What Does it Mean to be an Empiricist? Empiricisms in Eighteenth Century Sciences

Siegfried Bodenmann teaches early modern history at the University of Zurich. He was trained as an historian and philosopher, with emphasis on the history of science and knowledge. He is currently researching the forms and rhetorical styles of scholarly communication in the eighteenth century. He has published several articles on the subject in the Revue d’Histoire des Sciences and in Dix-Huitième Siècle , but also, for a broader audience, in Physics Today . Other publications investigate the emergence of a scientific identity like his miscellany on myths, heroes, and symbols in the history of science. He is one of the scientific editors of the correspondence of the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler. He has been an advisory board member of the Swiss Society for the History of Medicine and Sciences and the 2006 prize winner of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaften und Technik (DGGMNT) among other memberships and distinctions.

Anne-Lise Rey, agrégée in Philosophy, is associate professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Lille I. In 2003, she defended her thesis on Leibniz’s dynamics at the Sorbonne, Paris, under the direction of Michel Fichant. She defended her habilitation thesis on the epistemological practices and natural philosophy un the eighteenth century, supervised by P.-F. Moreau, at the Lyon ENS in 2013. She has published numerous articles on the relations between science and philosophy in Leibniz and on eighteenth century natural philosophy. She has also edited a collective work entitled Méthode et Histoire , dealing with methods in history and philosophy of science. She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in 2012-2013. In 2016, she published a French translation of the correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, including an extended introduction on the notion of action in Leibniz’s dynamical thought.