Is it Interesting to Qualify as Resentment Some Episodes of the Priority Quarrel Between Leibniz and Newton? Reflexions on Psychological Aspects in History of Science

• Autores: Jean Dhombres
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 6
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Because the priority quarrel between Leibniz and Newton about Calculus is certainly one which lies at the foundation of History of science as a specific intellectual domain, it has received as many explanations as there are different ways of telling what science means, including some nasty nationalists biases. A very surprising aspect is that the two protagonists never met, but exchanged letters from 1676 onwards, the quarrel beginning around 1700 only, but having lasted far after Leibniz' death in 1716. It was still being mentioned as an important issue in textbooks a century later. However, during the XX th century, most historians or epistemologists avoided what they despised as « psychological factors » because they wanted to rely on positive facts only. And rare are literary essays or novels having used this quarrel as a subject, where resentment may be understood as an artistic reaction to the creation of Calculus, and a sense of personal property. What I wish to explore is not another investigation of the documents we know about Leibniz and Newton, as we are in a good situation nowadays after the publication by Derek T. Whiteside of Newton's Mathematical Papers, and even after the publications of Newton's works on alchemy or on prophecies. I don't wish to study resentment in this case as distortion between real motives and claimed universal values as they were called by social studies on science, due particularly to the importance of mathematics in both cases. It seems to me that was then changed was the idea a creator had about his intellectual property compared with what such a creator used to have earlier in the old Republic of Letters ? How were the young Academies of science, in Paris and London, to play a part in the organization of (national) resentment ? How was religion (both authors were protestants) to play a part by possibly giving charge for someone to oppose scientific atheism ?