Defending Descartes in Brandenburg-Prussia

This volume is a study of the many dimensions of the early reception of Cartesianism in German-speaking Europe during the seventeenth century based on the case of the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. It investigates the broad context of that discussion, which was at once scientific, cultural, political and socio-institutional. Chapter by chapter, the book sheds light on the most relevant aspects of the environment of the time. It is aimed at historians of science and philosophy, as well as scholars investigating German-speaking Europe of the 17th century.

Autorentext

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and a professor of historical epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). He is the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator research endeavor "Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe" (Horizon 2020, GA 725883). Together with Jürgen Renn he authored the book Science in Court Society: Giovanni Battista Benedetti's Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber (Turin, 1585) (2019). His books include the co-edited volume Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science (with Massimiliano Badino) and Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science (with Rodolfo Garau).

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Cartesianismus-Streit at Frankfurt an der Oder: Johannes Placentinus and His Opponents, 1653-1656.- Chapter 2. Nature and Scripture: Confessional Networks and Cross-Confessional Exegetic Problems.- Chapter 3. A Cartesian-Scholastic Controversy over the Origin of Life Opposing Frankfurt and Wittenberg, 1659-1660.- Chapter 4. The Mechanization of Astrology, 1661-1665.- Chapter 5. Placentinus's Cometary Correspondence with Hevelius and Lubieniecki.- Chapter 6. Medical and Demonological Approaches to Descartes's Psychophysical Dualism: Andreae and Brecht.- Chapter 7. Cartesian Bodies: Experiments on Embalmment.- Chapter 8. The Cultural Politics of Cartesianism.