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84Temperamentum/TempéramentIn Igor Agostini (ed.), Nouvel Index scolastico-cartésien, Vrin. pp. 1-4. forthcoming.
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120Ignis/FeuIn Igor Agostini (ed.), Nouvel Index scolastico-cartésien, Vrin. pp. 1-11. forthcoming.
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114Humor/HumeurIn Igor Agostini (ed.), Nouvel Index scolastico-cartésien, Vrin. pp. 1-4. forthcoming.
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81
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78Eredità cartesiane nella cultura britannica (Firenze, Le Lettere 2011), curato da Paola Dessì e Brunello Lotti (review)Giornale Critico Della Filosofia Italiana 8 (3): 745-748. 2012.
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34Sophie Roux, L’Essai de logique de Mariotte: Archéologie des idées d’un savant ordinaire, Paris: Classiques Garnier, Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences 2, 2011, 263 pp. (review)Journal of Early Modern Studies 3 (2): 147-152. 2014.
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120Sturm, JohannEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Johann Sturm was a Reformed pedagogic innovator, who established a teaching curriculum for gymnasia in order to provide an education based on the humanist ideals and on evangelical piety. This model described the contents and the method of learning for boys from 7 to 16 years and consisted mainly of the study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (based on Cicero and on classic literature). His method of learning was based on memorization and imitation rather than on the understanding of formal ru…Read more
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158More, HenryEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Henry More was an expounder of Cambridge Platonism, as he largely relied on a Platonicinspired standpoint in pursuing his aims: the demonstration of the immortality of soul, the critique of atheism and religious enthusiasm. He maintains that soul emanates from God (being therefore not created and pre-existing body) and argues for the existence of a spirit of nature as means to explain natural phenomena, which cannot be accounted for only in mechanical terms. Moreover, he argues for the extended …Read more
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164Hartlib, SamuelEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.The main aim of Samuel Hartlib was to provide an advancement of learning finalized to the amelioration of the material conditions of men and the pursuit of a religious peace, i.e., the unification of the Protestants. To this aim, inspired by Comenius, he devoted his efforts or gathering knowledge by the creation of a society or office of learned men (in technical fields, philosophy, and theology), and by the establishment of a network of correspondents (the Hartlib Circle). The method of discove…Read more
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108Cudworth, RalphEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Ralph Cudworth was an expounder of “Cambridge Platonism.” His main tenet is that natural phenomena cannot be explained only by the principles of mechanism; therefore, the existence of a “plastic nature,” which orders the world in accordance with divine decrees, has to be postulated. The order of creation, in turn, does not depend only on divine will but also on the essences present in God’s intellect. These essences can be known through the notions innate to human soul, which recollects them by …Read more
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113Cesalpino, AndreaEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Andrea Cesalpino is an important figure in the history of science. He demonstrated that blood circulates into heart from veins and from the heart to arteries, paving the way to Harvey’s complete description of blood circulation. Moreover, he was the founder of botany as a systematic discipline, which he based, rather than on the observation of accidental similarities of plants, on the discovery of their vegetative-generative principle. In philosophy, he attempted to conciliate the immortality of…Read more
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149Cavendish, MargaretEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Margaret Cavendish was a philosopher and writer active in mid-seventeenth century England. She is important not just as one of the first women active in philosophy in early modern age but as the expounder of an original scientific theory based on vitalism and materialism, by which she rejected the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes and the experimental philosophy of Boyle and Hooke. Also, while not developing a theory of gender equality, she envisaged a form of emancipation of women b…Read more
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116Alsted, Johann HeinrichEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Alsted was a foremost encyclopedist of the early seventeenth century. He provided both a complete presentation of all the subjects of philosophy (of which encyclopedia consisted) and a method to learn them. This method was an original synthesis of the dialectic of Petrus Ramus, the combinatorial art of memory of Raimond Lull and Giordano Bruno, and the method of presentation of philosophical disciplines of Bartholomäus Keckermann. Alsted’s encyclopedism was intended as a remedy to the postlapsar…Read more
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175Agrippa, Heinrich CorneliusEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2016.Agrippa was the main expounder of the occult philosophy, which is the knowledge of the hidden causes of things and is finalized to their manipulation by magic. Magic, in turn, is the highest form and the end of philosophy. According to his De occulta philosophia, magic is threefold: natural (concerning sublunar world), celestial (concerning stars and heavenly intelligences), and divine (concerning God and higher angels). It consists of the manipulation of concrete objects and of the summoning of…Read more
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91BaconianismEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2017.The philosophy of Francis Bacon was interpreted in various ways in the seventeenth century. In England, his utopian project and natural history became the basis for the projects of religious pacification, pedagogical reformation, and scientific cooperation of Hartlib, Comenius and Charleton. In the hands of Evelyn, Wilkins, and Wren, moreover, Bacon’s ideal of cooperative science engendered the birth of the Royal Society, and his natural history guided the experimental activities of Boyle and Ho…Read more
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627Individuality, Individuation, Subjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (edited book)„Vasile Goldiş” University Press. 2015.For generations of scholars the emergence of the notion of human subjectivity has marked the shift to philosophical modernity. Mainly traced back to Descartes’s founding of philosophy on the Cogito and to Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’, the rise of subjectivity has been linked to the rise of the modern age in terms of a reconsideration of reality starting from an analysis of the human self and consciousness. Consequently, it has been related to long-standing issues of identity, individuation and…Read more
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171Philosophy and Mathematics at the Turn of the 18th Century: New Perspectives – Philosophie et mathématiques au tournant du XVIIIe siècle: perspectives nouvelles (edited book)E-theca OnLineOpenAccess Edizioni. 2017.The essays gathered in this issue of the journal Noctua focus on the various relationships that were established between philosophy and mathematics from Galileo and Descartes to Kant, passing by Newton.
