The Enlightenment View Of The Mathematician D’ Alembert

D’Alembert lived in the Age of Enlightenment,an era of rapid social change.With his talent and social practice,he communicated closely with the great thoughts of that time,and showed great interest in mathematics,physics,philosophy and society,and made some achievements.His maturity period coincided with the climax of the Enlightenment Movement,and he deeply participated in the Enlightenment movement.Focusing on D’Alembert,we can go deep into the rational spiritual core of the Enlightenment Age,this paper introduces D’Alembert from multiple perspectives,takes D’Alembert’s mathematical pursuit as the main line,connects his social practice in the Academy of Sciences,the Encyclopedia Movement and the Republic of Letter,and tries to show D’Alembert’s enlightenment view and thus the rational core of the Enlightenment movement.Influenced by the French rationalist tradition and Newton’s thought,D’Alembert tends to explain the laws of motion in a more abstract way than Newton’s method.In Traité de dynamique,he developed a method to simplify and abstract the motion of objects into the world of geometric analysis,and explained the laws of motion from a more abstract geometric perspective.As he faced other problems in the academy,he tried to find ways to apply his principles by introducing subjects to the world of mathematical abstraction.This kind of mathematical certainty and analytical thinking mode that introduced everything into the mathematical world influenced his later practice.He built a new knowledge classification system based on mathematics in the Encyclopedia and abstracted the New Republic of letter from the literary world.All of his scientific and social practices are trying to find a way to introduce the objects that he deals with into mathematics,he believes that once this method is found,certainty will follow,and the progress brought by it is predictable,so his ultimate pursuit is to obtain a complete network of knowledge and principles through mathematical simplification and abstraction,so as to explore the final principles.D’Alembert also faced many hesitations and doubts under the guidance of this idea.In order to understand his enlightenment practice,only by truly returning to the trend of the Enlightenment movement and returning to the mathematician D’Alembert’s practice and the choice of applying rational tools can we provide some useful ideas for the truth of Enlightenment rationality.