ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the presentation of concepts in Boucharlat’s differential calculus, taking as a guide, on the one hand, Marx’s criticism and, on the other hand, the 1886 version of Boucharlat’s book which includes a revision of the treatment of differentials by Hermann Laurent. Before examining the concepts of differential calculus in Boucharlat, it is interesting to carefully read his short preface in which he presents a periodization of the history of differential calculus, a periodization on which Marx had to rely. It is not possible to compare the history of the differential calculus of Boucharlat-Marx with that of Laurent, because the latter purely and simply eliminated the preface of Boucharlat from his edition of the Elements. Before establishing a periodization of the history of the differential calculus and the articulation of the different conceptions, it is necessary to examine one by one the concepts of the differential calculus to see the movement that can connect the different approaches.
