In this article, I provide a historical and bibliographical exploration of the handwritten, dictated commentaries (dictata) of Johannes de Raey (1620/1622–1702) on the texts of René Descartes (1596–1650), shedding light on their structure, development, and on their relations with the academic commentaries of Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Christoph Wittich (1625–1687). The study of these commentaries, which are extant as class notes, is important because they conveyed one of the first systematic teachings of Descartes’s ideas and constituted a vehicle for their (...) further dissemination across northern Europe. (shrink)

How did the relations between philosophy and science evolve during the 17th and the 18th century? This book analyzes this issue by considering the history of Cartesianism in Dutch universities, as well as its legacy in the 18th century. It takes into account the ways in which the disciplines of logic and metaphysics became functional to the justification and reflection on the conceptual premises and the methods of natural philosophy, changing their traditional roles as art of reasoning and as science (...) of being. This transformation took place as a result of two factors. First, logic and metaphysics were used to grant the status of indubitable knowledge of natural philosophy. Second, the debates internal to Cartesianism, as well as the emergence of alternative philosophical world-views progressively deprived such disciplines of their foundational function, and they started to become forms of reflection over given scientific practices, either Cartesian, experimental, or Newtonian. (shrink)

This contribution provides a transcription and translation of, and a commentary on, a letter of the German-Dutch-Japanese polymath Peter Hartzing to Gerhard Wolter Molanus, abbot of Loccum and famous collector of coins and medals. In the commentary, a survey of the life and intellectual endeavours of Hartzing is provided.

In this article I discuss a particular aspect of the Dutch reception of the ideas of René Descartes, namely the use of his Traité de l’homme by Henricus Regius. I analyze the use that Regius made of the theory of the movement of muscles, passions, hunger, and more generally of the neurophysiology expounded by Descartes in his book (not printed until 1662–1664). In my analysis, I reconstruct the internal evolution of Regius’s neurophysiology, I illustrate its sources beyond Descartes (i.e., Jean (...) Fernel and Santorio Santorio), and I show that he was certainly acquainted with some of its contents as early as 1641 (when he used it with the mediation of Descartes), before relying on it—as variously discussed in secondary literature—in his Fundamenta physices (1646), when he appropriated from it without Descartes’s authorization. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of Johannes Clauberg’s intentions in writing his Logica vetus et nova (1654, 1658). Announced before his adherence to Cartesianism, his Logica was eventually developed in order to provide Cartesian philosophy with a Scholastic form, embodying a complete methodology for the academic disciplines based on Descartes’ rules and a medicina mentis against philosophical prejudices. However, this was not its only function: thanks to the rules for the interpretation of philosophical texts it encompassed, Clauberg’s Logica was meant (...) to provide a general hermeneutics designed to put an end to the quarrels raised by the dissemination of Cartesianism. Such quarrels, according to Clauberg, were caused by the misinterpretation of Descartes’ texts in Revius’ Methodi cartesianae consideratio theologica (1648) and Statera philosophiae cartesianae (1650) and in Lentulus’ Nova Renati Descartes sapientia (1651), which criticized the apparent lack of a logical theory in Descartes’ philosophy and its supposed inconsistencies. Clauberg answers their criticisms by giving a clear account of Descartes’ logical theory and by undermining the interpretative criteria they assumed, in light of a general theory of error. Polemics over Cartesian philosophy, in this way, favored the development of a comprehensive Cartesian methodology for academic disciplines and of the first hermeneutics for philosophical texts. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to unveil the ways of teaching new philosophical paradigms in Dutch Universities between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, by means of an analysis of the uses of illustrations in Cartesian and Newtonian natural-philosophical textbooks. This analysis allows to understand the overall functions of philosophical textbooks, where illustrations act as conceptual means, filling the gap between the premise of a theory and its actual contents; didactic means, aiming to help the reader in understanding scientific models fully (...) explained in texts; promoting or propagandistic instruments, useful to present theories in a fascinating way. Eventually, I argue for a positive correlation of the use of illustrations and the introduction of new philosophies, and for the existence of non-philosophical reasons for such use: as to the propagandistic function of illustrations intended as decorative means. (shrink)