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572Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning (edited book)Firenze University Press. 2023.This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the productio…Read more
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250The Foundation of Early Modern Science: Metaphysics, Logic and TheologyErasmus University Rotterdam-Ridderprint BV. 2015.The present study defines the function of the foundation of science in early modern Dutch philosophy, from the first introduction of Cartesian philosophy in Utrecht University by Henricus Regius to the acceptance of Newtonian physics by Willem Jacob ‘s Gravesande. My main claim is that a foundation of science was required because the conceptual premises of new ways in thinking had to be justified not only as alternatives to the established philosophical paradigms or as an answer to the “sceptica…Read more
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14The Quarrel over Swammerdam’s Posthumous WorksBrill. 2023.The Quarrel over Swammerdam’s Posthumous Works reconstructs the vicissitudes of Johannes Swammerdam’s Biblia naturae, a pivotal collection of writings in the history of science. Bequeathed to the polymath Melchisédech Thévenot, the manuscripts and drawings of the treatises constituting this collection were instead kept by the editor Hermann Wingendorp after Swammerdam’s death (1680), triggering a quarrel over their publication. By analysing Swammerdam’s scientific legacy and by offering an editi…Read more
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149The Use and Plagiarism of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme by Henricus Regius: A ReassessmentPerspectives on Science 31 (5): 627-683. 2023.In this article I discuss a particular aspect of the Dutch reception of the ideas of René Descartes, namely the use of his Traité de l’homme by Henricus Regius. I analyze the use that Regius made of the theory of the movement of muscles, passions, hunger, and more generally of the neurophysiology expounded by Descartes in his book (not printed until 1662–1664). In my analysis, I reconstruct the internal evolution of Regius’s neurophysiology, I illustrate its sources beyond Descartes (i.e., Jean …Read more
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96Vix sciebant legere clerici: la fortuna di una citazione campanelliana nella cultura olandeseBruniana Et Campanelliana 19 (1): 237-247. 2013.The dissemination of Tommaso Campanella’s thought in the seventeenth-century Dutch context was not only due to his concern with the war involving the Netherlands. His works, indeed, were referred to by scholars interested in establishing a new philosophy and natural history. Johannes De Raey and Paul Veezaerdt took up some of his perspectives on the history of Aristotelian philosophy, and dealt with the theological implications of his arguments.
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428A Logic to End Controversies: The Genesis of Clauberg’s Logica Vetus et NovaJournal of Early Modern Studies 2 (2): 123-149. 2013.This article provides an analysis of Johannes Clauberg’s intentions in writing his Logica vetus et nova (1654, 1658). Announced before his adherence to Cartesianism, his Logica was eventually developed in order to provide Cartesian philosophy with a Scholastic form, embodying a complete methodology for the academic disciplines based on Descartes’ rules and a medicina mentis against philosophical prejudices. However, this was not its only function: thanks to the rules for the interpretation of ph…Read more
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106The Medical Cartesianism of Henricus Regius. Disciplinary Partitions, Mechanical Reductionism and Methodological AspectsGalilaeana. Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science 15 181-220. 2018.Abstract: This article explores the medical theories of the Dutch philosopher and physician Henricus Regius (1598-1679), who sought to provide clearer notions of medicine than the traditional theories of Jean Fernel, Daniel Sennert and Vopiscus Plempius. To achieve this, Regius overtly built upon the natural philosophy of René Descartes, in particular his theories of mechanical physiology and the corpuscular nature of matter. First, I show that Regius envisaged a novel partitioning of medicine, …Read more
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126Le premesse del discorso sulla soggettività nell’età moderna: il dibattito cartesianoI Quaderni Della Ginestra 8 (1): 6-13. 2013.Il discorso moderno e contemporaneo sulla soggettività prende le mosse dall'opera di René Descartes (1596-1650), universalmente considerato l'iniziatore della filosofia moderna. Improntata ad un severo meccanicismo, la filosofia di Descartes nasce come un tentativo di sostituzione della fisica aristotelica nel curriculum universitario dell’epoca. La fisica, secondo l'ordine degli studi delle università a cavallo fra ‘500 e ‘600, costituito dalle discipline filosofiche e letterarie del trivio e d…Read more
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192Between Descartes and Boyle: Burchard de Volder’s Experimental Lectures at Leiden, 1676–1678In Davide Cellamare & Mattia Mantovani (eds.), Descartes in the classroom: teaching Cartesian philosophy in the early modern age, Brill. pp. 174-198. 2023.In this chapter I provide a reconstruction of the contents of the lectures provided by Burchard de Volder by means of experiments at Leiden, in the years 1676–1678, as well as of the natural-philosophical interpretation he provided of the experimental evidences he gained. Such lectures, mostly based on the experiments described by Boyle, served De Volder to teach natural-philosophical ideas which he borrowed from Descartes, and which he re-interpreted in the light of Archimedes’s hydrostatics.
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18How Did Regius Become Regius? The Early Doctrinal Evolution of a Heterodox CartesianEarly Science and Medicine 23 (4): 362-412. 2018.This article offers an assessment of Henricus Regius’s (1598-1679) pre-Cartesian sources and their role in his appropriation of Descartes’s ideas, via two main questions: 1) Who was Regius, doctrinally speaking, before his exposure to Cartesianism? And 2) how did he use Descartes’s theories before his quarrel with Descartes himself in the mid-1640s? These questions are addressed by means of a textual analysis that concerns his theory of matter. In this article, I will show that 1) Regius started…Read more
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
History of Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |