Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific Revolution

Andrea Strazzoni (1984) has completed his undergraduate education at the University of Parma, and has obtained his PhD in the history of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (2015), with a dissertation on the Dutch reception of Descartes and the problem of the foundation of natural philosophy. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, where he works on the ways in which Cartesian ideas were entangled with different scientific and philosophical paradigms.

“Andrea Strazzoni’s new book is really a demanding one … . This book is complex but worthwhile, and represents a very valuable contribution to the history of science. … His book is very rich in primary sources, and the numberless footnotes contain substantial quotations and references to original texts in Latin, French, Dutch and so on. ” (Ferdinando Abbri, Nuncius, Vol. 36, 2021)

• 1. The Philosophical and Scientific Background of De Volder.- 2. De Volder’s Methodological and Epistemic Considerations.- 3. De Volders’s Natural-Philosophical Theories.- 4. De Volder on Metaphysics.- 5. Conclusion.- 6. Commented Edition of De Volder’s Experimental Lectures and Disputations.- 7. Bibliography.