These notes contain an annotated edition of the only four extant letters of Burchard de Volder to Philipp van Limborch. In the first letter De Volder provides Van Limborch with some information about the subscription to the Dordrecht Confession of Faith by professors. In the second letter De Volder comments upon Van Limborch’s De veritate religionis Christianae. This letter is interesting as it provides insights into De Volder’s views on religion and theology. The third letter served as a cover letter (...) for De Volder’s sending to Van Limborch a copy of the honestum testimonium on Jacobus Arminius that was requested by Arminius’s widow in 1611. In the fourth letter Volder comments upon the visit that Pieter Burman had paid him. The visit was an episode in the quarrel between Pieter Burman, his brother Frans Burman jr., and Van Limborch, caused by Van Limborch’s remark, in his Theologia Christiana, that Frans Burman sr. had used Spinoza’s words while treating the issue of divine omnipotence in his Synopsis theologiae. (shrink)

The present study aims to present a transcription and a commentary of three unpublished letters of the Dutch Cartesian philosopher Johannes de Raey, addressed to his former student Johannes Clauberg. Mainly containing suggestions concerning the defence of Cartesian philosophy and academic affairs, these letters, dating back to 1651, 1652 and 1661, bear witness of a steady friendship and of a certain cooperation in rebuking the critiques moved by Jacob Revius in his Statera philosophiae cartesianae and by Cyriacus Lentulus in his (...) Nova Renati Descartes sapientia, refuted in Clauberg’s Defensio cartesiana. According to these letters, this cooperation had to be kept secret, not to provoke the reaction of Leiden theologians. However, the violation of the correspondence of Clauberg and De Raey occasioned the edition of Lentulus’s book and the rise of the polemics over the new philosophy. Eventually, such cooperation is to be noticed also in some crypto-quotations between the edited texts of Clauberg and De Raey. (shrink)

The search for an agreement between Aristotle’s and Descartes’ philosophy was aimed at making Cartesian physics acceptable in the Dutch universities by showing its consistency with Aristotelian thought. Their agreement is defended by Johannes De Raey in the Clavis philosophiae naturalis (1654), where he interprets the Corpus Aristotelicum from a Cartesian standpoint. Those Aristotelian positions which are inconsistent with Descartes’ are treated as erroneous. The Scholastic positions, moreover, are considered as distant from the true Aristotelian philosophy rediscovered by Descartes.

Raccolta di saggi sulla storia della filosofia rinascimentale e moderna.

Raccolta di saggi sulla storia della filosofia rinascimentale e moderna.

The sixth chapter focuses on the evolution of Cartesianism in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in Leiden and Amsterdam, against the background of the emergence of alternative views in natural philosophy capable of replacing it as a dominant paradigm, namely, the experimental philosophy of Robert Boyle and the mathematical-experimental approach of Huygens and Newton. The last evolution of Cartesianism is reconstructed in this chapter by considering the ‘Cartesian empiricism’ of Burchard de Volder, and the reflections on the language (...) of philosophy and practical disciplines by De Raey in Amsterdam, where he moved in 1669. In 1675 De Volder established the Leiden Theatrum physicum. There he performed experiments in order to teach the principles of a mechanical philosophy largely inspired by Descartes but open to the use of experimental and mathematical evidences in the formulation of natural laws. A similar approach was in fact assumed in the same years by Wolferd Senguerd, who used the Theatrum to perform experiments in pneumatics to teach some of the principles of his eclectic worldview, encompassing some Cartesian principles (such as that of the circularity of movement), but also rejecting the vortex theory. Yet, only De Volder developed a foundational theory for the basic principles of mechanicism, namely, the assumption that every phenomenon can be explained by the notions of matter and movement alone. This was the result of a movement internal to Cartesianism, as De Volder not only reacted (positively) to the emergence of an experimental-mathematical natural philosophy, but was also involved in the defence of Cartesianism against the Censura philosophiae cartesianae of PierreDaniel Huet (1689), in which Descartes’s metaphysics is rejected as inconsistent given its very foundation on doubt and cogito. The intermingling of these different issues resulted, in De Volder’s hands, in a further de-metaphysicisation of physics – as metaphysics cannot provide a justification for the laws of motion – and in the narrowing of the scope of foundationalism, which can only sanction the psychological character of clarity and distinction as a criterion for internal truth, defined in terms of indubitability only. Accordingly, for De Volder metaphysics cannot demonstrate, on a Cartesian basis, that phenomena are actually ruled by the principles of mechanism: insofar as, for him, metaphysics has a prominent reflective role, and loses its status as justification of the absolute truth of scientific statements. This process can be labelled as the transition from foundationalism to philosophy of science and does not characterise only his ‘Cartesian empiricism’. In Amsterdam, De Raey was, over the same years, developing his Cogitata de interpretatione (1692), embodying one of the first, self-standing philosophical considerations of language. Still maintaining his separation thesis, and attacking Hobbes and the radical Cartesians, in this text he aimed to clarify how words meaning sensory data and abstract notions (such as those of mathematics) can be used in philosophy. Rather than setting a method for how to use mental faculties, De Raey aimed, at the end of his career, to provide an updating of the linguistic meanings of scientific vocabulary, namely, a reflection rather than a justification of science. (shrink)

