and his subsequent abandonment of that proposal in 1749. In my view, her commentary was never intended either to represent Newton faithfully or to reconstruct the path leading to his discoveries, contrary to Smith (2022). Rather, it seeks to move beyond the weaknesses in Newton's Principia, including mismatches between propositions and phenomena, unwarranted idealizations, and reliance on inconsistent data. It is, in a sense, a forward-looking document for the field of physics, rather than a summary and explication of Newton's achievements of the kind one might expect from a traditional commentary.

Qiu Lin is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University.

Before that, she was a Philosophical Review Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell's Sage School of Philosophy. Her main research areas are early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and Chinese philosophy, especially Chinese Islamic philosophy.