Andrea Strazzoni - Böcker

This monograph details the entire scientific thought of an influential natural philosopher whose contributions, unfortunately, have become obscured by the pages of history. Readers will discover an important thinker: Burchard de Volder. He was instrumental in founding the first experimental cabinet at a European University in 1675.The author goes beyond the familiar image of De Volder as a forerunner of Newtonianism in Continental Europe. He consults neglected materials, including handwritten sources, and takes into account new historiographical categories. His investigation maps the thought of an author who did not sit with an univocal philosophical school, but critically dealt with all the ‘major’ philosophers and scientists of his age: from Descartes to Newton, via Spinoza, Boyle, Huygens, Bernoulli, and Leibniz. It explores the way De Volder’s un-systematic thought used, rejected, and re-shaped their theories and approaches. In addition, the title includes transcriptionsof De Volder's teaching materials: disputations, dictations, and notes.Insightful analysis combined with a trove of primary source material will help readers gain a new perspective on a thinker so far mostly ignored by scholars. They will find a thoughtful figure who engaged with early modern science and developed a place that fostered experimental philosophy.

In addition, the title includes transcriptionsof De Volder's teaching materials: disputations, dictations, and notes.Insightful analysis combined with a trove of primary source material will help readers gain a new perspective on a thinker so far mostly ignored by scholars.

This book offers the first thorough-going account of the covert manuscript dissemination of a pivotal text in the history of early modern philosophy and science, namely the Traité de l’homme by René Descartes, completed in 1633 but published in printed form only in 1662 and 1664. This account serves as both introduction to and commentary upon the following transcription of a Latin handwritten translation of the treatise (Tractatus de homine a Cartesio) recently brought to the attention of scholars, and which was integral to such dissemination. Included is an apparatus of variants with respect to its first editions. Importantly, during its first dissemination the treatise fostered the development of medical theories based on mechanical ideas and is now increasingly at the centre of the attention of historians, thanks to the renewed appreciation of Descartes as a scientist rather than as a metaphysician. By developing an investigation taking into account not only professors and scientists, but also the importance of women, courtiers, publishers, soldiers, and the covert circulation of knowledge in the early modern age, this book contributes to the knowledge of scholars, students, and anybody interested in the early modern history of philosophy, science, intellectual history, and the history of the book in a crucial phase of the development of western thought.

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 (which included rational theology) 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 (such as those of Hobbes, Spinoza, the experimental science and Newtonianism) 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.

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 (which included rational theology) 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 (such as those of Hobbes, Spinoza, the experimental science and Newtonianism) 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.