The third chapter gives an account of the debates over Cartesianism outlined below, which shifted from the University of Utrecht to Leiden, where the new philosophy was introduced by Adriaan Heereboord in the early 1640s, and was carried on by Johannes de Raey at the end of the decade. In Leiden, the quarrels over Cartesianism were prompted by the intervention of the theologian Jacob Revius, criticising Descartes’s philosophy as a source of Pelagianism in 1647. This gave rise to a series (...) of attacks, replies, and counter-replies which would dominate Dutch Cartesianism well into the 1650s: Revius’s Methodi cartesianae consideratio theologica (1648), Statera philosophiae cartesianae (1650), and Cyriacus Lentulus’s Nova Renati Descartes sapientia (1651) offered a full-blown critique of Descartes’s philosophy, focusing on his metaphysics, method and on their uses in academia. Such critiques are analysed in this chapter as they brought about the first foundation of Cartesian philosophy after Descartes himself, namely, the development of a ‘Cartesian Scholastic’ by Johannes Clauberg, professor at Herborn and Duisburg. In fact, Clauberg’s defence and foundation of a Cartesian academic philosophy was not the effort of one philosopher, but was coordinated with De Raey and with other members of the Cartesian network in the Netherlands and in Germany (including Abraham Heidanus, Tobias Andreae and Christopher Wittich), as a means to avoid the bans on Cartesianism and to provide a decisive answer to the theologians. This coordinated strategy of defence is revealed by two letters of De Raey to Clauberg: their contents shed light on the background of Clauberg’s foundation, which constitutes the first, Cartesian reworking of the academic curriculum. In his works, indeed, Clauberg maintained a metaphysical foundation embodying rational-theological arguments, while providing at the same time a logical theory of the method for natural philosophy, as well as for law, theology and medicine. Yet, his concerns with the traditional structure of the curriculum led him to develop, besides a Cartesian first philosophy, also an ontosophia, whose object is being as such. This is considered by Clauberg not only in the light of the ‘first notions’ of mind and body, but also of those abstracted from concrete realities, as ‘unity’, ‘goodness’, ‘truth’, and so on. This ultimately results in the reduplication of metaphysics, which will be reduced by Clauberg’s followers – dealt with in the next chapters. (shrink)

Through a consideration of the philosophical debates occurring in the Dutch and Dutch-related intellectual framework in the early modern period, in the present study some alternatives in the foundation of philosophy and science have been highlighted and analysed. In conclusion, it is time to assess them in a more systematic manner. Each alternative entails a different view on foundational arguments, which may be grouped into theological, metaphysical, and logical ones. This research reveals the essential features of a philosophical milieu created (...) by Descartes and constituting the framework for the dissemination of Newtonian science in Europe, leading to the birth of a philosophy of science as the study of the foundations, assumptions, methods, and limits of the study of natural realms. In fact, one can recognise several reasons for such foundation: on a general level, the need of providing philosophy with a secure foundation against the ‘sceptical crisis’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries highlighted by Richard Popkin. More specifically, however, the foundation of Cartesian and Newtonian philosophy and science served to defend the conceptual premises of new ways of thinking in an academic context, demonstrating the validity of such new ways and rejecting the commonsensical and non-explanatory assumptions of Scholastic philosophy, and, in the case of ’s Gravesande, the speculative character of Descartes’s physics itself. (shrink)

