Ana Rodrigues - "Gender und Genre in der Aufklärung: Émilie du Châtelets reaktionäre Aneignung von Bernard de Mandevilles Fable of the Bees"
2018-12-04 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin) | N2.245, Paderborn University, Warburger Str. 100, Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, 33098
Emilie Du Châtelet’s works on morals differ in a decisive aspect from her writings on natural philosophy. Whereas the latter as the Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu or the Institutions de physique were published during her lifetime and contributed to the official scientific debate, her works on morals circulated only as manuscripts and as such were part of a different stream of Enlightenment debate. The respective writings, her translation of parts of Bernard de Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees and her Réflexions sur le Bonheur, are each closely related to the works of philosophers who are widely considered contributors to the debates subsumed under the name of ‘Radical Enlightenment’: Bernard de Mandeville and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. In her talk Ana Rodrigues will present Du Châtelet’s transformation of parts of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Though designated as a translation, the text eventually turns out an adaptation which, on the one hand, contains a radical criticism of Mandeville’s main theses and, on the other hand, formulates the foundations of her own moral and social philosophy.
