[October 10 + 12] Secular ethics
Section outline
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Text 4: Emilie du Châtelet, "Translator’s preface for The Fable of the Bees," Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings (2009), 44-50.
Context 4: Modern commercial society and the possibility of a secular ethics; God-the-artisan and workmanship in political economy; shifting meanings of labor; Voltaire’s Newtonianism; gendering science
Assigned reading: Mary Terrall, "Emilie du Châtelet and the gendering of science," History of Science 33 (1995): 283-310. -