"Eine Neigung vor die neuere Gelehrsamkeit": Johann Christoph Gottsched and the translation of Fontenelle's Entretiens (1726-1751)

This article offers a study of Johann Christoph Gottsched’s translation(s) of Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). It examines the actions Gottsched performed on and around Fontenelle’s work, demonstrating how, through an extensive array of paratextual devices condensed into a pervasive network of footnotes, the Gespräche von mehr als einer Welt (1726) embedded a distinct treatise of natural philosophy running parallel to the main text. In addition, what follows illustrates that, when situated alongside Gottsched’s translation of the Digression des Anciens et des Modernes (1688, trans. 1730), these interventions directly challenge Fontenelle’s periodisation of the history of science. While the latter conceptualised Cartesian philosophy as the watershed between the ancients and the moderns, Gottsched consistently advances a narrative of continuity that harks back to authors from antiquity and medieval times. In mediating between Fontenelle’s materialism and Wolffian rational psychology, the account emerging from Gottsched’s translations and corpus of works allows for a specific form of progress in natural philosophy, which is rooted in developing the faculties of the soul rather than in the progressive accumulation of experience.