This paper examines Maupertuis’s Essay on Cosmology and its reception by three authors in the 1750s: H. S. Reimarus, A. P. de Prémontval, and I. Kant. It argues for the significance of Maupertuis’s physico-theological views for the German philosophical milieu. Specifically, it will be shown that his critique of traditional physical proofs, account of Newton’s role in their elaboration and his new emphasis on teleological principles expressed in the laws of nature have had decisive consequences on Kant’s perspective of 1755 and on the decline of the movement. If Maupertuis’s opponents tend to interpret his principle of least action as another physico-theological approach still indebted to the tradition he pretended to discard, Kant grasps the novelty of his views. Without endorsing his principle, Kant takes up some of Maupertuis’s central arguments and elaborates a novel cosmological perspective in the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.
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