This book offers the first full-length consideration of Émilie du Châtelet and Immanuel Kant. Connections between these two figures have thus far been neglected despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in Du Châtelet and her work. This book explores Kant’s direct engagement with Du Châtelet in his first published work and examines the extent to which Kant was influenced by key features of Du Châtelet’s work, such as her theory of space and time, her distinctive version of idealism, and her account of mathematical objects as partly dependent on our faculty of imagination. By putting these philosophers in dialogue on such topics as fire and subtle matter; the nature of causation; scientific hypotheses; the constitution of matter; mathematical truth; and time and change, this book becomes a must-read for those interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Ruth Edith Hagengruber is a German philosopher, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Paderborn. She specializes in the history of women philosophers as well as philosophy of economics and computer science and is a specialist on Émilie Du Châtelet. Hagengruber is the director of the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists and founder of the research area EcoTechGender. Hagengruber’s research is dedicated to the revision of a patriarchal history, specially to the rediscovery of women’s alternative contributions to the history of philosophy and the history of economics, focusing on circle and universality based economics as an approach of inclusive economic ethics. She published on value theory in Feminist Economics and reflects on technical design from a feminist (and inclusive) point of view, such as autonomous driving, a different approach to labor, and a profound acknowledgment of creative skills ideas there.

Aaron Wells is co-editor of an online critical edition of the early Paris Manuscripts of Du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique. His relevant peer-reviewed journal articles include “Du Châtelet, Induction, and Newton’s Rules for Reasoning (European Journal of Philosophy), “Du Châtelet’s Libertarianism” (History of Philosophy Quarterly), “Du Châtelet on Sufficient Reason and Empirical Explanation” (Southern Journal of Philosophy), “Du Châtelet on the Need for Mathematics in Physics” (Philosophy of Science), “The Priority of Natural Laws in Kant’s Early Philosophy” (Res Philosophica), “Science and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Du Châtelet contra Wolff,” (HOPOS) and an invited contribution to Kant-Studien, in preparation, on “Du Châtelet, Kant, and Continuity.”