Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval

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André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (born February 16, 1716 in Charenton , † September 2, 1764 in Berlin ) was a French mathematician and philosopher .

Live and act

His original name was Le Guay, fell out with his father because he did not want to become a lawyer or a priest, and lived in Paris as a math teacher. He gave public lectures and was successful in them and with his treatises. As a schoolboy he published a pamphlet in 1735 in which he attacked Catholic teaching and since he also started a relationship with a schoolgirl, the daughter of the well-known mathematician Pigeon d'Osangis, he had to flee Paris in 1746. With his student Marie Anne Victoire Pigeon d`Osangis (1724–1767) he went to Geneva and Basel , where they converted to the Protestant faith and married in 1746. Both taught in Switzerland. They were penniless and led an unsteady wandering life in Germany and the Netherlands (he published memoirs in The Hague in 1749) before his wife became a reader at Wilhelmine von Hessen-Kassel through the mediation of Maupertuis (who knew her father). In 1752 they moved to Berlin , where they stayed until their death and ran an educational institution. There he taught, for example, Adelheid Amalia Countess von Schmettau , the daughter of Field Marshal Samuel Graf von Schmettau and Maria Johanna Freiin von Rüffer, who lived in Berlin in 1761/62., And his wife was a reader for Prince Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig of Prussia .

According to Formey's obituary, he did not have a simple character (he was prone to paranoia) but worked hard, which also ruined his health.

Thanks to Maupertuis' support, he had been a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in the Philosophical Class since 1752 . They were mentioned in Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste . Diderots came into contact with Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval through his interest in mathematics, so he attended a number of his lectures in Paris in 1738.

Works (selection)

  • Cause bizarre ou Pièces d'un procès ecclésiastico-civil. (1755)
  • Le Diogène de D'Alembert on Pensées libres sur l'Homme. Berlin, Schneider, (1764)
  • Discours on various notions préliminaires à l'étude des mathématiques. (1743)
  • Discours on the nature des quantités que les mathématiques ont pour objet. (1742)
  • Discours sur la qualité du nombre. (1743)
  • Discours sur l'utilité des mathématiques. (1742)
  • L'esprit de Fontenelle on Recueil de pensées tirées de ses ouvrages , La Haye, P. Gosse et Paris, Vincent, (1744), (1755) and (1767).
  • Le hasard sous l'empire de la Providence. (1754)
  • Lettres contre le dogme de l'eucharistie tel qu'il est enseigné par l'Église romaine adressées en 1735 au fameux P. Tournemine jésuite .
  • Mémoires , La Haye, 1749.
  • La monogamy or L'unité dans le mariage. , La Haye, P. Van Cleef, 1751, 3 vol.
  • Panagiana Panurglca or Le faux évangélîste. (1750)
  • Pensées sur la liberté. , 1750
  • Préservatifs against the corruption of the French language in general. (1761)
  • Vues philosophiques ou Protestations et déclarations sur les principaux objets des connaissances humaines. Amsterdam, (1757), 2 volumes, Berlin, 1761.
  • Various treatises in the anthologies of the Berlin Academy

literature

  • Jean Henri Samuel Formey: Éloge de Prémontval . In: Histoire de l'Académie royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres pour l'année 1765 . Berlin, (1767), pp. 526-540.
  • Anne Baillot : Pyrrhonism and politics in the Academy of Sciences around 1750, in: Anne Busch, Nana Hengelhaupt, Alix Winter (eds.): French-German cultural spaces around 1800, Berlin intellectuals around 1800, Volume 2, BWV- Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2012 , P. 27ff
  • Clémence Couturier-Heinrich: Herder's translation from Prémontval's Contre la Gallicomanie in the letters for the promotion of humanity , in: Karl Menges. Wolf Koepke (Ed.), Herder-Jahrbuch, Weimar 2010, pp. 37–46

Web links

CERL thesaurus

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Letters and texts from intellectual Berlin around 1800  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / 141.20.126.175  
  2. ^ Gallitzin Foundation
  3. ^ Consortium of European Research Libraries
  4. ↑ Gansel, Carsten; Siwczyk, Birka: Gotthold Ephraim Lessings - Minna von Barnhelm - in the school cultural area (1830–1914): Consequences for the enrichment compensation in cases of forgery. V&R Unipress, (2011), ISBN 3-899-71600-0 , p. 170
  5. ^ J. Assézat, Œuvres complètes de Diderot . Paris, Garnier, 1875. Vol. 6, p. 70.
  6. ↑ Furbank, Philip Nicholas: Diderot. A critical biography. Secker & Warburg, London (1992), ISBN 0-436-16853-7 , p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Le Guay de Prémontval, Pierre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Guay de Prémontval, André-Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1716
PLACE OF BIRTH Charenton
DATE OF DEATH September 2, 1764
Place of death Berlin