What is there left, then, for Euler’s philosophical standpoint? He was a deeply religious man, a devout Protestant of Baselian stock, and unwilling to commit himself to the teachings of any of the philosophes of the day, let alone to recommend any of them to his youthful student. Euler also refutes both idealism and materialism (letter 96), egoism (letter 97), and skepticism or “pyrrhonism” (letters 117–118).
He ridicules Wolff (whom he had once met in Marburg) by reporting that he compared humans to machines (letter 79). Wolffianism, at large, was anathema to Euler.
Euler describes Leibniz’s notion of preestablished harmony ( harmonia praestabilita) as a solution to the mind–body problem but rejects it as absurd (letters 82–83). The monads were largely irrelevant for him, and in their Wolffian formulation, seriously flawed (letters 125–132). Despite being a student of Johann I Bernoulli, a firm supporter of Leibnizian calculus, Euler was no admirer of Leibnizian philosophy. Euler borrows Descartes’s concept of an all-pervading ether to explain electrical phenomena (letters 138–150) and his notion of an even finer “magnetic matter” (letters 176–186) to explain magnetism. Euler also articulated great respect for Descartes, “ le premier des philosophes modernes,” even if he needs to point out that the Cartesian theory of the tides being caused by the Moon’s pressure was erroneous (letter n:o 63). Regarding the laws of motion and the law of gravity, he was definitively a Newtonian, even if he disagreed with Newton when it came to the theory of light (letters 18–19) and color (letters 28–32). Spanish: in 1798 (E.343 H) (no information on the last two volumes was available)Įuler’s own position can be inferred from his letters, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. Here it may be appropriate to list only the first translated editions of the three volumes up to 1800: In his list, Eneström included all 111 editions of the Lettres (including translations) known at the time. Condorcet’s edition, to which I will shortly return, was used as a basis for numerous translations. Euler à une Princesse d’Allemagne, sur différentes questions de physique et de philosophie in 1787 (E.343 4), 1788 (E.344 4), and 1789 (E.417 4). A revised version of the letters edited by the Marquis de Condorcet and Sylvestre-François de Lacroix was published in Paris under the slightly different title Lettres de M. Volumes 1 and 2, denoted by E.343 and E.344, respectively, in Gustaf Eneström’s Verzeichnis der Schriften Leonhard Eulers (1910), were first published in 1768, and volume 3 (E.417) in 1772. The letters-whose originals are lost-were published in three separate volumes in Saint Petersburg, where Euler famously had returned in 1766 after a 25-year stay in Berlin. Even if the physics involved is in part dated, Euler’s letters may captivate even the modern reader by presenting an easily accessible insight into the thoughts of one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. Among the topics discussed we find, for instance, sound and music, light and color, gravitation and the tides, electricity and magnetism, determination of longitude, logic and syllogisms.
Between 17, Euler wrote 234 letters to the Princess, totaling some 1000 pages of high-level science in a palatable form.
The charm of the Lettres is partly due to the clarity and simplicity characteristic of the author’s explanations of difficult issues, without recourse to formulas and equations, and partly due to his gentle mode of persuasion, the letters being addressed to an enlightened young lady of the ruling class, presumably Princess Friederike Charlotte Leopoldine Luise von Brandenburg-Schwedt (1745–1808), who was only 14 when the private course was initiated. Leonhard Euler’s well-known epistolary course in physics and philosophy, Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur divers sujets de physique et de philosophie, has since its first publication in 1768–1772 enjoyed an immense success.
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