A comienzos deI siglo XVIII se origina una polémica en la Academia de Ciencias de París a propósito de la fundamentación deI calculo infinitesimal. Con motivo de la misma Leibniz presentará los infinitesimales corno ficciones útiles, noción que agrega polémica a la polémica y que habrá que precisar. Leibniz se desmarcará claramente de la idea de infinitesimal mantenida por sus seguidores franceses. Resultado de todo ello es un triunfo en la práctica deI cálculo infinitesimal y un alto en cuanto a (...) su fundamentación.In the beginning of the XVIII century arises a discussion in the Paris Academy of Sciences about the justification of infinitesimal Calculus. In this line, Leibniz will present infinitesimals as useful fictions, a problematic notion that requires an accurate meaning. Leibniz does not accept the infinitesimal concept of his french followers. The result of the controversy was a triumph for Calculus, but a pause in its justification. (shrink)

Cette contribution propose une analyse comparée de la manière dont Bernard de Fontenelle, pour l’Académie des sciences de Paris, et Samuel Formey, pour l’Académie des sciences et des belles-lettres de Berlin, théorisent le rôle et le mode de fonctionnement des académies, ainsi que leur inscription dans la catégorie générale d’histoire de l’esprit humain. Cela permet de montrer comment leur fonction épistémologique est en étroite relation avec le statut politique qui leur est conféré.

Cette contribution propose une analyse comparée de la manière dont Bernard de Fontenelle, pour l’Académie des sciences de Paris, et Samuel Formey, pour l’Académie des sciences et des belles-lettres de Berlin, théorisent le rôle et le mode de fonctionnement des académies, ainsi que leur inscription dans la catégorie générale d’histoire de l’esprit humain. Cela permet de montrer comment leur fonction épistémologique est en étroite relation avec le statut politique qui leur est conféré.

Summary This essay explores the place of natural philosophy among the patronage projects of Louis XIV, focusing on the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (or Histoire des animaux) of the 1670s, one of a number of works of natural philosophy to issue from Louis XIV's printing house. Questions particular to the Histoire des animaux include the interaction between text and image, the credibility and authority of images of exotic animals, and the relationship between comparative anatomy and natural (...) history, and between human and animal anatomy. At the same time that the Histoire des animaux contributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's management of patronage and of Louis's image, it was a work of natural philosophy, representing the collaborative efforts of the new Paris Academy of Sciences. It examined natural history and comparative anatomy in new ways, and its illustrations broke new ground in their depiction of animals in a natural setting. However, the lavishly formatted books were presentation volumes and did not gain wide circulation until their republication in 1733. Sources consulted include Colbert's manuscript memoires on the royal printers and engravers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic ExperiencePeter de Bolla (bio)Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of "aesthetics" or of "art" in the most general sense to note that the term "aesthetics" was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see Menke 40; Dickie; Eagleton]. But the force of (...) this observation in regard to the relative youth of the concept is rarely, if ever, commented upon. As many philosophers and critics have pointed out, Baumgarten's use of the term was not primarily angled at what today might be unproblematically called "artworks"—say, paintings in the European grand master tradition—since his new kind of investigation was to be a "science of sensual recognition," that is, a general inquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses. But, as is also frequently remarked, early on in the tradition of speculation now associated with "aesthetics as the study of art" the mutual attraction (to put it in the most anodyne terms) of "art" and "aesthetics" seems to have been extremely strong. As Jonathan Ree remarks, "the real begetter of the philosophical doctrine connecting the arts with the empirical senses—what we might call the aesthetic theory of the arts—was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing" [58]. From this point on (for heuristic purposes it may be identified with the date of publication of Lessing's Laokoon in 1766), artworks, which heretofore had not required a specific branch of inquiry in order for them to make sense or be conceptually grounded as art, are almost universally assumed to require "aesthetic" contemplation or appreciation.1 It is curious, then, that before 1766 such a mode of experiencing artworks had not been felt to be lacking.One might understand this observation both historically and philosophically, and both approaches, it seems to me, are needed. In the case of the first, a number of material effects conspired across mid-eighteenth-century Europe to produce what was in essence the modern art market. These include the legal establishment of copyright, first in England in 1709 but only by the end of the century in France and Germany; the foundation of various institutions whose primary purpose was the promotion and establishment of the fine arts: academies of painting, sculpture, or letters either with or without royal patronage; the public exhibition of paintings (from 1737 in France and 1761 in England); the opening of royal collections to public view (during the second half of the century in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Rome); the development of public concerts of secular music (in small scale from the 1670s in England but only becoming fully integrated in fashionable social life by mid-century); the construction of purpose-built concert venues (the Gewandthaus in Leipzig, a former cloth merchant's hall, was remodeled in 1781 in order to accommodate a resident orchestra, in effect becoming the first dedicated concert hall in Europe); the foundation of literary periodicals and review media; the emergence of social spaces and rituals encompassing polite discussion of [End Page 19] literature (coffeehouses, the construction of dedicated library rooms in domestic settings); and the promotion of architecture to a fine art through various societies, competitions, and the public display of architectural drawings in exhibition contexts (the Royal Academy yearly show included both drawings and models). These and other material conditions helped define the fine arts and construct a market in and for them.2 By the 1770s the category of the "fine arts" was well established in Britain, Germany, and France: Charles Batteux's Les beaux arts reduit a un meme principe, first published in France in 1746, was quickly translated into English as The Polite Arts; or, a Dissertation on Poetry,Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence in 1749 and into German in 1751. By 1771 a four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts had been published for the German public by J. G. Sulzer.All of this points to the fact that the concept of the "artwork" is subject to both historical and material pressures. Prior to the mid-eighteenth... (shrink)

