Abstract

This is a very impressive piece of philosophical scholarship, in the best tradition of French-language studies in the history of philosophy and science in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. Its theme is Leibniz’s philosophy of science, which, François Duchesneau contends, is at bottom a doctrine of method in the seventeenth-century manner of Descartes. Leibniz’s philosophy of science, however, is as antithetical to the principles of Cartesian science as to those of the “experimental philosophers,” from Boyle and Hooke to Locke and Newton. If Leibnizian science was all but eclipsed by the powerful legacy of Newton and his followers, Leibniz’s philosophy of science, Duchesneau argues, has a special relevance for contemporary discussions of the respective roles of theory and observation, the status of theoretical entities, and the logical structure of scientific theories.