La letteratura insegue la scienza. Una prospettiva settecentesca

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to study the relationship between literature and science from the point of view of Eighteenth century writers and philosophes who, having received a scientific education, tried to explain the sense of the Galileian and Newtonian world in layman’s language: the struggle for clarity – often nurtured by imagination – was part of the battle for the triumph of Enlightenment. The article analyzes Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (a seminal work but still influenced by Cartesian cosmology), the Italian translation of Lucretius by Alessandro Marchetti, inspired by the atomism of Gassendi’s physics, finally the early vulgarizations of Newton. Special emphasis is put on Voltaire’s Élémens de la philosophie de Newton and on Algarotti’s Newton for the Use of the Ladies, two very different but equally successful books. In the age of Enlightenment literature and science seemed to engage with the same problem: to read without prejudice the ‘Book of the World’ (to cite a famous expression by Galilei) and to defend the libertas philosophandi, the freedom to investigate.