  At the start of this section, we mentioned that Du Châtelet is at the forefront of the emergence of the embrace of the hypothetico-deductive in scientific explorations. Some have attributed such a method to Descartes (e.g. Lauden 1981) while others have disputed this, due to his refusal to devise testing experiments and to take falsifying data seriously (McMullin 1990, 44; McMullin 2008, 98; and Sakellariadis 1982, passim). On both points, Du Châtelet departs notably from Descartes due to her very friendliness to this sort of engagement with the empirical. Nonetheless, as also mentioned above, she is somewhat out of step with her own time precisely because of her unabashed endorsement of the need for hypotheses. Moreover, her endorsement of the Aristotelian idea of hypotheses, and her belief in the systematic unity of the natural world, shows that she also embraces there being a relation between metaphysics and physics, even while she also believes that there are limits to what we can know about that relation. This is no surprise given our characterization of her above as a natural philosopher, a pre-modern stance despite her standing on the cusp of modern conceptions of hypotheses and scientific methodology. She is truly standing between two worlds, the old world of natural philosophy and the soon to emerge new world of modern science as we now know it.