The fourth chapter analyses the establishment of Cartesianism at the University of Leiden in 1650s and 1660s. This was carried out by De Raey, who provided a defence and teaching of Descartes’s physics in his Clavis philosophiae naturalis (1654), although not based on Descartes’s metaphysics: physical principles, indeed, are presented by De Raey as self-evident truths, and consistent with Aristotle’s theory of scientia or universal and necessary knowledge. This was not the only peculiar characteristic of Leiden Cartesianism, as De Raey (...) also provided a differentiation between philosophical and practical knowledge (including medicine and revealed theology), as these are based on different sources of knowledge, namely, intellect and sensory experience. In the hands of Christopher Wittich, the separation thesis became the standard in conceiving the place of Cartesianism in the university, which was confined to natural philosophy in 1650s and strictly secluded from revealed theology. At the same time, the need to develop a moral philosophy consistent with the Reformed creed became the centre of the debate between Revius and Heidanus, a Reformed theologian who saw in Cartesianism a philosophy more consistent with Calvinism than Scholasticism. Accordingly, he was eager to support the appointment in Leiden of Arnold Geulincx, who was developing a philosophical ethics independent of revealed theology but consistent with the Reformed creed. For this purpose, besides the relation of body, soul and world, Geulincx considered those relations of man, world, and God from which moral duties follow. Accordingly, he provided his ethics with a foundation in rational theology. In turn, this foundation entails a reflection on the type of knowledge that constitutes physics and determines its very method. Given the inscrutability of God’s reasons in creating the world, Geulincx could claim that physics has to proceed by hypotheses based on experience rather than by a deduction of natural laws from metaphysical principles. In this way, the epistemic consequences of his foundational theory refuelled a reflection on the method of natural philosophy itself, making his foundation a sample of the transformation of Cartesian foundationalism – dominated by Descartes’s metaphysical physics – into a reflection on physics itself. In other words, Geulincx provided, together with De Raey, a de-metaphysicisation of physics. (shrink)

The fifth chapter is a study of the emergence of ‘radical Cartesianism’ as an actor’s category in 1660s and 1670s, which prompted a further development of foundationalism as a reflection on the limits and proper method of philosophy. The key figure in this double process was De Raey, who in the late 1660s started to develop a new logic or metaphysics, intended to counter, on the one hand, the uses of Descartes outside natural philosophy and metaphysics itself, and on the (...) other, the erosion of Descartes’s metaphysical tenets. His writings thus turn out to be relevant as he offers a mapping of the interpretations of Cartesianism covering its uses in theology (as by Meijer and Spinoza) and the spreading of Hobbes’s materialist philosophy in the Low Countries. Moreover, his logical-metaphysical theories embody a novelty in determining the aim of these disciplines, both with respect to the Cartesian tradition (i.e. to Clauberg and Geulincx) and to the Scholastic one, and start to assume a reflective role as they assess the limits of scientific knowledge. In his hands, logic and metaphysics become one discipline, as they have the same function, i.e. the definition of the principles of scientific knowledge (viz. the notions of physical and mental realities), and of its scope and applications. On the one hand, therefore, he can overcome the reduplication of metaphysics and ontology of Clauberg, and the introductory or didactic function that logic played both in Clauberg’s and Geulincx’s philosophy. On the other, his logical and metaphysical systematisation can be read as the result of a long-standing debate over the objects of these disciplines (either mere concepts, or entities existing outside mind), in which De Raey places himself by dealing with the theories of Burgersdijk and Ramus. This chapter thus works as a junction in the account of the establishment of Cartesianism as the philosophy of the university, and its challenges by emerging, alternative worldviews, interpretations and uses. Together, these converging theoretical and historical factors shaped a new, reflective function for logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

When was philosophy of science born? And why? This book aims to answer these questions. Simply put, philosophy of science was born in seventeenth-century Dutch universities, where the introduction of Cartesian ideas called for philosophical reflection upon the validity, method, and concepts of natural philosophy. The disciplines which fulfilled this role were metaphysics and logic. The process was neither short nor straightforward, nor – admittedly – easily grasped through such a generalisation. As a matter of fact, philosophy of science has (...) existed since antiquity, or for as long as philosophers have provided reflections on such topics. On the other hand, the institutional fragmentation of philosophical and scientific disciplines in the modern era has made it increasingly easy to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’, and for philosophers to provide reflections on the natural sciences. This book stands at the crossroads: namely, it disentangles the ways in which metaphysics and logic became functional for such reflection, and, forthwith, they began to be detached from what was labelled ‘natural philosophy’. This is the reason why this book offers a study of Dutch Cartesianism. Dutch universities were the first where Descartes’s ideas became official matter of teaching and came to reshape the function of metaphysics and logic. So that one can meaningfully ascribe the role of ‘philosophy of science’ to them, and to see this role at work in lectures, disputations, treatises. Again, this is a simplification. Philosophy of science did not appear abruptly, nor was it related only to a transformation of metaphysics, logic, and natural philosophy: its emergence coincided with a rethinking of the foundations of all philosophical disciplines. Philosophy of science appeared, first, as a reflection on philosophy itself, carried out in different disciplines. More precisely, it emerged as a renewed foundation of all philosophical disciplines, serving to guarantee the reliability of their methodologies and concepts, namely, to grant their status as indubitable scientiae. (shrink)

