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Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet
(17 Sep 1743 - 28 Mar 1794)
French mathematician and natural philosopher.
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Science Quotes by Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet (4 quotes)
[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.
— Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet
Unpublished Manuscript. Quoted In Frank Edward Manuel and Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979, 2009), 493.
A great man, [who] was convinced that the truths of political and moral science are capable of the same certainty as those that form the system of physical science, even in those branches like astronomy that seem to approximate mathematical certainty.
He cherished this belief, for it led to the consoling hope that humanity would inevitably make progress toward a state of happiness and improved character even as it has already done in its knowledge of the truth.
He cherished this belief, for it led to the consoling hope that humanity would inevitably make progress toward a state of happiness and improved character even as it has already done in its knowledge of the truth.
— Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet
Describing administrator and economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785), i. Cited epigraph in Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime (2004), 3
If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum.
— Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet
'Histoire'. Histoire et Memoires de l’Academie Royale des Science de Paris (1788/1791), 9-10. In Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (2nd Ed., 2000), 151.
We pass by imperceptible gradations from the brute to the savage and from the savage to Euler and Newton.
— Marquis Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet
In 'Esquisse', Oeuvres, Vol. 6, 346. As cited by Frank Edward Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979, 2009), 492.
See also:
- 17 Sep - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Condorcet's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