Ce volume, paru il y a maintenant treize ans, faisait suite à un colloque tenu au Centre de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences à Paris à l’occasion du tricentenaire de la naissance du naturaliste français Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. Consacré aux relations entretenues par le grand naturaliste français des Lumières avec la Pologne, il constitue une rare contribution à l’étude des circulations de savoirs scientifiques entre la France et l’Europe Centrale et Orientale au xviiie siècle. Le parcourir, treize ans (...) après sa publication, nous invite à évoquer l’historiographie relative à Buffon et à ses rapports avec la culture de son temps. (shrink)

L’œuvre de Nicolas de Cues est à la disposition de la communauté scientifique depuis l’édition monumentale de ses Opera omnia par l’académie de Heidelberg, et un grand nombre de publications y ont été consacré. Depuis une vingtaine d’années l’intérêt pour cette oeuvre a été relancé notamment par les études du grand médiéviste Kurt Flasch, et, en France, par la thèse de J.-M. Counet et par plusieurs traductions qui mettent à la disposition d’un public cultivé toute une série de textes (...) du cusai... (shrink)

En avril 1775, alors que le ministère Turgot rencontre les plus vives oppositions et attaques et va devoir affronter les émeutes liées au prix du blé, les amis de Turgot, D'Alembert et Condorcet, sont à des postes clés de la cité savante : le premier comme secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie française, le second comme adjoint du secrétaire perpétuel de l'académie royale des sciences de Paris, Grandjean de Fouchy, dont le retrait est attendu. Dans une lettre à Joseph-Louis (...) de Lagrange, alors directeur de la classe de mathématiques à l'académie de Berlin, D'Alembert se plaint que Condorcet et lui essuient des « tracasseries » à l'Académie des sciences. Au même moment, Mme Grandjean de Fouchy, demande à D'Alembert six mille francs pour éviter l'expulsion de leur logement. Comment ces différents événements interfèrent-ils ? (shrink)

Vers la fin du XVIIe siècle, les dictionnaires expriment bien l’embarras général devant le terme « sensation ». Ainsi Furetière, en 1690, définit la sensation comme « Action des sens, ou plutôt de l’âme, qui est émue par les impressions qu’ils ont souffertes. La plus grande difficulté de la Philosophie, poursuit-il, est d’expliquer la sensation, comment les objets corporels peuvent agir sur l’âme qui est spirituelle. » Quatre ans plus tard, le dictionnaire de l’Académie française exprime lui ..

