The Call for Submissions for the 2026 Du Châtelet Prize in Philosophy of Physics is now live, with a deadline of September 1. The topic is Newton's Principia.

This year marks the 300^th anniversary of the third edition of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. To celebrate this, we invite submissions on any philosophy of physics topic arising from the Principia and its reception. 

As is well known, Newton’s Principia immediately gave rise to intense philosophical debates (such as those found in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence), ongoing discussion, interpretation, and re-interpretation (such as in Du Châtelet, Kant, Mach, and so on), and a re-visiting of the foundations and methodologies of Newton’s theory in the wake of Einstein’s theories of relativity. Present-day Newton scholarship continues to cover a wide terrain, uncovering and examining Newton’s sources, inquiring into his metaphysics, epistemology, and methodologies, probing the conceptual foundations of his mechanics and gravitational theory, and assessing the widespread reception and influence of his work. We are pleased to welcome submissions engaging with any aspects of Newton’s Principia and/or its ongoing philosophical legacy.  

The winner will receive $1000, an invitation to participate in a workshop on the topic of this year’s prize, and an invitation to have their paper considered for publication in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. The prize is open to graduate students and to scholars within 5 years of PhD as of the submission deadline. Submissions must not exceed 10,000 words.The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2026, (midnight GMT). For more details of the prize and of submission requirements, see below.

Committee

The members of this year’s prize committee are:

·      Zvi Biener, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. Zvi has published numerous papers on Newton and Newtonianism, and is co-editor with Eric Schliesser of Newton and Empiricism (Oxford University Press, 2014).

·      Mary Domski, Professor of Philosophy, The University of New Mexico. Mary has authored multiple papers on Newton, and her book Newton’s Third Rule and the Experimental Argument for Universal Gravity was published in 2022 by Routledge.

·      Steffen Ducheyne, Professor of Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Among his many publications are The Main Business of Natural Philosophy: Isaac Newton’s Natural-Philosophical Methodology (Springer, 2012) and Physics in Minerva’s Academy: Early to Mid-Eighteenth-Century Appropriations of Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy at the University of Leiden and in the Dutch Republic at Large, 1687–c.1750 (Brill, 2025).

·      Andrew Janiak, Professor of Philosophy, Duke University. Author of Newton as philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2008), editor of Newton’s Philosophical Writings (Cambridge University Press 2004, 2014), and co-editor with Eric Schliesser of Intepreting Newton: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Andrew’s most recent book is The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

·      Kirsten Walsh, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. Kirsten has published multiple papers on Newton’s methods including his use of hypotheses and his experimental philosophy, most recently “Definitions, Axioms and Newton’s Proofs by Experiments,” in Peter R. Anstey and David Bronstein (eds.), Definition and Essence from Aristotle to Kant (Routledge, 2025).

Workshop

A workshop honoring this year’s prize winner, and including talks by members of the committee, will be held at Duke University on Tuesday November 17, 2026. If you would like to join the mailing list to receive registration information for this workshop, please email Katherine Brading at katherine.brading@duke.edu.

Submission requirements

·      Submissions must be in English

·      Submissions must be prepared for blind review

·      Submissions must be no longer than 10,000 words in length, including footnotes and references

·      Submitted work must be unpublished and must not be under consideration for publication