Abstract
In an early draft of her translator’s preface for Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–49) changed a passage that read “the unfairness of men excluding us from literature” to “excluding us from the sciences.”1 To her the choice seemed significant. Then and now, however, the differences are not so obvious. To reason, to narrate, and to persuade are skills shared by the practitioners of both disciplines, whether in the eighteenth or the twenty-first century.
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Notes
Judith P. Zinsser, “Entrepreneur of the ‘Republic of Letters’: Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, and Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees,” French Historical Studies 25.4 (2002): 622–3.
Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (New York: Penguin, 2007), 152–3.
Lettres de la marquise Du Châtelet, ed. Theodore Besterman, 2 vols. (Geneva: Institut et musée de Voltaire, 1958), vol. 1, 117.
Voltaire, Letters on England (New York: Penguin, 1980), 71–2.
On the historiography of science, see for example: Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Peter Dear, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Toward a Heuristic Narrative for the Scientific Revolution,” Configurations 6.2 (1998): 173–93;
Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity that Illusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003).
On epistemology and language, see for example: Mary Hesse, “The Explanatory Function of Metaphor,” Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980);
Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Allan Franklin, “The Epistemology of Experiment”; and Geoffrey Cantor, “The Rhetoric of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
And the now classic Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Voltaire, Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation, in Les Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Oxford, UK: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991), vol. 17, 31.
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Discours sur les differentes figures des astres (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1732), 10, 45.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover Publications, 1979 [1730 ed.]), 41–42.
Herman Bøerhaave, Elements of Chemistry, trans. Timothy Dallowe, 2 vols. (London: J & J. Pemberton; J. Clarke, A. Millar, J. Gray, 1735), vol. 1, 85, 112–14, 122.
The most pertinent section of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric is Part III, section 8, entitled “Common Topics.” See Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H. C. Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1991). There are studies of the use of classical rhetoric; see for example, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2001).
Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
For this essay, I have used the categorization in Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Zinsser, J.P. (2011). Du Châtelet and the Rhetoric of Science. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_9
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