TITLE:
D’Alembert: Between Newtonian Science and the Cartesian Inheritance
AUTHORS:
Agamenon R. E. Oliveira
KEYWORDS:
History of Mechanic, History of Mathematics, French Enlightenment, Philosophy of Enlightenment
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.6 No.4,
December
6,
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper is a tribute to the tercentenary of
d’Alembert’s birth. It studies the way how d’Alembert (1717-1783), with his
Cartesian education, assimilated and developed Newtonian science. His
Cartesianism involved the conception of the intelligibility and rationality of
the principles of knowledge. His discovery of Newtonian science determined the
direction of his work, with the laws of dynamics and gravitational attraction,
as well as the mathematical-physics approach to mechanical problems. However,
d’Alembert’s work is not just a mere development of Newtonian physics, but a
real conceptual reorganization of mechanics, using differential and integral
calculus formulated by Newton (1642-1727) and Leibniz (1646-1716).