An outdated geography supplies the bond among the thirty‐one articles in Sur les traces des Cassini. In the seventeenth century, when the Italians Gian Domenico Cassini and his nephew Giacomo Filippo Maraldi were born in Perinaldo, north of Genoa, their birthplace belonged to the County of Nice. Hence the rationale of building a set of papers on astronomy in the south of France around Cassini I and his family, which for four generations ran the Royal Observatory in Paris.Over half (...) the articles concern the Cassinis, mostly Cassini I and his great‐great‐grandson and namesake Cassini IV. There was also a Cassini V, Henri de Cassini, who countered the family genius and stamina by preferring botany and dying early, of the same outbreak of cholera that took the life of Sadi Carnot, without having created Cassini VI. He had already entered the Academy of Sciences with a push from his father. “I dare to beg of you [Cassini IV wrote to his fellow academician A. M. Ampère] to consider whether this unique situation in the history of letters, [a family's] devotion to the sciences for five successive generations and 170 years, ought not add some weight to the scientific credentials of my son.” It is hard to refuse the children of important alumni.The portion of Traces dealing more directly with astronomy in the south of France gets off to a distant start. Pytheas of Marseilles, who lived about 350 b.c., sailed to the Orkneys and the Baltic and earned himself the reputation of a liar back home for his stories of midnight suns and frozen lakes. He measured the latitude of Marseilles, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the size of the earth. Ptolemy praised him. Strabo did not: “Pytheas lied about everything and covered it up with his knowledge of astronomy and numbers.”No traces worth following up were laid down for just under two thousand years. Then, in 1580, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc first saw the light of day. He lived in Italy for four years as a very young man, deepening his knowledge of astronomy and human nature and meeting the main future actors in the Galileo affair: Galileo himself, Bellarmine, and Matteo Barberini . At his center in Aix‐la‐Provence, Peiresc made many useful astronomical observations, some in collaboration with Pierre Gassendi. He died in harness, worrying about the change of the obliquity since the days of Pytheas.There follow articles on Provençal astronomers who determined longitude and latitude at sea, on neglected observers in Languedoc who assisted the cause of the Enlightenment, and on modern observatories in the south of France. The political circumstances after the defeat of 1870–1871 favored decentralization of astronomy away from the Paris Observatory. In Italy, too, recent political events—the unification of 1870—made a restructuring of astronomical institutions desirable and possible. But whereas France had too few observatories, Italy had too many. Georges Rayet and Pietro Tacchini, both astrophysicists, compared the circumstances in their countries and made mutually reinforcing proposals to their colleagues and governments. Their respective proposals, most of which were enacted, called for reassigning some Italian observatories to meteorological work, building new observatories in Besançon, Bordeaux, and Lyon, and refurbishing older ones at Marseilles and Toulouse. Once again, as in the days of Cassini I, Italy made a decisive contribution to the practice of astronomy in France.Sur les traces des Cassini mixes slight and weighty work, admits antiquarian and broader approaches, offers new documentation, displays pertinent illustrations, and does it all at a high level of scholarship. Since, because of its title, the book's primary audience probably will be people interested in the Cassinis, its fullest articles about them may usefully be mentioned here: Anna Cassini on Cassini's brief return to Italy, 1694–1696; Claude Teillet on the provincial life and poetry of Cassini IV; Christiane Demeulenaere‐Douyère on the Cassinis and the Académie des Sciences; Fabrizio Bonoli and Alessandro Braccesi on Cassini I's astronomical work in Bologna, with full bibliography; and Monique Pelletier on the Cassini map of France, on which she has written a book . Pytheas and Peiresc are the subjects of collaborative articles by Simone Arzano and Yvon Georgelin. (shrink)