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the (...) production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson. (shrink)

The seventh chapter focuses on the aftermath of the decline of Cartesianism as a leading force in the Dutch academic context. After De Volder and De Raey, indeed, only Ruardus Andala in Franeker carried on the teaching of Cartesian physics (which he taught by commenting upon Descartes’s Principia) and metaphysics, mainly for the sake of contrasting Spinozism and other forms of radical Cartesianism. Thus, Descartes’s philosophy came a dead end on the eve of the eighteenth century. Yet, Leiden Cartesianism and (...) the Leiden experimental tradition (which could include, after De Volder and Senguerd, the activities of Herman Boerhaave), favoured the introduction of Newtonianism as the standard in teaching natural philosophy. This was carried out by ’s Gravesande, who used logic and metaphysics (including rational theology), that is, the chief foundational disciplines in the Cartesian tradition, to introduce students to and justify the assumptions (methodological and ontological) of a Newtonian approach in natural philosophy. This had two outcomes. On the one hand, his arguments in metaphysics (i.e. ontology) have the function of clarifying which objects natural philosophy can investigate. These are natural laws, whose ultimate source in substances or modes cannot be ascertained by intellect alone, as they depend on the power of God. On the other, given the fact that experience is our only means of grasping such laws (which are then mathematically handled) he provides a rational-theological justification of experiential evidence, as capable of providing us with a degree of certainty equal to mathematical evidence. As for the Cartesians, this is still the paradigm of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, with the introduction of Newtonianism foundational disciplines such as logic and metaphysics (including rational theology) served as a justification for and a reflection on a given scientific methodology. Thus, philosophy started to be actually detached from the natural sciences, and to assume a subservient role with respect to them, as once it was the ancilla theologiae. (shrink)

The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of the first introduction of and quarrels over Cartesianism at the University of Utrecht, as determined by the teaching of a Cartesian natural philosophy and physiology by Henricus Regius. First, it is shown how his teaching gave rise to the querelle d’Utrecht (1641), in which two main issues were debated: the rejection of substantial forms, and the characterisation of man as ens per accidens. During the quarrel, questions were raised about the consistency (...) of the new philosophy with theology and – insofar as it raised the problem of the individuation of bodies and species by substantial forms – of the unity of man. Secondly, it is shown how Regius’s peculiar approach to natural philosophy (and physiology) led him to quarrel with Descartes himself in 1645–1648, with regard to two main questions: the nature of mind, and the method of natural philosophy, which Regius interprets in both cases from an empirical standpoint, as he maintains that the nature of mind may consist in matter (according to medical evidence), and that all knowledge has a sensory origin. Accordingly, he paved the way for ‘radical’ interpretations of Descartes which rejected his metaphysics, but also for an approach to a natural philosophy more open to the use of experience. In this chapter, I scrutinise the reasons behind Regius’s approach to physics and metaphysics by paying attention, on the one hand, to his quarrel with Descartes, and on the other to the sources of his methodology, which he largely borrows from medical authors. In conclusion, I show that Cartesianism, in the hands of Regius, might serve as the basis for medicine but could not yet become a full-fledged alternative to Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Since the 1960s the integration of the history of science and the philosophy of science has been substantiated by the presence of university departments offering a curriculum of studies catering to both disciplines. At Princeton University, Charles Gillespie established the first curriculum of studies in the history and philosophy of science – henceforth HPS – in 1960, with the purpose of attracting students to the study of the history of science. In Princeton, history of science was taught by John E. (...) Murdoch, while Hilary Putnam gave courses in philosophy of science. At Indiana University it was a historian of philosophy, Norwood Russell Hanson, who established the first department of HPS, hosting the teaching of historian of science Alfred Rupert Hall. Eventually, the actual integration of history and philosophy of science was brought about by the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which, drawing attention to the notion of paradigm in scientific theories, favoured the marriage between historical and philosophical analysis of science. Since 1960s, HPS has flourished, and nowadays at least five universities in the United Kingdom and sixteen in the United States offer degrees in HPS (Mauskopf/Schmaltz 2012, pp. 1–10). More recently, kindred approaches have emerged, such as the ‘integrated HPS’ (&HPS), endorsed in some international conferences, which aims at merging the two disciplines rather than offering philosophical insights into the history of science and vice versa. (shrink)