History of Philosophy Research Group Talk (Qiu Lin, Simon Fraser)

In §77 of Foundations of Physics, Du Châtelet offers an account of how we acquire the idea of extension. Later, in the chapter “On the Elements of Matter,” she invokes §77 as a premise to argue for the conclusion that “an aggregate of simple beings must be extended (§133).” In this paper, I provide a reconstruction of Du Châtelet’s argument. First, I show that existing reconstructions in the scholarship overlook an important interpretive constraint: in §77, the only faculty at work is the imagination, but for Du Châtelet, non-extended simples cannot be represented by this faculty — they can only be represented by the understanding. Second, I draw attention to a crucial detail that scholars have not yet taken into account: for Du Châtelet, human souls are simples. Finally, I offer a reconstruction of Du Châtelet’s argument in §133 that incorporates these two findings. If my reconstruction is correct, her explanation of how non-extended simples “give rise to” extended bodies is neither Wolffian nor Leibnizian, but a distinctive contribution to the history of monadologies.