FONTENELLE, BERNARD LE BOYER (BOVIER) De. - THE PROGRAM OF THE ENLIGHTMENT

Preface.

Paris, Jean Boudot, 1702. 4to. Without wrappers. Extracted from "Mémoires de l'Academie des Sciences". Année 1699. With the fine engraved frontispiece and the titlepage to the volume. (22) pp.. Stamped in blind on the 2 first leaves, in margins.

First appearance of Fontenelle's famous program for the philosophy of science of the Enlightment, stipulating the nature of scientific research in terms of the analytical geometry.

"From 1699 to 1740 Fontenelle devoted himself almost exclusively to his task of editing the Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences . . . avec les mémoires de mathématique et de physique pour la même année, tirés des registres de cette Académie. The volume for the year 1699, which appeared in 1702, opens with an untitled preface usually called "Préface [sometimes "Discours préliminaire"] sur l’utilitë des mathématiques et de la physique et sur les travaux de l’Académie (the paper offered), which contains essential material on the philosophy of science and is a sort of bridge between Descartes’s Discours de la méthode and Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. Here one finds the first literary expression of the idea of the interdependence of the sciences and of the constancy of the laws of nature."

Order-nr.: 44534