Early Modern Cartesianisms: Dutch and French Constructions

New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA (2016)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe. This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes's thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes's own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues. Though more or less rooted in Descartes's somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes's views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 102,546

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Early Modern Cartesianisms: Dutch and French Constructions by Tad M. Schmaltz.Daniel Garber - 2017 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (4):732-734.
Tad M. Schmaltz. Early Modern Cartesianisms: Dutch and French Constructions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 392. $90.00. [REVIEW]Aaron Spink - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):229-232.
The Early Dutch Reception of L’Homme.Tad Schmaltz - 2016 - In Stephen Gaukroger & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), Descartes' Treatise on Man and Its Reception. Springer.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-07-27

Downloads
19 (#1,102,834)

6 months
4 (#1,107,690)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Tad Schmaltz
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Citations of this work

Occasionalism.Sukjae Lee - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The young Leibniz's tentative acceptance of physical occasionalism.Christian Henkel - 2024 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 62 (4):486-500.
Johannes Clauberg.Nabeel Hamid - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

View all 14 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references