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The volume offers the first large-scale study of the teaching of Descartes’s philosophy in the early modern age. Its twenty chapters explore the clash between Descartes’s “new” philosophy and the established pedagogical practices and institutional concerns, as well as the various strategies employed by Descartes’s supporters in order to communicate his ideas to their students. The volume considers a vast array of topics, sources, and institutions, across the borders of countries and confessions, both within and without the university setting (public conferences, private tutorials, distance learning by letter) and enables us thereby to reconsider from a fresh perspective the history of early modern philosophy and education.

Davide Cellamare, Ph.D. (2015), Radboud University Nijmegen, is FWO Senior-Postdoc at KU Leuven. He has published numerous articles on late medieval and early modern psychology (with a special focus on the institutional and confessional contexts), as well as on Cartesianism.

Mattia Mantovani, Ph.D. (2018), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, is FWO Junior-Postdoc at KU Leuven. He has published numerous articles on medieval and early modern epistemology and perception theory – with a special focus on Descartes – and on the role of diagrams in science.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations

Introduction
Davide Cellamare and Mattia Mantovani

1 Descartes and the Classroom
Theo Verbeek

2 The Philosophical Fulcrum of Seventeenth-Century Leiden: Pedagogical Innovation and Philosophical Novelty in Adriaan Heereboord
Howard Hotson

3 Teaching Cartesian Philosophy in Leiden: Adriaan Heereboord (1613–1661) and Johannes De Raey (1622–1702)
Antonella Del Prete

4 Reassessing Johannes De Raey’s Aristotelian-Cartesian Synthesis: The Copenhagen Manuscript Annotata in Principia philosophica (1658)
Domenico Collacciani

5 “Let Descartes Speak Dutch”: Spinoza’s Circle Teaching Cartesianism
Henri Krop

6 Patronage as a Means to End a University Controversy: The Conclusion of Two Cartesian Disputes at Frankfurt an der Oder (1656 and 1660)
Pietro Daniel Omodeo

7 Cartesian and Anti-Cartesian Disputations and Corollaries at Utrecht University, 1650–1670
Erik-Jan Bos

8 Between Descartes and Boyle: Burchard de Volder’s Experimental Lectures at Leiden, 1676–1678
Andrea Strazzoni

9 Medicine and the Mind in the Teaching of Theodoor Craanen (1633–1688)
Davide Cellamare

10 Cartesius Triumphatus: Gerard de Vries and Opposing Descartes at the University of Utrecht
Daniel Garber

11 Debating Cartesian Philosophy on Both Sides of the Channel: Johannes Schuler’s (1619–1674) Plea for libertas philosophandi
Igor Agostini

12 Descartes by Letter—Teaching Cartesianism in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Cambridge: Henry More, Thomas Clarke and Anne Conway
Sarah Hutton

13 Teaching Descartes’s Ethics in London and Cambridge
Roger Ariew

14 Teaching Magnetism in a Cartesian World, 1650–1700
Christoph Sander

15 The Anatomy of a Condemnation: Descartes’s Theory of Perception and the Louvain Affair, 1637–1671
Mattia Mantovani

16 Descartes’s Theory of Tides in the Louvain Classroom, 1670–1760
Carla Rita Palmerino

17 Traces of the Port-Royal Logic in the Louvain Logic Curricula
Steven Coesemans

18 Cartesianism and the Education of Women
Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin

19 Rohault’s Private Lessons on Cosmology
Mihnea Dobre

20 French Cartesianisms in the 1690s: The Textbooks of Regis and Pourchot
Tad M. Schmaltz

Bibliography
Index