Cartesian Physics and Their Receptions

Historians of science and historians of philosophy are most of the time in disagreement when assessing the role of René Descartes and of his followers in the development of their own disciplines. This extends to the scholarly weight ascribed to the various components of Descartes’s intellectual endeavor, ranging from epistemology to the principles of nature, mathematics, physics, physiology, and medicine. A more complex narrative emerges from an entangled history of philosophy and science, which studies authors in their own contexts, without enforcing more recent categories produced by histories of one or another discipline. This collective volume aims to reassess the genesis and reception of Descartes’s physics in a variety of cultural and institutional settings. Rather than revisiting the principles of Cartesian philosophy, it looks at the ‘articulations’ of these principles in the comprehension of the nature and the world.