Du Châtelet and Kant: Claiming the Renewal of Philosophy

n 1789, Eberhard repudiated Kant’s claim expressed in the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason to have delivered a new, namely transcendental turn in philosophy, as he was able to retrace our cognition to the origin of phenomena instead of delivering a “merely logical deduction”. Eberhard holds that there was nothing new, but all delivered in Leibniz and Wolff; to prove his claim he refers to a quote from Du Châtelet, taken from a paragraph where she determines the right understanding as to be able “to penetrate to the origin of phenomena”. This paper brings Du Châtelet into discourse with Kant via this Eberhard quote. In its first part, it investigates the use of her quote in the Kant-Eberhard controversy. The second part serves to ground the quote in Du Châtelet’s epistemology. It lays out how to understand Du Châtelet’s claim to penetrate to the origin of phenomena. Du Châtelet’s claim to have renewed philosophy must be taken seriously, and it is helpful for rethinking the German philosophical development from the rationalists to Kant through including Du Châtelet’s theory of cognition.