As part of the Colloquium in Philosophy at Paderborn University, Pierpaolo Betti will present a talk on April 23, 2026, (04:00pm) entitled “Du Châtelet and Kant on Speculative Newtonianism.” The colloquium serves as a platform for the presentation and discussion of ongoing research in philosophy, bringing together students, faculty members, and international guests in a shared academic exchange.

Abstract: This paper explores the influence of Du Châtelet’s Institutions physiques (1740–42) on Kant’s early natural philosophy. While recent scholarship has shown that both authors adopted a critical stance toward Newton’s ideas, little research has been devoted to comparing their responses to the Newtonian paradigm. Yet, as early as 1749, Kant expressed sincere appreciation for Du Châtelet’s work in his treatise on living forces. In this paper, I examine Du Châtelet’s and Kant’s critiques of the speculative strand of Newtonianism that goes back to the Opticks and was further developed by Newton’s followers. More specifically, I compare their objections to John Keill’s highly influential account of matter and attraction, which played an important role in shaping eighteenth-century speculative Newtonianism. On the basis of the similarities in their arguments, I contend that Du Châtelet’s critical engagement with Keill’s work informed Kant’s early dynamical theory of matter. This paper thus highlights the often-overlooked yet crucial role of Du Châtelet in the German reception of Newtonian ideas.

About the Speaker: Pierpaolo Betti is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists at Paderborn University. He currently works on the commentary for the historical-critical edition of Émilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique. His research focuses on early modern philosophy, particularly the interplay between the history of metaphysics and the history of science. He received his PhD from KU Leuven in 2025, where his dissertation examined the development of the concept of the monad in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in relation to the early reception of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monadology.