Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism comprises fifty specially written chapters on Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Cartesianism, the dominant paradigm for philosophy and science in the seventeenth century, written by an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy. The first part focuses on the various aspects of Descartes's biography (including his background, intellectual contexts, writings, and correspondence) and philosophy, with chapters on his epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics. The chapters of the second part are devoted to the defense, development and modification of Descartes's ideas by later generations of Cartesian philosophers in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. The third and final part considers the opposition to Cartesian philosophy by other philosophers, as well as by civil, ecclesiastic, and academic authorities. This handbook provides an extensive overview of Cartesianism - its doctrines, its legacies and its fortunes - in the period based on the latest research.


Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 06/25/2019
Pages: 848
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.55lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.70w x 2.00d
ISBN: 9780198796909

About the Author

Steven Nadler, William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tad M. Schmaltz, Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Professor of Philosophy, ENS Lyon

Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities, and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been teaching since 1988. He has been the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. Nadler previous publications include A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011), The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013), Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999/2018, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award), Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, 2018), and the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017) with his son Ben Nadler.

Tad Schmaltz is Professor of Philosophy and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His areas of specialization are the history of early modern philosophy, the history and philosophy of early modern science, and the relations among philosophy, science and theology in the early modern period. He has as special interests the variety of early modern "Cartesianisms"; the influence of late scholasticism on early modern thought; the nature of the "Scientific Revolution"; and early modern versions of substance-mode metaphysics, theories of mereology, and views of causation and freedom.

Delphine Antoine-Mahut is Professor of Philosophy at the ENS Lyon, France. Her research focuses on early modern philosophy, especially on the relations between metaphysics and physiology; on the historiography of early modern philosophy, in order to highlight the genesis of our current representations of modernity; and on the various receptions of cartesianism, particularly on the crossed genesis of an official spiritualist model and an unofficial empiricist one.