Le mythe de la démonstrabilité résiste-t-il encore ? Remarques sur l’orientation des réponses anonymes

Abstract

It was an incredibly topical question that the Berlin Academy set in 1763. Indeed, a number of factors came to threaten the undisputed superiority of the demonstrative method at and around the Berlin Academy in 1761. Even if the optimism raised by mathematics still prevailed, the paradigm of absolute certainty was changing imperceptibly. Cartesianism was becoming less popular and, to use Voltaire’s word, “the torch of experience” was added to “the compass of mathematics”. The pure requisite of logical deduction was deemed too demanding for human understanding. The circumspection concerning the rhetoric of demonstration is obvious in the anonymous pages of the answers to this Preisfrage: most of them are favourable to geometric evidence in metaphysics but scepticism towards inflexible mathematical demonstrations is manifest. Was pruritus demonstrandi containing the germ of the future disdain for demonstrations in philosophy?

Keywords

• certainty
• demonstrative method
• experience
• mathematics
• metaphysics
• Preisfrage of 1763