ABSTRACT
Émilie Du Châtelet’s contributions to the history of science are hard to overestimate. This chapter starts with her feminist commitments to an ethics of belief in order to root out prejudicial ideas about women, their minds and social roles, and shows how Du Châtelet leverages her conclusions in this realm to advocate for an ethics of belief in scientific practice, too. Moreover, we see her put this epistemic stance into play on the question of the proper role of hypotheses in science, perhaps the watershed moment in the emergence of hypotheses as central in scientific method.
