Cartesian Empiricisms

For many years, the division between Continental Rationalists and British Empiricists has stood at the heart of enquiries into the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Historians of philosophy and science still use this distinction to portray methodological and pedagogical differences between early modern philosophers. According to this traditional narrative, Descartes belongs to a tradition of doing armchair-philosophy, in which everything springs out of the metaphysical mind of the author, whereas Newton s famous hypotheses non fingo expresses the general methodological claims of the Royal Society, rejecting any speculation prior to the empirical investigation of nature. This clear-cut difference between early modern philosophers has been challenged. Several studies in the past thirty years have examined Descartes own interest in observation and experimentation and recent scholarship has been drawing attention to the mixture of metaphysical and theological views in the work of some of the most important empiricists of the period. Yet, a thorough study of the numerous self-identified Cartesians who incorporate observation, experience, and / or experiments into their methods, doctrines, and pedagogies is still lacking. With this volume, we hope to draw attention to the diversity of pre-Newtonian examples of empirical science by examining these followers of Descartes, thereby filling a gap in the current scholarship. The volume will cover various disciplines (e.g., physics, chemistry, medicine, and psychology), various national contexts (e.g., French, Dutch, German and English) and over twenty-five early modern figures, such as Robert Desgabets, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, Henricus Regius, Jacques Rohault, and Burchard de Volder (see appendix for full list). The collection will include work of junior and well-established scholars from the international community. All articles submitted to this volume will represent new and original work by experts in Cartesian philosophy. The book begins with an introduction, coauthored by the editors, indicating how the subsequent chapters contribute to the more recent challenges to the traditional narrative of early modern natural philosophy, specifically, the Cartesians discussed in the volume fail to fit neatly into the rationalist - empiricist bifurcation and provide historical evidence against the Kuhnian notion of incommensurability between two competing paradigms. The contributed chapters will be divided into two sections, covering some of the most important issues related to the reception of Cartesian philosophy. The first section will uncover the general problems caused by Descartes philosophy within various national contexts. It will focus on the role Cartesians gave to observation and experiment in their attempt to solve intricate issues associated with Descartes system. The second section provides a number of case studies of individual Cartesian empiricists and their work. While various publications have drawn attention to the difficult relation between metaphysics and physics in Descartes own philosophy, a good account of what happens with Cartesian philosophy in the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth is still missing. For instance, one of the most influential books of the period is Jacques Rohault s treatise on physics, which spreads a Cartesian-oriented physics in England, long after the publication of Newton s Principia. Burchard de Volder, a Cartesian professor from Leiden University, is the first to introduce experiment into university physics classrooms. Philosophers connected to the Parisian circle formed around Clerselier such as Desgabets discuss the consequences of the Cartesian system, promoting at times an empirical methodology, as in the case of Desgabets work on blood transfusion. Such episodes escape the existing scholarship on Descartes reception, which focuses on topics such as the afterlife of Descartes metaphysical views or deba